Posts Tagged → Hanukka
This miraculous Thanksgiving, break the binary
Today is Thanksgiving in America, our uniquely American holiday based on the Puritans’ survival experience with Native Indians on the Atlantic coast roughly 400 years ago. While it has sadly become a holiday of cheap mattress sales, the fact is that most Americans still understand what a uniquely bountiful land of opportunity America is, and they give thanks to our Creator for it.
In 2024, we also give thanks today for a truly miraculous peaceful victory over bipartisan forces of darkness and evil in our recent national election. No matter that every official lever of power, corporate finance, media marketing, and cultural curatorship was pushed or pulled against Donald Trump, he nonetheless prevailed with a majority of the national vote as well as the Electoral College (folks, without the Electoral College there would be no UNITED States, because individual states in rural flyover country would have no incentive to unite with the more populous coastal enclaves).
And his opponent burned through more than a BILLION dollars of campaign funds, to no avail. Truly a miraculous election result…
Through our recent election, official power is being removed from the corrupt, violent hands of the impure and given into the hands of our peaceful citizens, the rightful owners of all things government, as was originally intended in 1776. This miraculous result is on a scale of only a few moments in history, where the good guys won against overwhelming odds, and which then resulted in good values being transmitted through the following generations, resulting in the free America we now enjoy and love.
The 479 BCE united Greek final stand against the invading Persians at Plataea is one such moment, and the orthodox Jews’ 175 BCE successful stand against the Seleucid Greeks and their “leftist” assimilated Hellenic Jewish allies is another, a long fought guerilla war commemmorated as Hanuka.
After Plataea, forms of democracy, free thought, and individual representation in government (the “Greek ideal”) became more broadly accepted. When the Maccabees defeated the hedonist Hellenist Jews and pagan Greeks in Israel and Jerusalem, Torah Judaism prevailed and survived, giving the world the widespread monotheism it now relies upon for the rule of law and individual rights we all take for granted.
A good case can be made that this month’s election resulted in a similar scale defeat of evil. Yes, this election was not about the next four years, but rather about the next 250 years of America as a constitutional and free nation. We were that close to losing everything.
However, we cannot get too caught up in the battle lines as they were drawn up on November 5th, 2024. We must break the Republican-Democrat binary that is really a corrupt Uniparty united against We, The People.
Yes, the Republican Party has some elected officials who stand for freedom and liberty, and no, I cannot think of one single elected Democrat who stands for freedom and liberty. But that only means that the majority of elected Republicans and all of the elected Democrats are united against pro-citizen freedom fighter Donald Trump.
Trump is our champion, a representative of and champion for all American citizens. He is the modern incarnation of our first president, George Washington. We must stay focused on him and active in implementing his agenda.
When President Trump is gone, it is hard to know who will again so fully pick up the mantle of We, The People. So it is incumbent upon us today to really give thanks for this reprieve we have all miraculously enjoyed, and to work hard these next two years to ensure that our freedoms and our government of, by, and for The People, are fully conveyed to the next generations of Americans.
Give no power to political parties, give no longevity to career officials, but give aggressive support only to those few who actually represent us. Give thanks that we have this one opportunity for the restoration of good and proper government, right now, for many generations to come.
Hanukka’s message to Americans
While Christmas is the national holiday of America, Hanukka is the other big holiday happening now. Today is the last day, and it is worth taking note of the meaning this religious holiday can and should have for all freedom-loving Americans.
Let us reflect upon what the message of Hanukka is and should be for Americans, because God knows, we are all in need of inspiration right now. Especially as we daily recognize ever more just how rogue and turned against us citizens our own federal government has become.
