For them, it's wholly unholy
Christmas Eve is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study, do not conduct weddings or go to the mikveh. But they do play chess and work on their bills
By Shahar Ilan
On Christmas Eve, known in Jewish circles as Nitel Night, the klipot (shells) are in total control. The klipot are parasitical evil forces that attach themselves to the forces of good. According to kabbala (Jewish mysticism), on the night on which "that man" - a Jewish euphemism for Jesus - was born, not even a trace of holiness is present and the klipot exploit every act of holiness for their own purposes.
For this reason, Nitel Night, from nightfall to midnight, is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study. On this horrific night, they neither conduct weddings nor do they go to the mikveh (ritual bath). An entire folkloric literature has developed around the unusual recreational activities of Nitel Night. The customs, it should be emphasized, are practiced only by Hasidim. Lithuanian and Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Jews do not suspend their regular Torah study on Christmas Eve.
Chess and cards
The classic pastime on Nitel Night is chess. There is the famous photograph of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, apparently playing chess with his father on Nitel Night, although calendar calculations by Lubavitcher Hasidim rule out the idea that the photograph was taken on Nitel. Some prefer cards, such as Uka, a Galician Jewish version of poker, or 21. Some argue that each card has its own klipa (shell) and thus card-playing on Nitel Night is a particularly serious sin.
Kabbalistic toilet paper
The Knesset correspondent of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamodia, Zvi Rosen, relates that celebrated Hasidic admorim (sect leaders) would cut a year's supply of toilet paper for Sabbath use (to avoid tearing toilet paper on Sabbath) on this night. Actually, this disrespectful act has profound kabbalistic significance, because kabbalistic literature extensively discusses Christianity as waste material excreted from the body of the Jewish people. Today, precut toilet paper for Sabbath use is available on the market; thus, the custom's relevance has diminished.
Another custom of Hasidic admorim is to make calculations on Nitel for the entire year, such as the amount they must set aside to observe the commandment of tithe-giving. Rabbi Hannah of Kalschitz reportedly would study geography on Nitel. The journalist Rosen spends Nitel night arranging his archive, peeling oranges and making marmalade. The Lubavitcher (Chabad) movement's spokesman, Menachem Brod, arranges his pile of bills.
Abstaining from procreation
As was the case in 2000, Christmas Eve or Nitel Night this year falls on Friday night, and this fact has several significant ramifications. Because of this, certain acts that are desecrations of the Sabbath cannot be performed, such as cutting toilet paper or straightening out paperwork. Nor can one sleep throughout the entire Christmas Eve because of the obligation of eating the Friday night meal, although it is customary not to talk about sacred matters at the table when Christmas Eve falls on Friday night.
However, the biggest paradox concerns the procreation mitzvah (commandment). It is recommended that the commandment be observed on Friday night, which is a holy time. Yet on Nitel Night, which has no holiness, it is customary to refrain from observing the commandment, because of the fear that a Jewish child conceived on Jesus' birthday could become an apostate.
A whispered prayer
Abraham Isaac Sperling's "Reasons for Jewish Customs and Traditions (Bloch Publishing Company, 1968) explains that one chief reason for the development of Nitel customs was practical: Anti-Semites would ambush Jews and savagely beat them, sometimes even killing them, in the streets on Christmas Eve. Thus, the rabbis decreed that Jews should remain at home that night and not wander in the streets.
Over the years, abstention from Torah study on Christmas Eve became a custom that, of course, was observed clandestinely. There are tales, however, that describe cases where gentiles, discovering that Jews were playing games instead of studying Torah that night, would burst into Jewish homes, only to discover the young students engaged in the discussion of Jewish law over open books.
One Nitel custom in the Diaspora was to recite the entire "Aleinu Leshabe'ah" prayer out loud. The prayer includes the phrase "those who bow down before vapor and emptiness," customarily uttered in a whisper throughout the year, so that gentiles would not hear the words. On Nitel Night, it was customary, after it had been ascertained that no non-Jews were around, to loudly utter the forbidden phrase.
Ban on Torah study
The source of the name "Nitel" is unknown. The most successful, although perhaps not the most convincing, explanation is that Nitel is an acronym for the Yiddish words "nischt yidden tarren lernen": "It is forbidden for Jews to study." Another explanation is that the term is a corruption of the Latin word for birthday, natalis.
How many Nitels?
