Posted on 12/11/2006 5:53:43 PM PST by SJackson
The Hanukkah menorah, valued by American Jews as a symbol of religious freedom, is becoming a rallying point for Christian activists seeking to put images of Jesus into the public square.
In several recent cases, Christians have pointed to the erection of public menorahs as justifying their demand to put nativity displays on public property. The most recent incident was in Wellington, Fla., where Christian residents challenged the town’s holiday display last month. The town had both a menorah and a Christmas tree.
Residents, citing court rulings, argued that the tree was a secular symbol, and that they were entitled to a religious symbol to balance the menorah. The town council consented last week and erected a nativity scene on December 14, showing a baby Jesus in his mother’s arms.
Two weeks earlier, a seven-foot-tall menorah on a public square in Neptune Beach, Fla., led to similar results.
Both cases come one year after a federal judge ordered the city of Palm Beach to permit a nativity scene to be erected in a park where there had previously been only a menorah.
The spread of public menorahs is largely the result of a campaign begun in the late 1980s by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Most Jewish organizations have traditionally opposed the insertion of religion into the public square, and many organizations originally fought the Chabad campaign for the same reason. In the past decade, however, menorahs have spread, clearing the way for other religious symbols, and not just Jewish ones.
“Chabad has actively sought out the appropriate forums, which has given other people the idea,” said Ed White, the trial counsel at the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian legal-aid organization that has been involved in many of the recent nativity cases.
“We say, keep the menorah, add a nativity,” White said.
The More Center and other Christian advocacy groups have pushed this point in various public venues, not only in town squares. In another pending case, a Catholic woman is asking the New York City Department of Education to allow more Christian symbols into her sons’ public schools. The mother said that the menorahs and Jewish history in her sons’ schools constituted a form of religious coercion in the absence of any parallel Christian education.
The push for more elaborate — and more explicitly religious — public holiday celebrations is particularly heated this year as a cadre of Christian activists has pushed for more public recognition of Christmas. But the central role played by menorahs in this debate has largely gone unnoticed outside the legal profession.
The menorah’s public face in America only began in the 1980s, when the grand rabbi of Lubavitch, the late Menachem M. Schneerson, began pressing his local emissaries to erect menorahs in town squares where holiday displays were already present. Following several court challenges to the menorahs, the Supreme Court in 1989 took up a case against a Chabad-erected menorah in Pittsburgh.
The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the menorah, which was set up opposite a Christmas tree in front of the Pittsburgh City-County Building. The ACLU also challenged a nativity scene set up on the city’s courthouse steps. Following an earlier precedent, the Supreme Court considered whether the holiday displays had any secular purpose. While a majority of justices determined that the tree was a secular symbol and the nativity scene was a religious symbol, they paused at the menorah.
“The display of the Chanukkah menorah in front of the City-County Building may well present a closer constitutional question,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in his majority opinion.
“The menorah, one must recognize, is a religious symbol; it serves to commemorate the miracle of the oil as described in the Talmud,” Blackmun wrote in a decision that ranged widely over Jewish history and religious thought. “But the menorah’s message is not exclusively religious. The menorah is the primary visual symbol for a holiday that, like Christmas, has both religious and secular dimensions.”
In one of the five other opinions issued in the case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor disagreed with Blackmun that the menorah had any secular character at all, and said that a menorah standing alone, like a nativity creche standing alone, was not constitutional if the display was sponsored by a government. But she agreed with five other justices that a menorah could have a secular purpose if displayed alongside other holiday decorations.
The ruling has left an uncertain legal legacy for small towns seeking clear guidelines. Pasco County, Florida, was thrown into turmoil last year after a rabbi sought to install a menorah in a local library. The county authorities first responded by taking down all holiday displays. This year county attorneys spent two months drafting a lengthy memo outlining every possible holiday scenario, even detailing what county employees could do in their work cubicles. The attorneys were responding to the overriding message in the Supreme Court decision: Context is everything.
Chabad rabbis have also been caught in this uncertain legal atmosphere. This year, rabbis in Tennessee, New Jersey, Colorado and Florida have been fighting to erect menorahs. They have been supported by a leading constitutional lawyer, Nathan Lewin, who argued for the menorah before the Supreme Court in the 1989 Pittsburgh case.
