It's Time To Become Rosa Parkstein

January is a tough month. The tinsel and sheen have faded. People start to remove holiday lights from their homes. Discarded Christmas trees lay on sidewalks waitingFTP be picked up. We return our Chanukiyot to their storage places for another year and remove any wax that still sticks to our countertops. Yet with the last memory of the Chanukah candles still burning in our mind's eye, I'd like to return to Hanukkah for a moment.

We know the story. In 167 bce, at the time of the second temple in Jerusalem, Antiochus IV outlawed Jewish services and ordered that an altar be built to Zeus. Pigs were sacrificed in the holy of holies; Brit milah and Torah study were banned on punishment of death. Those who saw a negative outcome of this situation developed the concept of the afterlife (yes, the Jews invented Heaven!) while a small band who saw things differently - called the Maccabees - organized a revolt. You know who won that war.

There is, however, a part of the Hanukkah story that is rarely told, one that sadly in Israel today is currently being played out in the ongoing clash between extreme ultra-Orthodoxy and non-Orthodox Jews. This is the part of the story of what happened next, after the Maccabees rededicated the temple, after that legendary oil burned out.

A couple of years ago David Brooks wrote a wonderful op-Ed in the times retelling the story of Hanukkah. After reminding his readers of the familiar parts he wrote:

The Maccabees are best understood as moderate fanatics. They were not in total revolt against Greek culture. They used Greek constitutional language to explain themselves. They created a festival to commemorate their triumph (which is part of Greek, not Jewish, culture). Before long, they were electing their priests.

On the other hand, they were fighting heroically for their traditions and the survival of their faith. If they found uncircumcised Jews, they performed forced circumcisions. They had no interest in religious liberty within the Jewish community and believed religion was a collective regimen, not an individual choice.

They were not the last bunch of angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East, but they may have been among the first. They retook Jerusalem in 164 B.C. and rededicated the temple. Their regime quickly became corrupt, brutal and reactionary. The concept of reform had been discredited by the Hellenizing extremists. Practice stagnated. Scholarship withered. The Maccabees became religious oppressors themselves, fatefully inviting the Romans into Jerusalem.

Brooks may have been writing about West Bank settlers. He may have been writing about the Taliban. In either case it was a warning against religious extremism and fanaticism of any kind; a warning I believe that must be sounded whenever extremism or fanaticism raises its intolerant and exclusionary head. And if Brooks were writing in 2012 instead of 2009 as he did, he might have been writing about some of the ultra orthodox in Beit Shemesh, Bnai Brak and Jerusalem.

In six short weeks, 50 pilgrims will join me for ten awesome days in Israel. We will explore her routes and will deepen our roots to our Jewish homeland. While a visit to Beit Shemesh, where 8 year old Na'amah Margolis was spat on for not wearing modest enough clothing and where owners of women's stores have been warned by the orthodox fundamentalists to only stock one color is not on the itinerary, we will participate in our own action, our own protest against this growing fundamentalism so that Israel does not decline into the type of state it once was under Hasmonean rule.

We all know that orthodox Jews demand gender separation in worship, learning and other aspects of life. Well, in Israel this separation has extended to which side of the street you walk on and where you sit on a bus. Like the American south of the Pre civil rights era, many buses that travel through ultra orthodox neighborhoods are now segregated by gender. Not only is this immoral and unegalitariatn, it is also illegal in Israel. Yet it persists as many bus drivers accede to demands of orthodox men to segregate women and orthodox women do not feel emboldened enough to sit at the front of the bus where the law and Jewish tradition says they can.

We all know the story of Rosa Parks. Well, when we go to Israel in 6 weeks we will become modern Rosa Parksteins.

In an act of protest, we will participate in a freedom ride. Like American Rabbis of the 1960s who joined Martin Luther King jr. in the struggle for civil rights, like rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who, after marching on Selma said that his legs were praying, we too will speak truth to power through our actions. We will board public buses and will sit, men and women and children in the front of the bus, modeling what is right and empowering other women to sit up front where they deserve to be.

This freedom ride we will participate in, is ultimately not about who gets to sit where. It is not a fight over one little girl’s walk to school or what people should or should not wear. . It is a struggle that could shape the future character and soul of Israel, against ultra-Orthodox zealots who have been increasingly encroaching on the public sphere with their strict interpretation of modesty rules, enforcing gender segregation and the exclusion of women.

If we do not stand up and take action then the threat to Israel's existence will not come from external forces like Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran who are clearly bent on israel's destruction, it will come from within, from an internal civil war that will pit Jew against Jew. The rabbis teach that Jerusalem was destroyed because of Sinat Hinam -senseless hatred between different Jewish factions. That's the diplomatic story which spreads the blame evenly. Truth is, Jerusalem was destroyed because of the fanatics who refused to let anyone leave the city on pain of death. They would rather see Jerusalem burn than compromise and allow for its survival. If nothing is done, I fear history will repeat itself.

It is time to return to the wisdom of Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, an extremely Orthodox Jew himself. He loved both the yeshiva bochers and the kibbutznikim. He worked to build a society where tolerance of Jewish differences and differentiated ways of life all worked for the rebuilding of the Land of Israel and the State of Israel. The Charedi no longer are part of the Kook equation. They are outside the acceptable parameters of a modern Jewish democratic society which was envisioned in the Israel Declaration of Independence.

We have the responsibility and obligation to support Israel’s security needs while fighting for its spiritual soul. We take seriously the words of Rab Kook “What is old you will make new and what is new you will make holy”.

We may share the same historical religious DNA as these religious extremists but their Judaism is not mine. My Judaism is tolerant, open minded, pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian, creative and forward looking. This is the Judaism I want to fight for. This is the Jewish State that i want israel to be This is what I celebrate at Hanukkah - a tradition that dispels darkness with light - and this is why this February I will board a bus in Jerusalem to sit at the front with my wife, my daughter and my sons. Shabbat Shalom.