|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
The Rabbi and the Christmas Trees Lowell Ponte A Seattle rabbi is being called the Grinch who stole Christmas. But if we learn from what happened there, he could have helped us save the true meaning of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
"Holiday trees" with secular decorations were removed from Sea-Tac, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, according to The New York Sun, after Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky "threatened to sue if his organization, Chabad Lubavitch, was not permitted to put up an electric menorah" next to the biggest such tree.
"He wanted to do his own display, and the airport felt like that could be problematic," said Port of Seattle spokesperson Deanna Zachrisson. "It seemed like a simple request, but it's establishing a precedent that — you don't know where it's going to go.It really boils down to we didn't want to get sued."
Story Continues Below
If Sea-Tac had permitted Chabad Lubavitch to put up its own menorah, perhaps including its own organizational self-promotion, would Muslim groups sue for a Crescent and Star next to the menorah?
A year ago, when Rabbi Bogomilsky persuaded the U.S. Navy to display his giant menorah on the guided missile frigate USS Ford, he did not suggest including a Crescent and Star for Muslims.
The U.S. Census is prohibited from asking about religion, so guesses as to America's Muslim population range from half a million to 8 million — with the most likely figure between 1.8 and 2.4 million, slightly less than half the number of Jews in the United States.
Would Buddhists also be allowed an airport display? How about Satanists?
By tearing down the "Holiday trees," Sea-Tac has handed a victory to atheists. Richard Dawkins, author of the current best seller "The God Delusion," (2006, Houghton Mifflin), admits he cannot entirely rule out the possibility of a divine creator.
This should make him an agnostic, one who concedes that he does not know with certainty. But Dawkins embraces atheism, the ideological position that no God exists. This is itself a dogmatic religious position based on faith. And this is the man-is-the-measure-of-all-things dogmatic humanist religion that triumphed in the Seattle exclusion of the lights of all competing religions.
The airport now, in effect, displays atheism, the banishment of God from the public square.
The biggest loser in Seattle, however, was neither Christianity nor Judaism. It was paganism, the ancient beliefs for which President Bill Clinton created pagan chaplains in the U.S. military. The pagan roots of the Christmas tree, you see, originated in idolatrous times, places, and symbolic meanings that long predate the birth of Jesus.
"Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen," wrote the Prophet Jeremiah (10:2-4) six centuries before Jesus, "For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman with the axe. They deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not."
No such use of a decorated tree is to be found in the New Testament in association with Jesus. But, as you see above, the Book of Jeremiah seems to be telling us that cutting down and mounting a tree and then decorating it with silver and gold is idolatrous, "the way of the heathen" that the Lord tells his people not to learn.
One such symbolic use of a tree is linked to the cult of the Egyptian pagan goddess Isis.
The apparent origin of our "Christmas tree" comes from the pagan Roman cult of Saturn, their god of sowing of seed. Priests of Saturn were initiated in a blood-spattered ceremony that involved dancing around a decorated tree.
The merriest festival of the ancient Roman year was Saturnalia, celebrated for seven days from Dec. 17-24. During this festival, all work ceased, slaves were granted a week of free speech and other liberties, and some moral rules were relaxed for everybody.
A major part of Saturnalia was that people gave each other gifts.
This festival also corresponded with the winter solstice around Dec. 21, after which the sun begins to move north again towards summer and days start to get longer. In the far-spread cult of Mithras, which originated in the Middle East, Dec. 25 marked the celebration of Sol Invictus, the victorious sun.
Was Jesus actually born on Dec. 25, ask scholars, or did the early Christian church decide to celebrate Christmas on this date to expropriate the most popular of Mediterranean pagan celebrations? Was picking this date the calendrical counterpart of Christians deliberately building their churches on the exact sites where Aztec, Celtic, and other pagan temples had stood?
If the Gospel is right in saying that shepherds were watching their flocks by night near Bethlehem when Jesus was born, then the prince of peace likely was born no later in the year than early October — the season when, for thousands of years, shepherds in that region have moved their sheep from cold nighttime fields to safer enclosures.
The Pilgrims in New England held no major celebration of Christmas, viewing it as a holiday contaminated with pagan symbols such as Christmas trees and yule logs, wanton licentiousness, and materialist merrymaking.
Christmas trees only became popular in the 19th century after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria encouraged people to decorate trees.
Jews living in predominantly Christian Europe and America elevated the status of a festival so minor in the Jewish calendar that until recently it went almost unnoticed in Israel — Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights — and celebrated it with gift-giving and decorated "Hanukkah bushes" that bear a striking resemblance to Christmas trees.
The rabbi's actions in Seattle led to consequences he never intended — the temporary removal of pagan religious symbols from the city airport.
Perhaps he was serving as God's tool, helping Americans reconsider how Christmas has been expropriated from the religious Judeo-Christian tradition by materialism, paganism, and godlessness. The rabbi has brought light to this, in the tradition of Hanukkah.
We need to open our eyes and see.
Editor's note:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |