The fascinating contrast between President Obama’s and Sen. Cruz’s Hanukkah (Chanukah) greetings

David Bernstein writes in the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy about the contrast in the ways Ted Cruz and Barack Obama wrote about today being the first day of Chanukah:

Obama’s Hanukkah is universalist, about a “struggle for justice.” There is no mention of God. Cruz’s Chanukah (note the less common, but more traditional spelling) is about the Jewish people, with God’s help, winning the right to worship against an oppressive dictatorship.

...The lesson from Obama’s Hanukkah is that Americans should advocate for “the fundamental dignity of every human being.” Jews as such are incidental to the holiday, as is religious freedom. Cruz’s Chanukah lesson is that Jews must be protected from their modern enemies.

...Obama’s Hanukkah teaches the sort of vague, and vaguely agnostic, and universalistic Sunday school platitudes one might find in theologically liberal congregations around the country, that we should “be the engine of the miracles we seek.” And he doesn’t even identify which “people” the Maccabees sought to free from oppression. Cruz’s Chanukah is both a specifically Jewish celebration and a “testament to God’s providence,” to which Cruz, evoking Ronald Reagan, also attributes the wonders of the United States.

Read more here.

Toiling in the shadow of the pyramids of socialism

As the first Chanukah candle is lit, The Jew today is called on to forget. To turn his children into bricks in order to construct the utopia of their new world order. To bend to the progressive wheel and wear the social justice chain, and cast his own offspring into the sea of zero population growth. To give up his nation, his land, his faith and his future to toil in the shadow of the pyramids of socialism. To go down to labor in Egypt once more, in South America and Haitian slums, in barrios and villages, in ghettos and madinas, to give up who he is in order to serve others in the new slavery of social justice.Daniel Greenfield writes:

Chanukah marks the culmination of the Maccabee campaign for the liberation of Jerusalem. It is the time when we remember the men and women who refused to submit to the perversion of their values and the theft of their land. It reminds us that we must not allow our land to be stolen under any guise or allow our religion, history and culture to be perverted on any pretext. The light of the Menorah reminds us that the sacredness of a nation is in its spirit and that preserving that spirit is an eternal struggle against the conquerors of land and the tyrants of souls.

The lights of the menorah embody the spirit of the Jewish people. A spirit that has outlived the atrocities of every tyrant. In the heart of the flame that has burned for a thousand years lives the soul of a people.