Although the Menorah has been cleaned and polished and has re-taken its place in our silver cabinet, I still can’t get those pure flames out of my head…to banish the darkness.
But, in order to banish that darkness, the government urged me not to make any political statements in my speeches that I would make when lighting the public Menorahs. I listened obediently but in retrospect I wonder whether I was right to do so.
De-escalation and ‘poldering’ (that is building protective walls around community sensitivities) are two words that the Dutch excel at.
Did they prevent the Syrian slaughterhouses? Did keeping silent about the horrible cruelties in Africa make the indescribable suffering less? Underground prisons in Iran? Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Islamic minorities are locked up in ‘re-education camps’!
Does turning a blind eye help? During my Chanukah Tour, I deliberately spoke only about darkness in countless places. I don’t think I even mentioned Israel once and I had safely stored away my slogan anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism, so as not to engage in politics.
And what did my silence and looking the other way lead to? During one of my meetings I was accused of celebrating Chanukah while in Gaza… shame on me for not mentioning that! True, but besides Gaza there are hundreds of other hotbeds, why don’t they raise questions? When will an international arrest warrant be issued against Assad? He deserves a cum laude in the field of physical and mental torture and murder. If he had been a Jew, he would have been put to the slaughterhouse without any form of protest and with a number of UN resolutions.
Too bad, I think, that he is not a Jew. I would have liked to see him dangling from the gallows, if necessary as a fake Jew. I have not made any political statements, ignored the pure flame within myself…
But, I have proclaimed that the Maccabees fought for freedom of religion and however apolitically intended, I have hurt many whose faith does not allow room for dissenters, because in their ‘holy’ view every person must convert to their faith and if that cannot be done by fair means, then by force.
Am I fantasizing? I don’t think so, because if we look around us, we see many countries where the population is forced into a way of life that has nothing to do with freedom of religion or freedom of thought.
In fact, everything is political, because ‘no politics’ is blatantly political here!