A Menorah Without Prayers? A Creche Without Christ? : Religion: The seasonal arguing over religious symbols on public property has led to a lamentable secularization of religious culture.

In his ruling prohibiting the stand-alone display of a menorah on public land in Beverly Hills, U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. captured a part of the tragic irony that attends the Chabad Lubavitch sect’s annual efforts to place this unique symbol on government property during the eight-day Jewish religious festival of Hanukkah. “I find it rather interesting,” Hatter said, “that one of the most Orthodox, if not the most Orthodox, segment of the Jewish religion is (arguing) that the menorah is secular.” That observation also helps to explain why the American Jewish Congress--together with all of the other community relations agencies that make up the mainstream American Jewish community--unanimously oppose the display of all religious symbols on public property.

In court papers defending the display of its menorah, Chabad’s lawyers claimed that “the menorah is a symbol with relatively mild religious intensity from the Jewish point of view.” In fact, the Hanukkah menorah’s religious origins, and the Jewish religious practice of lighting the menorah in commemoration of the oil-burning miracle, is directly traceable to a rabbinic source dating from the first or second centuries as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud. Next to the Five Books of Moses, the Talmud is the primary authoritative source for Jewish law.

Moreover, unlike a Nativity scene, the Hanukkah menorah is more than a mere religious symbol that recalls a particular event. It is most closely analogous to the communion wafer used in the Catholic Mass; it is a religious object used to perform a specific religious rite.

A Chabad rabbi submitted a declaration arguing that the lighting of a Hanukkah menorah during the eight-day holiday is not a religious act because it does not incorporate ritual blessings. This claim is similarly specious. Kindling of the menorah’s lights during Hanukkah is a religious ceremony, whether or not appropriate blessings are said. The 28-foot menorah displayed in Beverly Hills was constructed, placed and lit in the precise manner prescribed by Jewish religious law.

Judge Hatter’s Dec. 13 order prohibited “any religious ceremonies, including, but not limited to, prayers, blessings, singing or rituals, of any type or nature at the site of the display.” While legally correct, this certainly had the impact of chilling the Jewish community’s ability to avow the obvious religious significance of a menorah lighting ceremony.

In order to comply with the Supreme Court’s dictates, it is now clear that those who wish to use public property for religious purposes can do so only by seeking to demean or pervert the sectarian character of their religion’s symbols. Justices Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens warned of this heresy in their 1984 dissent to the court’s 5-4 decision upholding inclusion of a Nativity scene in a Pawtucket, R.I., display: “The creche has been relegated to the role of a neutral harbinger . . . devoid of any inherent meaning and incapable of enhancing the religious tenor of a . . . municipality sponsored display, a setting where Christians feel constrained in acknowledging its symbolic meaning and non-Christians feel alienated by its presence. Surely, this is a misuse of a sacred symbol.”

For many Christians, the secularization and commercialization of Christmas makes it increasingly difficult to keep “Christ in Christmas.” For those of us in the Jewish community who wish to preserve our own cultural heritage and religious identity, the celebration of Hanukkah must be genuine and meaningful.

We can no longer tolerate the debasement and distortion of our precious few authentic religious objects in service of efforts to have our public servants officially “bless” our beliefs or practices. Since this is the unfortunate price that the Supreme Court’s decisions extract, we can and must find a better way.

Now that 1990’s “December debacle” is over, government bodies across this country should pause to reflect that constitutionality is a necessary, but by no means sufficient, prerequisite for enlightened policy-making. They should also recall that the Ku Klux Klan’s Dec. 22 construction of a cross in a Cincinnati public square, which caused a riot, was inspired by the display of a menorah in the same square during the eight days of Hanukkah.

It is time to end the actuality and appearance of government endorsement by forbidding the unattended, overnight display of all religious symbols on public property. Such a policy is fully within the discretion of our elected officials and consistent with Supreme Court teachings. Failure to adopt such rules inevitably will entail an unacceptably high cost to America’s religious minorities and majority.