When I heard about this over the weekend and no actual identification of the rabbi involved was made, I figured the guy was a Lubavitcher. I wasn't wrong.
In response to a rabbi's request to add an 8-foot menorah to holiday decorations, officials at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport instead decided to remove all nine Christmas trees.Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky made the request weeks ago, when he demanded officials add a menorah next to the trees and threatened to file a lawsuit if his request wasn't honored.
Instead, officials decided to remove holiday decorations as a whole. Maintenance workers boxed up the trees during the graveyard shift early Saturday, when airport bosses believed few people would notice.
"We decided to take the trees down because we didn't want to be exclusive," said airport spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt. "We're trying to be thoughtful and respectful, and will review policies after the first of the year."
You should have told him to blow it out his ass.
Bogomilsky said he was appalled by the decision.
Backfired on you, didn't it? Idiot.
"Everyone should have their spirit of the holiday. For many people the trees are the spirit of the holidays, and adding a menorah adds light to the season," said Bogomilsky, who works at Chabad Lubavitch, a Jewish education foundation headquartered in Seattle's University District.
That's nice, but the vast majority of travellers probably aren't looking for a menorah. Or a chanukiah, if you want to get technical, rabbi.
After consulting with lawyers, port staff believed that adding the menorah would have required adding symbols for other religions and cultures in the Northwest. The holidays are the busiest season at the airport, Betancourt said, and staff didn't have time to play cultural anthropologists.
Probably wise, but you still should have ignored him, and countersued when/if he sued you.
Hanukkah begins this Friday at sundown."They've darkened the hall instead of turning the lights up," said his lawyer, Harvey Grad. "There is a concern here that the Jewish community will be portrayed as the Grinch."
Gee. You think? Moron.
The Lubavitch here successfully lobbied for a chanukiah at the City-County Building years ago, and they light it every year and get a notice in the paper and all that jazz. But there are something like 10,000 Jews in Indianapolis in a metro area population of over a million. Why do we need a chanukiah in the public square?
Personally I like Christmas lights and Christmas trees. They're not in my cultural background, but they're pretty, and I frankly do not have a problem with them being put up by the city. Trees and lights aren't a nativity scene, which as a strictly religious symbol tied to Christianity should be denied in the public square -- just as a chanukiah should be.
Religion is highly personal to me; it stays in the home and in the shul, when I go, which I don't much (readers of this blog will know that I have problems with organized religion). People I know will assert that I don't and never did display much in the way of Jewish symbolism (no big jewelry stars, no kipah, no tzitzit, none of that for me). There are two reasons for that: One, my religion is really nobody else's business, and two, I just think Jews need to keep their heads down -- it's dangerous out there, so why be a walking billboard for Judaism? Since we don't proselytize, what is the point?
As I think about it, the rabbi took the wrong tack. There were nine trees, after all. He should have asked for the middle tree to be raised above the others. He then would have had his chanukiah, and nobody would have been upset.
(Yeah, tongue firmly imbedded in cheek, but I have no use whatsoever for the Lubavitcher Chasidim.)