Over the years, a collection of Nitel jokes has developed. For example, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi was once asked to eulogize Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism and a secular Jew. After a few moments, he came up with three positive traits: Herzl had never spoken while putting on his phylacteries, had never thought about Torah matters in unclean places and had never studied Torah on Nitel. Or, for example, a young Jewish boy was found studying Torah on Nitel. Asked why he was not observing the ban on such study on Nitel, he replied that he observed the ban on the Armenian Christmas Eve.
The second joke points to a real problem. Roman Catholics and Protestants celebrate Christmas Eve on the night of December 24. Christmas on the Greek and Russian Orthodox calendars falls on January 6. On which day should Torah study be prohibited? The late Lubavitcher Rebbe proposed that Nitel be observed on the Christmas Eve celebrated by the majority of Christians in that particular country. In the United States, he ruled that Torah study should be banned on the night of December 24, when most Christian Americans celebrate Christmas Eve. Some Hasidic sect leaders and members have refrained from Torah study on both Christmas Eves, and the most meticulous of them even suspended Torah study on New Year's Eve as well.
Slumber of the righteous
One of the early Lubavitcher leaders told his disciples that he disliked those scholars who argued that they could not suspend Torah study for even a few hours and that they therefore had to study Torah even on Christmas Eve. The Saintly Genius of Liska reportedly wanted to study Torah on a Nitel night. However, he fell into a deep sleep and his candle went out. When he awoke, he realized that divine intervention had kept him from carrying out his original purpose.
In an article on Nitel published in the Torah monthly, Moriah, Rabbi Yosef Lieberman offers a solution to circumvent the ban on Torah study: go to bed at nightfall and get up at midnight to study Torah, when such study becomes permissible. An expert on Hasidism, Rabbi Benzion Grossman relates that in the yeshivas of the Vishnitz Hasidim, the students would go to sleep in the afternoon prior to Christmas Eve and would get up at night to make up for the study hours they had missed. However, the Saintly Genius Rabbi Shalom of Kaminka would refrain from sleeping on Nitel, arguing that he always dreamed about Torah matters.
The Holy Land's sacredness
Some people maintain that the Nitel customs need not be observed in Israel, because of the Holy Land's sacredness. Rabbi Mordechai of Slonim ruled that, in the Holy Land, the klipot had no power - not even in Jerusalem, the site of many synagogues. Nonetheless, Hasidic sect leaders who came to the Holy Land continued the Nitel custom, and their disciples followed their example. In contrast, Lithuanian and Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Jews do not observe Nitel at all. "The Hasidim will look for any excuse not to study Torah," quipped one Lithuanian Jewish cynic.
Showing posts with label Menachem Brod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Menachem Brod. Show all posts
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Religious Affairs: Burying the Jew-Israeli distinction?
Dec. 4, 2008
Matthew Wagner
THE JERUSALEM POST
The attack in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists that ended the lives of six Jews, including Chabad emissaries Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, raised questions about Israel's role in providing security to Chabad houses.
This week, the Chief Rabbinate Council, spurred by one of its members, Chabad Rabbi Shimon Elituv, called on the government to provide such aid.
United Torah Judaism chairman Ya'acov Litzman sent a letter to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asking that Chabad houses, which "serve the entire Jewish people," receive state funding. In contrast, Foreign Ministry officials said that Israel could not help provide security, since Chabad houses were "not official Israeli organizations."
And Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter said that "the State of Israel cannot be the sheriff of Jewish sites in the Diaspora."
Obviously, part of the reason for Dichter's reluctance involves budget concerns. It would be prohibitively costly to fund even a fraction of security for hundreds of Chabad houses around the globe.
The Foreign Ministry's distinction between official and unofficial Israeli organizations, however, might hint at another reason for official opposition to supporting Chabad: Why should the secular State of Israel support Chabad, an organization with the essentially spiritual goal of spreading Yiddishkeit?
Lubavitch Hassidism's express purpose, as articulated Tuesday by one rabbi who eulogized the Holtzbergs at Kfar Chabad, is "to hasten the redemption and spread the light of Torah by making sure there is not one Jewish man who does not wear tefillin, not one Jewish woman who does not light Shabbat candles."
To accomplish this, Chabad's emissaries have created a network of Jewish centers that promulgate good deeds and Torah study wherever there are Jews. Chabad's emphasis is on strengthening the religious aspect of Jewish identity in preparation for the messianic era.
The Zionist state's goal, in contrast, is to normalize the Jewish condition. By providing the Jewish people with its own territory, Zionism's founding fathers hoped to transform the wandering Jew of the exile into a nation like all other nations.
