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Posted on 01/07/2003 4:50:43 AM PST by SJackson
PONTEFICATIONS
OUR SEVENTH OF JANUARY IS IN ORTHODOX RUSSIA the Christmas day that December 25 has become in the rest of the Christian world.
The difference between these two Christmases is one of calendars. The Russian Church follows the ancient Roman method of dating imposed by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. The West follows the calendar established by Roman Catholic Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. On the day the Gregorian calendar was imposed, it differed from the old Julian calendar it replaced by 10 days.
The Russian Orthodox faithful will be celebrating from January 7 until January 19, Theophany, the commemoration of Jesus’ baptism.
(Other Orthodox and Western Christians nowadays generally celebrate the "12 days of Christmas" beginning on December 25 in the Gregorian calendar and culminating with Epiphany, January 6, the "manifestation" or "revelation" of the baby Jesus to the gentile, gift-bringing Magi.)
In the closing days of 2002, to show his support for the upcoming Christmas holidays Russian President Vladimir Putin sent government woodcutters and a state helicopter to deliver a 65-foot tall fir tree to the Siberian town of Birobidzhan northeast of the port of Vladivostok and near the Chinese border.
In the United States such a gesture would outrage the American Civil Liberties Union. How dare any President use taxpayer property and money to provide a town with the symbol of one particular religion – especially Christianity!!!
But students of Soviet history will find their own epiphany, a shock of recognition in Putin’s carefully-chosen action that might carry a powerful message for us.
Birobidzhan, you see, is no ordinary place. Once upon a time many viewed it as Zion.
Before the birth of Israel, the Jewish yearning for a homeland manifested in the West with British offers to provide Jewish settlers a Zion in what today we call Uganda in central Africa – and later in the Balfour Declaration’s recognition of Jewish rights to a homeland in British-ruled Palestine.
The Soviet Union made its own offer of a Zionist homeland, in 1928 designating a swampy, mosquito-infested, undeveloped region of Siberia twice the size of New Jersey for Jewish land colonization. In 1934, this enclave was renamed Birobidzhan after its biggest town and was declared the U.S.S.R.’s "Jewish Autonomous Region."
Details and photographs of its rise and fall can be found in the 1998 book Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996 by Swarthmore College scholar Robert Weinberg and others.
Birobidzhan in its first years attracted 18,000 Leftist Jewish idealists from throughout the world, including the United States. What those who arrived in search of paradise found, instead, was a harsh landscape in which tailors and intellectuals were expected to become farmers or, as the Stalinist government called them, "toilers on the [collectivized] land."
The Soviet Government did little to provide these unprepared settlers with tools, seed, food, healthcare, housing, training or other help. Many died. More found themselves, like sod buster pioneers of America’s Great Plains, shivering through long Siberian winters in whatever half-subterranean sod huts they could improvise.
But Stalin’s secret police did bring rules to Birobidzhan. The only permissible spoken or written Jewish language was Yiddish. Hebrew, which carried an aura of religiosity unacceptable in the atheistic Soviet Union, was forbidden. Even the permitted Yiddish was purged of Hebrew-origin words, and Russian-based new words were substituted in the official Birobidzhan lexicon.
Birobidzhan, according to dictator Joseph Stalin, was to be "Jewish in form but Marxist in content," whatever that means.
Its settlers would be terrorized by the Stalinist purges of 1936-38. It then briefly grew to a peak Jewish population of 30,000 in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust and because of promoting groups like the American Birobidzhan Committee (Ambijan) endorsed by no less than Albert Einstein.
But in 1948 Stalin moved to eradicate Jewish culture throughout the Soviet Union. By his order 30,000 books from Birobidzhan’s Judaica collection were burned.
Once again Jews were in effect being told to "convert or die," the demanded conversion this time being not to Christianity but to the rival religious cult of atheistic Marxism.
Because of this, as well as the 1948 birth of Israel, Birobidzhan’s magnetic appeal as a Zion locked inside a largely anti-Semitic Soviet Union vanished for the world’s Jews.
Today Birobidzhan has a population of about 216,000, of whom at most 3,000 are Jewish. The synagogue that opened there without a rabbi in September 1947 now has one for the small congregation that remains.
But despite the fall of the Soviet Union and reemergence of Orthodox Russia, Birobidzhan legally remains the country’s Jewish "Autonomous Okrug (Republic)."
