Everyone is entitled to a pet-peeve. I would like to share with you one of mine: Car commercials!

Car commercials have got to be one of the most falsified ad schemes on planet earth. Picture this: You are watching TV, and a flashy car commercial comes on. The car is zooming down a winding road, taking sharp turns with tremendous fluidity and ease, and looking like it is having the time of its life. Why is it that most car commercials depict a car sidewinding around a deserted mountain, driving through a muddy river, or gliding through a snowstorm?

When it comes to car commercials, there is virtually (yes pun intended) no reality and truth to what is being depicted. This is because car manufacturers use CGI – computer-generated imagery – technology when showcasing their vehicles on commercials. The usage of CGI allows the car to be featured in ways that traditional filming techniques cannot match. Advertisers can use CGI to create dynamic, visually stunning shots that would literally be impossible to achieve with a real car. The lighting, camera angles, and other virtual embellishments, helps create a scene of a car that appeals to the consumers’ desires for speed, luxury, and style.

But guess what? It is not real. It is completely fake. As soon as the consumer goes ahead and purchases the car and drives it off the lot, the chances of driving through a futuristic city-scape that does not exist or on top of Mt. Everest (which is impossible) is below zero.

I hereby declare that car manufacturers and advertisers should change their approach, and instead of using CGI and showcasing a fake reality, they should showcase their car in an every-day, practical, and normal fashion.

My friends, from an ideological perspective, the exile of Yavan, represented by חושך (darkness), continues to permeate the world with falsehood and fiction. Society constantly throws at us CGI-type of falsified images for what a person should look like and how a person should behave.

But we must not fall for these tricks and schemes of the Car Commercial Generation.

In Parshas Vayeshev (39:7), the wife of Potiphar reaches out to Yosef and says “lie with me!” This is the same calling of society today, constantly reaching out to us and beaconing us to connect with its impurity and falsehood.

But a Jew has the power to not give in. A Jew has the power to rise above nature. A Jew has the DNA of Yosef Hatzaddik, who, in passuk 8 – a number that represents above nature – refused and said no to the wife of Potiphar. A Jew has the power to be holy and great because he is holy and great.

The candles that we light each of the 8 nights of Chanukah remind us of this truth: We are holy. We are great.

Have a holy Shabbos and a wonderful Chanukah!