Secular Zionists argued that with the creation of a Jewish state there would no longer be a need for halacha [Jewish law], which served the sole purpose of maintaining Jewish unity as a "portable homeland" in the Diaspora. A new, more normal Jewish identity would be created, and the old Diaspora baggage could be dropped.
Chabad did not seem completely comfortable with the idea of tightening its ties with the State of Israel either. Its leadership in New York was hesitant about the possibility of receiving security aid. The reason, said Chabad sources, was that security issues should be discussed behind closed doors.
But an Israeli Chabad source gave another reason: "Somebody in the Foreign Ministry said that if we started receiving money from the state, we would have to fly an Israeli flag over every Chabad house. We can't do that. There is nothing wrong with flying an Israeli flag occasionally if it strengthens someone's connection with the Jewish people and gives them a little Jewish pride. But we are not a Zionist organization."
HISTORICALLY, CHABAD, like other haredim, virulently opposed secular Zionism, because its ideology proposed to replace Judaism with nationalism. In 1903, Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, the fifth rebbe of Chabad, elucidated his staunch opposition to Zionism in a famous letter. "They think nationalism has replaced religion, and that Zionism is now the best means for the preservation of Jewish society, and not Torah and mitzvot," he wrote. "Zionists are more dangerous than the maskilim, because they believe that they are no longer obligated to the Torah, and that one is a proper Jew in that he is a loyal nationalist."
The seventh and last Chabad rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who staunchly opposed territorial compromise and was adamantly pro-Israel, nevertheless was careful never to use the term "State of Israel," always referring, instead, to the "Land of Israel."
In a 1969 letter to former MK Geula Cohen, he explained that one of the reasons he refrained from using the word "state" was because "it implied a general approach and program among Jews to be like all the goyim, a program that resulted in many physical and spiritual causalities and which, due to our sins, continues to do so."
For Schneerson, the nationalist aspect of Zionism represented a potential spiritual danger. Jews were liable to believe that a secular Israeli identity patterned after gentile nations would supplant authentic Jewish identity.
THE ATTACK in Mumbai, however, may have helped both Chabad and secular Zionists realize the symbiotic relationship that has developed between the religious and nationalist aspects of Jewish identity.
The Pakistani Islamist terrorists did not distinguish between the "Jewish" and "Israeli" identity of Chabad. Most of the victims of the attack on the Chabad House either had dual Israeli-American citizenship or were not Israelis. Regardless of whether or not Chabad houses fly the Israeli flag, they are identified with Israel.
President Shimon Peres, the only state official and secular Jew who eulogized the Holtzbergs at Kfar Chabad, barely mentioned the State of Israel or Israelis. Rather, he spoke in the name of "the Jewish people."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lumped together the state and Jews in his official reaction to the Mumbai attack: "The hatred of Jews, the State of Israel and Jewish symbols is still a factor that spurs and encourages such murderous acts."
In a telephone conversation after the funeral, Rabbi Menachem Brod, the official spokesman for Chabad in Israel, was very candid about his organization's interest in strengthening its ties with the state. Unlike the New York Chabad leadership, he spoke openly about working together with security officials.
"We plan to meet with government representatives soon," he said. "We would like to see what they can do to help."
He added that Chabad already received help, advice and sometimes even training from security personnel located in Israeli embassies.
A senior official in the Foreign Ministry said that Mumbai represented a "turning point in relations between Chabad and the State of Israel. I don't know if we will be seeing more state funding for Chabad Houses, but the attack definitely blurred the distinctions between 'Israeli' and 'Jew.'"
Matthew Wagner
THE JERUSALEM POST
The attack in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists that ended the lives of six Jews, including Chabad emissaries Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, raised questions about Israel's role in providing security to Chabad houses.
This week, the Chief Rabbinate Council, spurred by one of its members, Chabad Rabbi Shimon Elituv, called on the government to provide such aid.
United Torah Judaism chairman Ya'acov Litzman sent a letter to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asking that Chabad houses, which "serve the entire Jewish people," receive state funding. In contrast, Foreign Ministry officials said that Israel could not help provide security, since Chabad houses were "not official Israeli organizations."
And Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter said that "the State of Israel cannot be the sheriff of Jewish sites in the Diaspora."
Obviously, part of the reason for Dichter's reluctance involves budget concerns. It would be prohibitively costly to fund even a fraction of security for hundreds of Chabad houses around the globe.
