COMMENTARY: Texaco execs are soul mates of an ancient tyrant

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ The nation has been dismayed by the recently revealed”Texaco tapes,”in which oil company executives were secretly recorded expressing bigotry toward blacks and the new African-American holiday of Kwanza. But the tapes, which came to light […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The nation has been dismayed by the recently revealed”Texaco tapes,”in which oil company executives were secretly recorded expressing bigotry toward blacks and the new African-American holiday of Kwanza. But the tapes, which came to light during a federal discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by Texaco employees, also exposed the executives’ apparent contempt for the 8-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which begins this year on Thursday evening, December 5th. “I’m still having trouble with Hanukkah. Now we have Kwanza,”Texaco exec Robert Ulrich was recorded as saying at a high-level meeting with other executives in 1994. Their conversation also included racial slurs and other derogatory remarks.


Poor Hanukkah. Once again it is being maligned, this time by American corporate leaders. Lots of swings have been taken at this venerable holiday, which Jews have observed for nearly 2,100 years. Even the ancient rabbis had cause to criticize Hanukkah, but for far different reasons that those expressed by the Texaco officials.

Though Hanukkah memorializes a great Jewish military victory in the land of Israel against a powerful Greco-Syrian empire, the rabbis unsuccessfully sought to downplay the warlike dimensions of the story. Strike one on Hanukkah.

And in their continuing antipathy to Hanukkah, rabbis down through history have stressed that the holiday is a post-Biblical event, one not mentioned in sacred Scripture. Strike two.

For many years in this country, Hanukkah was often thrown into direct competition with Christmas because the two holidays come at the same time of the year. Although Hanukkah and Christmas are quite distinctive in their messages of faith, insecure Jewish parents frequently made their wildly overdone Hanukkah holiday celebrations into a kind of consolation prize for their children who were incorrectly perceived as somehow being deprived because they did not celebrate Christmas. This parental excess, in the minds of many, could well have been strike three and out for the possibility of any authentic Hanukkah celebrations.

But in the last decade or so, many Jews have finally grasped the true meaning of Hanukkah and its always-relevant message of religious freedom. They correctly sense that holidays of all traditions possess their own integrity and power to touch people’s minds and hearts. Holidays should never be made into rivals. How foolish and mindless it is for religious communities to engage in one-on-one holiday contests with each other.

We need to keep this lesson in mind as the United States becomes increasingly multi-religious, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic. By expressing apparent contempt for people who believe or behave differently than they do, Texaco executives were perhaps incapable of grasping this central reality of religious and racial life in America.

But perhaps the Texaco officials understood the true meaning of Hanukkah far better than they ever imagined. For what is the holiday’s central and compelling message? It represents one of the first attempts in history of a people to maintain their distinctive identity in the face of a powerful monarch and his army. King Antiochus used military force to impose a cultural and religious uniformity upon his subjects, especially upon the Jews of his empire.

While the Texaco executives clearly lack the coercive power of Antiochus, they are soul mates of that ancient tyrant. Perhaps what these hostile executives really desire is a world that looks, acts, sounds, and believes just as they do. Blacks and Jews represent a direct challenge to their continued domination of the contemporary business culture, and one way to respond is with hatred.


While Antiochus wanted to destroy Jewish religious freedom and identity, it seems to me the Texaco executives had a different goal. They knew that the men and women who celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanza are not going to disappear from Texaco, but they could, at the least, block minority professional advancement within the company.

Is it far fetched for me to liken the Texaco execs with the villainous King Antiochus? I don’t think so. In my mind both vainly attempted to impose their narrow view of reality upon others. Antiochus wanted the elimination of Jewish religious practices, including the teaching of the Bible. The Texaco executives, angered by the changes going on within their corporate culture, expressed scorn for racial and religious minorities and sought to discriminate against them.

But Antiochus was thwarted in his sinister plans. And fortunately, because of the incriminating tapes, Texaco and the rest of American companies have been put on notice that religious and racial bigotry are unacceptable in the corridors of corporate power.

MJP END RUDIN

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