Opinion & Comment
Secularism's Final Throes

The issues dealt with here by Rabbi Sheinfeld are those of Chanukah, since the secular Jews are really the representatives of the alien Greek culture as it has become nowadays.

Irreligious Jews, who have supposedly found happiness in freedom from the shackles of halochoh, are in fact deeply jealous of their counterparts who shoulder the full burden of Yiddishkeit.

They gaze in wonderment at their observant neighbors' close family ties. They see sons and daughters surrounding the parental table, the pleasure and enjoyment of their Shabbosos and Yomim Tovim, their way of life and their way of thinking and of talking, that unites the entire family.

Then they look at themselves and are painfully aware of the devastation of family life among irreligious families. Sons rebel against fathers and daughters against their mothers. If they had the courage, the irreligious public would engage in some serious soul-searching; but they refuse to do so. They cannot even come to terms with how impressed they are in their heart of hearts by their brethren who have chosen the path of Torah and mitzvos.

Therefore, they hate and despise us. They are well aware of the compelling nature of the statistics yet they knowingly fly in its face: crime among the youth runs at thirty percent in Haifa, four percent in Yerushalayim and only one percent in Bnei Brak. How can they not hate Bnei Brak? It is possibly the only city of its size in the world that doesn't have a police station in it.

The judges on the Eichmann trial interviewed experts about the phenomenon of antisemitism and they were given feeble and misleading explanations. Chazal illuminated the mystery with one accurate and all-inclusive sentence: "Why was it named Sinai? Because from there sinoh, hatred, descended to the nations of the world" (Shabbos 89). The hatred that secular Jews bear to this day towards their brethren who perpetuate the heritage of Sinai also has its roots there. It is a hatred as ancient as that of the gentiles and that is even more keenly felt. "The hatred of ignoramii for talmidei chachomim is greater than that of the gentiles for the Jews" (Pesochim 49). Both types of hatred have the same source: envy and the prickings of a troubled conscience.

How does the Jew's existence trouble the gentile's conscience?

The eternal Jew dampens the empty frivolity of the gentiles. The Divine imprint upon his face reminds them that the world has a Judge and that there will be a day of reckoning. The German philosopher Nietzsche argued that the Jews contaminated the nations of the world with their "servant ethic." Before they encountered the Jews, the nations viewed themselves as their own masters and worshiped deities that were as frivolous and as immoral as they were themselves.

Secular Jews also boil and seethe on account of the moral and ethical quandary that the Torah observant way of life puts them in.

HaRav Meir Shapiro zt'l of Lublin had a talmid who left the Torah path. This fellow would complain about his teacher and say, "Would that I had ripped him in half. I am unable to enjoy a single aveiroh as my friends and partners in hefkeirus do. Whenever I have the opportunity to do an aveiroh I immediately see my teacher's visage before me. The ethical rules and arguments that I heard from him and the small degree of fear of retribution that he implanted within me, resurface. I have ruined my chances in both worlds: the World to Come, in which I don't believe but in which I also don't dare not believe, and this world whose pleasures I am unable to enjoy unreservedly."

Besides its personal grievances, the secular public also has an historic score to settle with faithful Jewry (which, of course, they again fail to articulate). Why, they want to know, have those Jews who stubbornly kept their faith, prevented the Jewish nation from assimilating and being absorbed into the gentile nations?

Because of those who resisted and who sacrificed themselves on the pyres of martyrdom, because of those who refused to change their names, their costume or their language, Jews have become the scapegoats of the entire world. They continue to instruct their offspring to live separately and to maintain their uniqueness, which is so hard, for those who so desire, to break away from.

Why are they jealous of the Jew?

Gentiles, steeped in drunkenness and bloodshed, would cast envious glances at the Jewish ghettos. Abject poverty never led the ghetto inhabitants to turn their backs on their religion. Descendants of royalty and free men, they would pass along the narrow, crowded streets, showing generosity to the poor and feeding the hungry. Persecutions and decrees could not overcome these people's joy in life. Their hearts remained wholly receptive to spiritual values and their minds remained as lucid as a natural spring in their quest for perfection.

Is it any wonder that Jews seemed otherworldly to the gentiles? And is it any wonder that, unwilling to acknowledge the Jews' superiority, they made every effort to denigrate them and blot out all memory of them?

Torah Jewry, that did not capitulate to secularism in its heyday, will certainly not cringe before it, now that it is in crisis.

I heard a well-put observation. Idolatry has four stages, all of which are alluded to in the parsha dealing with the incident of the eigel: "And they offered burnt offerings and brought shelomim offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and they arose to make mirth" (Shemos 32:6). During the initial stage, the idol's devotees are willing to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of their beliefs completely, like burnt offerings. In the second stage, they seek some personal benefit as well. They bring shelomim offerings, from which the owner also derives something. The third stage is when "the people sit down to eat and drink." They have become disillusioned and are only looking out for their own enjoyment. The fourth stage is when "they rise to make mirth," mocking and scorning their own idols (heard from HaRav Yankel Galinsky, of Yeshivas Chadera).

It appears that secularism has now arrived at a further, fifth stage, which was foreseen by the novi Yechezkel (6:9), "And they will pronounce the verdict of severance upon themselves because of all the evils that they did with all their abominations." Voices are occasionally heard -- and they are getting more frequent -- expressing regret and reconsideration. Secularism has lost its charm. Coercion and enforcement are the only means that it has left at its disposal.

Today we witness its failure and disgrace as the prisons take in some of its finest followers. The thought sometimes surfaces, "Why don't we make a brochoh, `who has not made me irreligious'?" In fact though, this is covered by the brochoh, `who has not made me a slave' -- neither a slave to desires and to worldly vanities nor a slave to false ideologies nor a slave to coarse materialism, whether corporeal or spiritual.

We fully believe that Jews will always remain free men. The nation that was brought out of Egypt by the world's Creator and Mover of its history, will ultimately free itself from secularism, which is a foreign implant within Beis Yisroel.

"And the idols will fade away completely" (Yeshayohu 2:18).