The Foreign Ministry's distinction between official and unofficial Israeli organizations, however, might hint at another reason for official opposition to supporting Chabad: Why should the secular State of Israel support Chabad, an organization with the essentially spiritual goal of spreading Yiddishkeit?
Lubavitch Hassidism's express purpose, as articulated Tuesday by one rabbi who eulogized the Holtzbergs at Kfar Chabad, is "to hasten the redemption and spread the light of Torah by making sure there is not one Jewish man who does not wear tefillin, not one Jewish woman who does not light Shabbat candles."
To accomplish this, Chabad's emissaries have created a network of Jewish centers that promulgate good deeds and Torah study wherever there are Jews. Chabad's emphasis is on strengthening the religious aspect of Jewish identity in preparation for the messianic era.
The Zionist state's goal, in contrast, is to normalize the Jewish condition. By providing the Jewish people with its own territory, Zionism's founding fathers hoped to transform the wandering Jew of the exile into a nation like all other nations.
Secular Zionists argued that with the creation of a Jewish state there would no longer be a need for halacha [Jewish law], which served the sole purpose of maintaining Jewish unity as a "portable homeland" in the Diaspora. A new, more normal Jewish identity would be created, and the old Diaspora baggage could be dropped.
Chabad did not seem completely comfortable with the idea of tightening its ties with the State of Israel either. Its leadership in New York was hesitant about the possibility of receiving security aid. The reason, said Chabad sources, was that security issues should be discussed behind closed doors.
But an Israeli Chabad source gave another reason: "Somebody in the Foreign Ministry said that if we started receiving money from the state, we would have to fly an Israeli flag over every Chabad house. We can't do that. There is nothing wrong with flying an Israeli flag occasionally if it strengthens someone's connection with the Jewish people and gives them a little Jewish pride. But we are not a Zionist organization."
HISTORICALLY, CHABAD, like other haredim, virulently opposed secular Zionism, because its ideology proposed to replace Judaism with nationalism. In 1903, Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, the fifth rebbe of Chabad, elucidated his staunch opposition to Zionism in a famous letter. "They think nationalism has replaced religion, and that Zionism is now the best means for the preservation of Jewish society, and not Torah and mitzvot," he wrote. "Zionists are more dangerous than the maskilim, because they believe that they are no longer obligated to the Torah, and that one is a proper Jew in that he is a loyal nationalist."
The seventh and last Chabad rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who staunchly opposed territorial compromise and was adamantly pro-Israel, nevertheless was careful never to use the term "State of Israel," always referring, instead, to the "Land of Israel."
In a 1969 letter to former MK Geula Cohen, he explained that one of the reasons he refrained from using the word "state" was because "it implied a general approach and program among Jews to be like all the goyim, a program that resulted in many physical and spiritual causalities and which, due to our sins, continues to do so."
For Schneerson, the nationalist aspect of Zionism represented a potential spiritual danger. Jews were liable to believe that a secular Israeli identity patterned after gentile nations would supplant authentic Jewish identity.
THE ATTACK in Mumbai, however, may have helped both Chabad and secular Zionists realize the symbiotic relationship that has developed between the religious and nationalist aspects of Jewish identity.
The Pakistani Islamist terrorists did not distinguish between the "Jewish" and "Israeli" identity of Chabad. Most of the victims of the attack on the Chabad House either had dual Israeli-American citizenship or were not Israelis. Regardless of whether or not Chabad houses fly the Israeli flag, they are identified with Israel.
President Shimon Peres, the only state official and secular Jew who eulogized the Holtzbergs at Kfar Chabad, barely mentioned the State of Israel or Israelis. Rather, he spoke in the name of "the Jewish people."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lumped together the state and Jews in his official reaction to the Mumbai attack: "The hatred of Jews, the State of Israel and Jewish symbols is still a factor that spurs and encourages such murderous acts."
In a telephone conversation after the funeral, Rabbi Menachem Brod, the official spokesman for Chabad in Israel, was very candid about his organization's interest in strengthening its ties with the state. Unlike the New York Chabad leadership, he spoke openly about working together with security officials.
"We plan to meet with government representatives soon," he said. "We would like to see what they can do to help."
He added that Chabad already received help, advice and sometimes even training from security personnel located in Israeli embassies.
A senior official in the Foreign Ministry said that Mumbai represented a "turning point in relations between Chabad and the State of Israel. I don't know if we will be seeing more state funding for Chabad Houses, but the attack definitely blurred the distinctions between 'Israeli' and 'Jew.'"
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