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18 Kislev 5765 - December 1, 2004 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Opinion & Comment
In Those Days and In Our Times

More than 2,000 years ago, we faced a difficult test: "The evil Greek Kingdom stood against Your People Israel, to make them forget Your Torah and to force them away from the laws that You willed." Greece was a difficult and dangerous enemy, who attacked us at vulnerable points and succeeded in causing considerable damage before she was defeated. Her thrusts were effective and perceptive, and she won many converts to her idolatry from among the Jewish people before she was soundly and repeatedly defeated on the battlefield by the few weak tzaddikim and Torah learners who stood up against her.

Today, as the heirs of the Maccabim, we face the heirs of the Greeks. But they do not attack us on the battlefield, and their decrees — as effective and perceptive as ever — are nowhere near as evident as they were then.

Masses of Jews have no problem eating pork. Our own prominent figures in the Knesset call bris milah a barbarous custom, afro lepumei. In Israel there is a difficult struggle over Shabbos, and outside of Israel in the general Jewish community the situation is no better.

Their attacks are masked as offers to enlighten us — but what they present as light is really Greek darkness. They want to help us out of poverty — but their material riches bring along a terrible spiritual impoverishment. They want to see us "enjoy life" in the ways that they do — but their concept of life is spiritual death. They try to tempt us to be more modern — but it is becoming more obvious that all their progress is leading nowhere good.

A hundred years ago, the yetzer hora offered a powerful intellectual and philosophical alternative that confused and tempted tens of thousands to drink from the broken cisterns that were offered.

In our day the intellectual power of what used to be known as the "isms" (socialism, communism, capitalism) has been exposed as all pretense and no substance, but the wily yetzer hora brought out new temptations and distractions.

People call our times the Information Age. We are bombarded with facts and figures about all kinds of things — most of which are completely irrelevant to our lives. We can find out about events as they happen. We can learn the intimate details of occurrences and issues that have no chance of relevance to our lives. It is all packaged in ways that are calculated to ensure that it is very interesting and engaging. But must we think about Subsaharan Africa? And make no mistake about the fact that even hearing about all sorts of lurid crimes is definitely damaging to the soul.

That, according to the Mesillas Yeshorim, is the number one destroyer of the most fundamental step along the path of the righteous: zehirus—simple caution and evaluating what we do. According to the Mesillas Yeshorim (Chapter 5), it is in relation to this problem that Chazal say (Kiddushin 30b), "I created the yetzer hora and I created the Torah as a treatment."

If a person is not deeply immersed in Torah, he cannot shake free of the tremendous demands of the Information Age.

As is evident, one of the most insidious aspects of the attacks nowadays is that they are not evident. We do not see idolatry pitted against monotheism, or brute force applied to get us to do aveiros, or decrees that outlaw religious practices as we saw in the case of the Syrian Greeks against our people.

Their heirs are more subtle and sophisticated. They use free market advertising to pollute the streets. They bombard us with information that dulls our sensitivities. And they entice us with goals whose fulfillment demands so much from us that we have insufficient resources left to reach any serious spiritual achievements.

If the tactics are vastly different, the goal is the same: "to make us forget Your Torah and to force us away from the laws that You willed."

We do not have to battle them in the fields.

To win, we just have to kindle our Chanukah lights, and learn their lesson and apply it.


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