Some wonderful news: Batya Burd, whom we featured twice after the petirah of her husband, is a kallah! I’m sure you all join me in wishing her a huge, heartfelt mazel tov.

Showdown!

The word conjures up images of two cowboys astride their trusty steeds, guns drawn, ready to fight for their honor in a modern-day dual. The crack of gunshots rips the still air, one cowboy topples to the ground while the victor rides off into the sunset.

Hardly a Jewish image.

But when I think of the lives of my grandparents and great-grandparents, showdowns abound. My great-grandfather had a showdown every single Monday morning when he came in to work at some factory on the Lower East Side after not showing up on Saturday. He lost job after job, but never abandoned the Shabbos Queen. Years later, his son, my grandfather, had a similar showdown when he was drafted into the Navy during World War II and refused to swab the decks on Shabbos.

Like Yael Schuster’s grandmother, my grandmother spent the war years posing as a gentile. She worked in the French Resistance and, at one point, was arrested by the Gestapo. They suspected her of being Jewish. She had to face the Nazi killers and convince them that she was a true Frenchwoman while holding on to her Jewishness within.

My husband’s grandfather spent the later war years with a band of Russian partisans. Ironically, he was arrested by the Russians while on a mission and accused of being a German spy. His showdown also involved an interrogation room, although he had to prove that he was Jewish. After surviving the war, he arrived in America where he had to fight to establish a shul, to send his children to frum schools, to live a Torah life in a hostile environment.

These were lives replete with struggle and showdowns. Today, we live in an ostensibly tolerant, pluralistic world where everyone is entitled to his own opinion, culture, and religion. Frum life flourishes and the battlefield seems far off.

But is it?

If the enemies of yesterday charged toward us with sabers drawn, today’s opponents use a sprinkle of arsenic. It’s not our bodies that get attacked, but our minds. The damage is subtle; a change in opinion here, a shift in attitude there, lines getting blurred again and again until we’re left with a muddy mess instead of the crisp clarity we need.

A friend just shared a powerful line from a well-known mechaneches. “In America they teach you that not everything is black and white,” she told her seminary students. “Here we teach you that not everything is gray.”

Tolerance sounds good. It feels good. It’s easy to live, let live, and live with. But sometimes, as the Maccabim showed us, living with is deadly. Sometimes, we have to take a strong stand and say, “No! This is wrong!” And sometimes, the entity we must battle, the being we must engage in our critical showdown, is not a distant speck upon the horizon, but a piece of our very selves.

Wishing you all a freilechen, lichtegen Chanukah,

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 421)