GetReligion has an interesting piece on the Christmas, er holiday tree flap in Seattle.
For those who have been comatose or shopping for the last week, the Christmas trees at the Seattle airport were taken down after a rabbi requested that a menorah be placed alongside the biggest tree.
Port of Seattle officials decided to take down the trees after receiving a legal brief from the rabbi's attorney and determining that it would be easier to take down the trees than try to find a symbol for every real and fake group or religion associated with December.
A nationwide furor erupted over the weekend as news of the trees' removal spread, with a flood of calls to Port officials and harshly worded e-mails to Jewish organizations. Today, Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky said he would not file a lawsuit and the Port, in response, said it would put the trees back up.
Amazing, isn't it? You send a legal brief to a group, then act astonished that they react in this manner? It doesn't sound crazy to me, given the litigious nature of our society.
But, as tmatt at GetReligion points out, there's one question that begs an answer: Who opposed the erection of the menorah in the first place?
That question may have been hard to answer. You see, there is a reason that lawyers are so nervous about giant menorahs — they represent a fault line in the public square between the left and right wings of Judaism. The primary voices protesting the civic menorahs are Jewish. The people cheering are traditional Christians. Click here to read a story about this conflict, which dates back to the late 1980s, published in the daily Jewish newspaper called the Forward. Here is a crucial clip:
In 1987, Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress wrote a report titled "The Year of the Menorah." In the report, Stern said, "we believe the Lubavitch campaign undermines Jewish interests in a most fundamental way."
"To the American Jewish Congress, the menorah on public lands clears the path for the creche and the Cross," Stern wrote.
. . . "We’re no more enthusiastic about Chabad’s campaign than we were before," Stern told the Forward. . . . "f it’s done properly, though, there’s not much that can be done legally to stop them."
Of course, we don't know what happened in the Seattle case, but it is interesting that it is secular Jews who have objected to the Chabad-Lubavitch campaign to erect menorahs on public property.
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