That public menorah is a defiant act of the modern Maccabees-as is every act to establish the unique value of the individual in the face of global McCulture. I felt that same sense of relief as when opening Google Maps and finding my own house. Wal-Mart is not friendly to tribal culture.īut today I walked into a Wal-Mart and saw a ten foot menorah burning there. In Wal-Mart, you get that subliminal sense of desperate anomy, of "do I really exist, or am I just another customer shopping in just another Wal-Mart that sells exactly the same stuff to the same people everywhere else in America?" Really, Wal-Mart and its sort truly represent the Hellenists of today, flattening and mixmasterizing everything unique and special in the colorful geo-demographics of America into a blurry, mind-numbing experience of today's favorite competitor sport, namely shopping. The place I feel Chanukah the most is in Wal-Mart. Yet, of all those ancient peoples, we alone remain, the only tribal entity to have survived into modernity. and homogenized it all into a mushy Hellenist stew which eventually became our modern world. They took all we had to offer, along with odds and ends from the Athenians, Spartans, Persians, Parthians, Armenians, Assyrians, Egyptians, etc. It says, there were these people came to our land and tried to assimilate us into their mega-culture, but we resisted and retained our identity. What does a menorah mean to me? It's a statement of who I am. But there's a deeper issue here: I wonder if for you, lighting a menorah might have exactly the opposite meaning that it has for me. Well, first of all, it sounds like a bit of a fire hazard. I hadn't realized the question can be reversed. Interesting-usually we get letters asking if it's okay to have a tree next to the menorah. We already have an Xmas tree, is okay to light a menorah next to it? My daughter attends a private school where there are many Jewish children.
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