“The bottom line is that you will never end up with no Christmas displays,” said attorney Alyza Lewin, Nathan Lewin’s daughter, who has worked with Chabad rabbis on the current cases. “If there will always be Christmas displays, you ought to always have menorah displays.”
In addressing such cases, many local judges have looked to O’Connor’s opinion in the 1989 case. Coincidentally, one of the most influential recent opinions was written by the nominee to replace O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. In 1999, Alito, then a judge on a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, wrote a decision ruling that a menorah and a nativity scene were both religious symbols and could be erected with public money when they are part of a larger secular display. Chabad now says it erects close to 11,000 public menorahs around the world each year.
In Florida this past November, when Wellington residents began pressing for a creche, town attorney Jeff Kurtz said he looked back to the decisions by Alito and O’Connor. Kurtz said his first recommendation was that the municipality avoid any holiday display, but he went on to recommend that if Wellington had a menorah it had to permit a nativity scene as well.
This was the outcome feared by a handful of mainstream Jewish organizations when Chabad began its menorah campaign in the 1980s. 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.
Both the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee submitted friend-of-the-court briefs opposing Chabad in the 1989 case. In the wake of that ruling, however, menorahs have been erected in a growing number of places by Chabad and other groups and opposition has been muted.
“We’re no more enthusiastic about Chabad’s campaign than we were before,” Stern told the Forward this week. “If it’s done properly, though, there’s not much that can be done legally to stop them.”
For Christian activists, the burgeoning of menorahs has been a welcome sign. “People see a menorah — or that Chabad is having a lighting ceremony — and they inquire and find out, ‘Heck, I didn’t know I could do that,’” said White of the Thomas More Law Center.
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Amen!!! Keep the Menorrah...Add The NAtivity!!! I will be grateful to the Chabad Rabbi forever!!!
You're in the minority. Most posters on these threads want the menorah dumped. As to the Nativity Scenes, it's fine with me, but sometimes what goes around comes around.
No, the Menorrah and the Nativity are RELIGIOUS symbols....so if there is one, the other must be also to complete the season of the RELIGIOUS message. If ther is ONLY a TREE, which is totally secular.....ATHEISTS and other religions put up trees, no Menorrah. Hannukah is 8 days....but Christmas is a SEASON....Advent to Epiphany, about 6 weeks.
I think so too. The courts disagree.
The courts are ASSES.....it's been 2500 YEARS and yet the ASSES say "who you gonna believe us or 2500 YEARS of law and tradition!!"
What thread were you seeing that? I haven't seen all the threads relating to this, but the ones I did, the posters were not arguing about keeping a menorah out, but that the rabbi in Seattle was using the threat of confrontation to remove the Christmas trees.
If they were against having a menorah up, I must have missed it.
Every thread I've posted on, which probably isn't all of them, multiple posters, myself included, have noted that there was never either a request or a threat to remove the Holiday (Sea-Tac's name for Christmas Trees) Trees. That was simply never an issue. To some of the media perhaps.
I must have missed a lot of intervening threads.
My initial reaction from the first couple of threads were that it was just another Seattle leftist using his status as rabbi to remove even a secular symbol of Christmas. If it was just a request to add a menorah, then I bet it was the airport who reacted negatively and decided not to display either. Christians shouldn't have a problem with adding a menorah, though I realize that some would. I wouldn't.
The Menorrah is just fine with me. When the Jews get on planes and demand seat-belt extenders, sit in the wrong seats, congregate by the emergency exits, praise terrorist leaders and their organizations and damn the US, then stand and pray at the same time loudly... give me a call. Then I'll be willing to voice a loud objection and demand they be jettesoned from the plane at altitude. Until then, I'll just harbor those thoughts for those that do.
As a general rule I like to see other people's holiday celebrations or rememberences. As long as those celebratory actions don't remind me of terrorism, I'm happy for them.
Leave the gun...Take The CAnnoli!!!
Sorry...it was running through my mind and I couldn't resist.
IMO Christmas Trees aren't, though in the last few days I've learned there's an amazing amount of support for the concept of non-denominational Holiday Trees. I think it depends on the point one wishes to make.
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