Shalom everyone,
On ancient Jewish tombstones in Aramaic, in Yeshua’s time, a common refrain carved on them was, dakir hu le-tab, ‘May he be remembered for good’, or dekirah hi le-tab, ‘May she be remembered for good’. This was an ancient way of saying, ‘May the act of remembering this person be a source of goodness, honour and blessing to us’. A modern Jewish equivalent in English is, ‘May their memory be a blessing’.
There is a reason why Islamists target Jews during our festival times. It’s not to catch us off-guard; it’s to cause us to associate our religious festivals with pain and grief. It’s also for another reason – the same reason why psychopaths use fear to keep their victims in a constant state of subjugation: to tell us that they own us and control us.
They want us to grieve during our seasons of joy; they want us to be in a permanent state of fear at every one of our festivals that celebrate life and liberation.
You can honour the memories of those who are killed by Islamists by refusing to be sad; their memory can be a blessing to us, and we can honour them, by being joyful during our seasons of joy, just as God intended. We can refuse to be cowed by fear, by showing them that we will not be afraid to celebrate our God and our faith.
There’s another thing that they hope to do by targeting us during religious festivals: to cause us to hate back, to make us want vengeance, and to become as violent as they are.
There is a Palestinian ex-Jihadist called Walid Shoeibat, who was brought up to hate Jews, and to want us all dead. As a child, he was brought up with blood-curdling songs about turning their own bodies into swords and spears to kill, about glorifying death and war, about wanting to kill us and terrorise us. He wanted to learn more about his enemy, so he bought CDs with Jewish music, and books about us – if he could find our songs about death and war, he reasoned that he could use that against us.
He couldn’t find any Jewish songs that mentioned swords, spears, or any music that glorified war and death. He finally found one song that had the word ‘war’ in it, the Hebrew word milchamah. It was a biblical quote. He thought he had finally found what he had been looking for – the smoking gun, so to speak.
However, he actually didn’t understand much Hebrew, so he went to a Hebrew-speaker, and asked them what this meant. They said, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they train for war any more.”
It completely deflated him. He thought that the Jewish religion was founded on death, killing and war, just as his was. Instead, he learned that the Jewish faith was centred on life and peace. Since then, he has gone around speaking against Jihad, and working for peace. He is now a strong supporter of the State of Israel.
May this time of light be a seed for peace among nations, so that they neither train or learn war any more.
Hanukkah blessings, in YHVH’s Holy Name
Your brother in the peace and light of YHVH
Shmuliq