A seasonal photo essay for a season of great flux.
Along with Jewish schoolchildren everywhere, I love it when the lunar-based Jewish calendar and the Gregorian calendar (the internationally accepted civil calendar used in Western Christendom) sync up. The world feels singularly aligned when Hannukah and Christmas overlap.
I love the beauty of Christmas, resplendent and cozy all at once. I love the music. I’ve been playing Christmas jazz standards in the car for weeks.
I was primed to love Christmas, growing up Jewish in a town where there weren’t many Jews. During my formative years, my family spent Christmas Eve at a friend’s house. Each year, they’d give me a stocking filled with trinkets. We’d spread warm artichoke dip on crackers and exchange gifts. To this day, I have tree envy.
Image note: One of the daughters in that family is now married to a Jewish woman. They mingle their traditions beautifully, as pictured in the photo she sent me last night.
Yet Hannukah—a minor observance in the scheme of Jewish practice made major by virtue of assimilation—is the holiday of my heart and most often it comes during a busy work and school week and we simply push things aside to celebrate.
This year, we don’t have to.
My 15-year-old twins have already relaxed into their first week of winter break. My husband and I have cleared our schedules for the next few days.
The first night of Hannukah begins on Christmas at dusk. And when that sun goes down tomorrow, we’ll be socked away in front of a great fire at a magical place in the woods, a place where we can look up and see stars.
Still, my soul seems to have followed a calendar all its own this year. I’m not the only one. Many of my Hannukah-celebrating friends started celebrating early, too.
One friend hosted my 15-year old daughter and her friends for chicken soup, latkes, candles, and cookie making—a full week ahead.
Another invited all the families who had come together earlier in the month at the synagogue’s retreat to a BYOM (“Bring Your Own Menorah”) latke fest this past Sunday.
For many of us Hannukah celebrators, the need to gather with our people is palpable. It’s been a dark year and change, in so many different ways.
I find myself needing Hannukah’s lights this season with the kind of yearning that many Jews of my generation have never known. I’m having a difficult time writing about it, as you can see from the way I wrote “Hannukah celebrators” a few lines back instead of “Jews.”
It’s not exactly fashionable to come out as Jewish in literary circles right now.
And yet, here I am: Jewish. Literary. Heartbroken by both national and world events. Yearning for Hannukah like never before.
Illusion Shattered
Though raised to the refrain of “never again,” Jews my generation and younger have been graced by a kind of historic privilege that lulled us into believing that Jews in America were safe.
We’ve had the luxury of make believe.
We now know what our grandparents and great-grandparents knew in their kishkes. Safety is an illusion, antisemitism a foregone conclusion. Feeling safe is the exception, not the norm.
This is not new news for many; it is only news for some. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side came to the United States in 1906. The period between 1903 and 1906 was known in Russian history as one of the bloodiest waves of pogroms. My great-grandparents on my father’s side escaped pogroms as well.
But this is not a post about historic or ancestral trauma. This is a riff on the light. And so, let’s talk about the oil.
About the Oil
The oil story at the heart of Hannukah is not included in the Jewish Bible but rather comes from the Talmud, from which our legends spring. When Antiochus IV, King of Syria, desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem by erecting a statue of Zeus and sacrificing a pig on the altar of incense, the Maccabean revolt ensued. The Jews were few, the enemy were many, and yet the Jews prevailed.
Upon reclaiming and rededicating the Second Temple, among the wreckage the Jews found a one-day supply of oil, light’s fuel. The oil miraculously lasted for eight days. According to a different version, the eight candles represent the torches which replaced the stolen menorah.
Whatever the story, Jews took on this custom of lighting candles for eight nights at dusk during the darkest time of year. The candles came to represent the light of freedom and the right of every people to preserve their tradition and way of life.
Every people.
But this is not a post about the current war. This is—or at least, this is trying hard to be—a riff on the light.
What Sages Say
Our sages have much to say to us all at this unsettlingly dark yet sadly congruous moment in history:
“A little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness.” said Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi.
“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness,” wrote Anne Frank.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” said Leonard Cohen.
I’ve been lighting candles for weeks. I added candles to the little altar in my office. I strung up fairy lights.
And yes, that’s a Buddha on my shelf. I draw inspiration wherever I find it.
This season, I’m inspired by our impulse to call in the light, as early and often as we can.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg taught, “The proper response, as Hanukkah teaches, is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle.”
I love the candles, but I’ll end with the cookies. I mean, just look at these cookies! I’ve never seen Hannukah cookies as beautifully decorated as these:
At last week’s party hosted by my friend, I marveled as the girls passed bags of frosting in all shades of blue back and forth and learned the fine art of piping.
The friends who weren’t Jewish took turns lighting the eight candles. The Jewish girls led them all in a game of dreidl.
This, to me, is Hannukah.
Whatever holiday you may be celebrating this week, may the light find you.
May you find the light.
No matter how dark it may get, may we shine on.