Hanukka is the commemoration of an unbelievably heroic and unlikely war outcome 2,300 years ago by a band of ferociously patriotic religious Jews battling against one of the regional superpowers of their time. In short, when Alexander the Great died, his Greek empire was divided into large parts, each run by one of Alexander’s generals. Seleucus was one of those generals, and while his life was a whirlwind of cloak and dagger politics, leading massed battles, and shifting political alliances, he ended up founding one of the regional empires. The Seleucid Empire included all kinds of remote areas and sleepy places and small peoples that the Greeks did not really care about, including the nation of Judea and its natives, the Israelites/Judeans/ Jews.
But the powerful Greek Seleucids ended up caring very much about the relatively small and highly religious Judeans, because most of the Jews would only go so far in pledging their loyalty to the Greeks, due to religious differences. While in general the Greeks had a very broad and inclusive view of culture, what was then called the pan-Hellenic, and while the Jews could go along with a lot of cultural differences so long as their religion was not compromised, the Greeks did require a basic fealty to their most important values. And those polytheistic values strongly antagonized the Jews’ monotheism.
It must be said that the resulting civil war was as much between religious Jews and Hellenized Jews as it was between religious Jews and the Greeks. Essentially it was the Orthodox Jews vs. the assimilated and very liberal Jews and their protectors, the Greeks. This fact obviously has great implications for the tensions between religious Jews today and their more liberal and religiously distant brethren.
An armed showdown began when the Seleucids erected their own statues and began sacrificing pigs in the Jews’ Great Temple. You know, the same large hill whereupon another uninvited, rogue, imperialistic and colonizing symbol has been erected, namely the golden dome of the rock. And so a Jewish priest names Mattathias (essentially Matthew in today’s English, a name familiar to Christians) picked up a sword, killed some bad guys with some gutsy moves, and started a Jewish rebellion against an overwhelmingly superior military force.
The Greeks and their liberal Jewish allies responded with force, and the Orthodox Jews fled their homes in Jerusalem to the Judean Hills, where they eked out a meagre existence in caves and remote washes where the Greek patrols did not go. Using hit-and-run guerilla war tactics over several years, Mattathias and his sons’ troops eventually wore down the Greek resolve, to the point where headlong massed battles resulted in smaller forces of Jews utterly annihilating their opponents.
Following the final battle, when the Jewish “Maccabees” returned in force to Jerusalem, they found the Great Temple ransacked and wrecked. Despite a great desolation upon the land, as a result of this terrible civil war, the religious Jews were able to scrape together enough pure olive oil to re-light the gold Menorah in the Great Temple while they also pulled the religious service back together, too. That fact about the olive oil has become kind of a materialistic Christmasized silver and blue tinsel fairy tale about a miracle, and thus great emphasis has been placed on the “miracle of the oil.”
Truth is, this “miracle of the oil” is almost a Monty Python sketch of what really happened, because the true miracle of Hanukka was that the tiny force of true believer Orthodox Jews was able to defeat a much more powerful but spiritually flaccid enemy. Where have we seen this same kind of scenario play out elsewhere in history? Hmmm, my fellow Americans?
The message of Hanukka is that no dark, evil force can defeat goodness and righteousness. This is the true miracle of this holiday, that a small band of humans, led either by George Washington or Mattathias the Priest, can defeat hordes of knuckle dragging barbarians. This is a message of inspiration that all Americans need right now, because we are now facing a terrible plague of evil, moral rot, and sadistic cruelty emanating from the present interloper rulers of our nation’s capital. Many people predict America is heading for a civil war, or at least an armed contest between the central government of Washington, DC, and the rest of the country. Hopefully, our election system is not so corrupted that we can vote our way out of this mess.
Don’t worry, Americans, because if you call upon God and are willing to sacrifice and take risks, like the Orthodox Jewish Maccabees did 2,300 years ago, then you can, we can, miraculously re-take the America that is ours from those who have risen up to steal it and make us all subjects and slaves to their evil power.
My fellow Americans, take heart from the history of Hanukka that you, too, can be successful against what look like overwhelming odds.
The light of freedom shines bright, including in our hearts and our spirit to fight for what is right