Friday Night Millennium Fever

Jewish World Review Feb. 4, 1998 / 18 Shevat, 5759

Friday Night Millennium Fever

By Jordan Max

IT'S ONLY FEBRUARY, but already it seems the entire continent has been gripped by Millennium Fever.

So, I decided to put my two cents in, in the faint hope of putting some perspective on this whole mishegas (nuttiness). As I figure, by December most people will be too crazed to pay attention to other seemingly mundane matters, like real news or its opposite, this column.

Now, fear about the approaching Millennium is anything but new. Aside from the guy on the street corner whose signboard proclaims that the world will end tomorrow, most people really don't believe the world will end in the year 2000 CE. Of course, there are a few people who claim to back this up through biblical calculations (let's call them End of the World Types, or EWTs for short).

Funny, do you notice how EWTs never quite get around to telling you exactly how this End is supposed to come about? For that, you have to buy the fourteen-part book subscription.

But before I totally dismiss the possibility of the world ending, it's hard to argue with certain recent events leading to something, even if you're not a Lubavitcher. For instance, I saw a recent news piece from Israel on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz actually making its kitchen strictly kosher. To ardent secularists, this happening is about as likely as Gehennom (hell) freezing over.

Speaking of freezing, up here in the Great White North, we have been blessed for two years in a row with very impressive January winter storms. In 1998, the famous Ice Storm knocked out electrical power in some areas for weeks on end. People discovered that just about everything runs on electricity or computer systems powered by, you guessed it, electricity. And so, the story goes, people had to actually learn to live without. This lesson has not gone unnoticed; in fact it seems to have brought out the raw survivalist in some people. The possibility of electrical or computer failure on the stroke of midnight 1999 in the depths of a Canadian winter has these people in a tizzy, stockpiling food and supplies, buying generators, hiding cash under the mattress, building underground bunkers, and learning obscure card games to pass the time.

Now, there's a famous Talmudic passage that G-d provides the cure before He sends the affliction. First of all, as many have noted, if the world would only convert to the Jewish Year 5760, then the computer chachams (geniuses) will have another forty years to come up with a solution.

Secondly, history has prepared the Jewish people all too well for survivalism. We're usually quite level-headed, non-Sky-is-Falling types, at least when it's not Erev Yom Tov ("Passover is coming, Passover is coming" I can hear the anxious housewife's cry). Despite the absence of pogroms and sudden eviction, we can still experience a taste of survivalism. If you don't believe me, watch the supermarket shopping hoarding for Kosher for Passover foods, which are available in the grocery stores only while supplies last. Then again, the mad rush for challahs at the bakery on Rosh Hashanah eve can be equally nerve-wracking. I still have the bruised ribs to show for it.

Thirdly, we have merited as a people to be blessed with the simple solution to the Y2K bug, when airplanes won't fly and gas stations won't pump. In case you haven't looked that far ahead in your calendar, December 31 1999 just so happens to fall out on a Friday night. Did Hillel the Elder have this in mind when he set down the Jewish calendar about 2,100 years ago?

On Shabbat, January 1, 2000, if we're where we're supposed to be, namely, in shul, (synagogue) there's no problem with flying, driving, etc., as long as the shul has light, heat, a backup generator, and if we're lucky, cholent stew for a thousand. Just in case, I think I'll be stocking up the freezer with challahs. No wait, the freezer runs on electricity. Oh well, there's always matzah.

But, if the world really does end on December 31, 1999, where will I get my challahs for the next Shabbat?