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.
