Friday, December 04, 2009

Santa Coke

It seems that Coke bottles in the US have a picture of Santa on them (see below).



Matzav.com is all worked up about this:

...Did you also know that the affect of this tumah will cause you and your prodigy to learn Torah improperly and could, G-d forbid, influence your offspring to go off the derech!?

How do I know this to be true?

Anything that takes you close to Hashem is emes while anything that takes you away is sheker! There is nothing in the world but emes and sheker. There’s no neutral zone! Does that make sense to you?

Please ask that your yeshiva not distribute this drink to your kinderlach. Please also ask the frum stores not to sell this stumbling block. Consider that when a non-Jew sees this product in your shopping cart, they see this, even in a minutia way, as your participation in their holiday and this causes a chillul Hashem.


Do you think that this is an issue? Or do you think this is another overreaction to something harmless?

4 comments:

mother in israel said...

Like drinking Coke really improves your learning. The rabbanim should assur it to save money for buying apartments.

talmudita said...

I think they mean "progeny," not prodigy. :-)

SpaceFalcon2001 said...

Considering that I often see Xmas decorations use in Israel for things like sukkot (oh yeah those are just "generic" red and green lights)...

Aside from that, it isn't even something that is even shituf with avodah zarah like the rest of xmas. It's a picture of a guy wearing a red suit who historically gave presents to random people, that's it, and you're not making any use of it by buying coke (It speaks volumes that this guy is afraid to buy diet coke which has SNOW on it)

Maybe you can say chukas goyim, but that's a weak argument. It's really just a (relatively secular except by association) character on a product (much of the modern "Santa Claus" does have origins in early American marketing, although he wasn't "invented" by coke), it isn't any different than the kebler elves (which I'm sure this same person has plenty of in their house).

Maybe they should just buy exclusively Dr. Brown's Cel-ray and give yeshiva kids that?

pc said...

the issue is that Matzav think that coke is a davar shebikedusha

A friend of mine bought a singing chassid in meah shearim, funny thing was that the song they sang was jingle bells

pc :-)