Tikkun: Maccabean Heroes Were Left-Wing Freedom Fighters Who Battled Greek Social Injustice
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2010/12/01/the-spiritual-messages-of-chanukah-and-christmas-and-their-downsides/#more-17737He also compares the Maccabees to the Taliban, and criticizes Christians for "not voting like Jews" (i.e. assimilated, self-hating American Erev Rav dreck)!
Clearly, Lerner needs to lay off of the pot-laced matzos!
DBF
...The cynical realists in Judea, among them many of the priests charged with preserving the Temple, argued that Greek power was overwhelming and that it made far greater sense to accommodate it than to resist. The Greek globalizers promised advances in science and technology that could benefit international trade and enrich the local merchants who sided with them, even though the taxes that accompanied their rule impoverished the Jewish peasants who worked the land and eked out a subsistence living. Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theatre of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes.
To the Maccabees, the guerrilla band that they assembled to fight the Greek Empire and its Seleucid dynasty in Syria, and to many of the Jewish supporters of that struggle, the issue of Greek militarism, social injustice and oppression were far more salient than the accomplishments of Greek high culture. Whatever might be the value of Athenian democracy, the reality that it exported to the world through Alexander and his successors was oppressive and exploitative....
...The ambiguities of hope were well illustrated in the past two years by the Obama administration. Brought to power by a movement that believed we had elected a president committed to peace, social justice, human rights, and environmental sanity, the Obama administration quickly pulled away from its progressive base and became, on many (NOT ALL) issues, hard to distinguish from many presidential administrations that came before. Tied to serving the interests of Wall Street and the elites of wealth and power, unwilling to articulate a progressive worldview that could contend with the selfishness and materialism and fear of the other which has always been the central psychological core of global capitalism, self-disempowering so that it would not fight even for the ideals it was willing to articulate,fearful to challenge the war-makers who run the military-industrial complex, enamored by the idea of compromise to his Right but not to his Left, Obama has turned many previously hopeful people into cynical or apathetic citizens...
...The Maccabees were in some respects like the Taliban — completely ruthless in their religious fanaticism, willing to impose it by force on fellow Jews, and their Hashmonean kingdom that they created became as corrupt as the Hellenists they replaced...
...we must not put out of our minds the national liberation still being struggled for by the Palestinian people...
...Christians who, had they voted like Jews in the 2010 midterm elections (68% of whom voted for the more liberal candidates in U.S. Congressional elections), would have given us a Congress with a strong liberal bent, might use this Christmas to popularize in their families, neighbors, friends, and churches the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ campaign for a Global Marshall Plan and our call for an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Seriously, this dude must have the hookups on some
really good acid to come up with these gems!!!
DBF
"Rabbi" Michael Lerner (yimach schmo): a face that only a schvartze mother could love!
Topic: Helen Thomas Doppleganger "Rabbi" Dykael Lerner (ys): Maccabees Were Marxists! (Read 789 times)