What, therefore, does it mean in a Russia whose history is blood-stained with anti-Semitic pogroms and purges when its new President Vladimir Putin goes out of his way to nationally televise his use a government helicopter to fly a 65-foot Christmas tree to Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish capital? Perhaps it means nothing.
We in the West should be asking what it means that a poll taken around Christmastime 2002 found that the Number One symbol of Christmas is no longer Christ….but is now Santa Claus. We should ponder as these once-holy days slip away into the rear-view mirror of a New Year whether our formerly religious celebrations, now sanitized by the ACLU, are becoming "Judeo-Christian in form but materialistic and atheistic in content."
The senile socialist and Harvard University economist emeritus John Kenneth Galbraith long argued that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were destined for "convergence" as our societies became more and more alike. He believed that America was becoming more socialist and the Soviets more capitalistic.
It now seems that Russia is reverting to aspects of its old time religion, while the West (except for Israel) is growing more secular. Christianity continues to grow, even faster than Islam. But as Pennsylvania State University scholar Philip Jenkins assays in his book The Next Christendom, the center of the Christian faith is already rapidly shifting to new homelands in South America and especially Africa, the continent where Joseph and Mary took the infant Jesus to Egypt to keep him alive.
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Mr. Ponte hosts national radio talk show Monday through Friday Noon-2 PM Eastern Time (9-11 AM Pacific Time) as well as on Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and on Sundays 9-11 PM Eastern Time (6-8 PM Pacific Time) on the Talk America network . Internet Audio worldwide is at TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
I noticed this little error. The 12 days of Christmas begins on December 26, not December 25. 12th night is January 6. The difference between Western and Orthodox celebration of Christmas is the western calendar underwent a calendar correction, the Orthodox folks did not. (The Russian government in 1918 adopted the reform, but the Orthodox Church did not).
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Not quite: the center simply moved from West to East Europe with support in S. America, Africa and SE Asia. Orthodoxy has stood firm and resolved in it's faith while the Pope has saught a world religion to rule, while loosing his own, and the protestants kept morphing into 40,000 individual flavors...to fit any life style or there lack off.
Pardon, did I understand correctly. Your son is in Russia and has influence with Putin?
:-)
[Christians nowadays generally celebrate the "12 days of Christmas" beginning on December 25]
I noticed this little error. The 12 days of Christmas begins on December 26, not December 25. 12th night is January 6. The difference between Western and Orthodox celebration of Christmas is the western calendar underwent a calendar correction, the Orthodox folks did not. (The Russian government in 1918 adopted the reform, but the Orthodox Church did not).
Thanks again!......................................BTTT
KING HENRY V
We hope to make the sender blush at it. Therefore, my lords, omit no happy hour That may give furtherance to our expedition; For we have now no thought in us but France, Save those to God, that run before our business.
Therefore let our proportions for these wars Be soon collected and all things thought upon That may with reasonable swiftness add More feathers to our wings; for, God before, We'll chide this Dauphin at his father's door. Therefore let every man now task his thought, That this fair action may on foot be brought.
Shakespeare
Henry V
He is missing one important point. In Russian Orthodox Christian Church there is no christmas tree. Russians use the yolka, the decorated fur tree on New Year's, NOT on Christmas. Their Santa Claus is also on New Year's, Ded Moroz or Grandfather Frost. For Russian Christians, they do not use pagan imagry in their Christmas worship. But the Pagan traditions are popular on New Year's. Maybe our Western Christian Church should adapt that custom? Separate Christmas from paganism? I was born Catholic, but I have to ask? What does the birth of Jesus have to do with christmas trees and flying reindeer??
Did you mean fir, as in a fir tree, or fur, as something mad from hides. If the later that would be interesting.
Thats just when they show up ;)
I was wondering myself about that. Thank you.
Exactly. Fir tree is not part of Orhodox Christmas and Putin is neither RC nor Protestant.
The Russian Orthodox Church uses White Oak in Christmas celebration by swinging branches with burning leaves into the sky as a reminder of the star the three wise men followed.
Did you mean fir, as in a fir tree, or fur, as something mad from hides.
Oops, I mean a fir tree. LOL! Fur is from an animal and I guess they do get mad when you take their hide!
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