This is inspired by something Jen wrote about celebrating chanukkah (the post itself is friendslocked, but she’s worth reading in general cause she’s made of awesome).

It’s wonderful being in Israel during Chanukkah and seeing the chanukkiot in the windows and outside the doors here. It’s wonderful to see people lighting big chanukkiot with oil (instead of candles) which doesn’t go out after only half an hour. It’s wonderful to come to shul in the morning and to sing hallel, and on Sunday morning to see the shul’s chanukkiah (which uses big candles) still burning from before havdalah the night before. And it’s wonderful that there’s no gaudy Christmas stuff to compete, so the holiday is its own thing. No one gives presents here. Chanukkah gets to be precisely what it is, a festival of lights, a festival of the Jewish people, something that belongs to us, that we had first, that doesn’t look like a cheap knockoff of the other guy’s birthday party.

The following are things that have occurred to me in the past couple of years:

Sukkah decorating should be for us what Christmas tree decorating is for them. We’ve got that activity in our tradition… and our “Christmas tree” thing is cooler than a Christmas tree because not only is it lovely and fragrant (depending on what you use for schach) but you get to frikkin LIVE in it! Do they get to live in their Christmas tree? I think not! And no, I’m not saying that we should copy the Christians with decorating the sukkah like how they decorate Christmas trees… dwelling in a sukkah is a mitzvah, a commandment. Decorating the sukkah is hiddur mitzvah, beautifying the mitzvah. This is BUILT IN to OUR religion. I’m saying we should OWN it, and realize how much we are NOT lacking.

For Chanukkah, here is no reason we shouldn’t have lights. It’s a festival of lights. Banu Choshech LeGaresh for Pete’s sake! There’s nothing about having lights that is inherently Christmas, and if anyone asks, well, we had the frikkin idea first, ya know? Well, not first, but at least before THEY did. Not that it’s a competition… as Jen put it, it’s “about the primal winter scream (help, where is the sun going?! we are hungry! come back, sun!! argh!!!)” and almost every culture has that. See, we’ve always known about Seasonal Affective Disorder. We banish the darkness with little oil lights or candles, because it fits with the story, and because that’s what used to be available for making light. A chanukkiah used to be a significant increase in how much light there was in the house. I see no reason why, in this day and age, we shouldn’t also have twinkly lights to ward off the SAD, without losing our “Jewish Cred” as Jen puts it.

As for the Maccabee cultural isolationism thingy… I’m genuinely torn about that one. This is a holiday of mixed messages and multiple lessons. (The short version: under Greco-Syrian Hellenistic rule, the Israelites began to assimilate, sometimes by force, sometimes under cultural pressure, sometimes by choice. The Maccabees/Chashmonaim [Hasmoneans] who were descended from priestly line fought a war against the Greco-Syrians AND the assimilationist Israelites, regained national sovereignty, kicked out the pagans, and cleansed and rededicated the Temple so that our religious worship could resume.) On the one hand, what did the Chashmonaim do as soon as they won their war against Hellenism and assimilation? They did the most Greek thing they could do and declared a holiday! That’s not something Jews did… we observed the festivals assigned us by God. Greeks declared holidays for military victories. And the Rabbis were extremely disturbed by this so they came up with the oil story. Which brings it into the primal scream realm very nicely and all works out well in the end. But more to the point, we would a) not be here, and b) not be celebrating this holiday or c) doing a lot of the stuff that we do as Jews (including Talmud) were is not for Hellenistic influence.

On the other hand, nor would we be here if we allowed the assimilationist tendency to overrun us, if we allowed ourselves to stop circumcising and gave in to the pressure to worship other gods/adopt other religious practices, even just for show. Which brings us to the Christmas tree/Chanukkah bush thing. The tree may not be so Christian, but neither is it Jewish. It is true that over the course of our history we have assimilated many pagan elements into our religion as have the Christians, but the tree is not one of them. I understand having positive cultural associations with the tree that one might feel like they want to bring into their celebration of Chanukkah… I have those associations too, from Christmas at my Catholic grandparents’ home… but it was always clear to us as children that, while the tree is lovely, it is not ours. I think that it is important to make that distinction. I think that it’s good to consider what will bring us closer to the holistic spirit of what we are celebrating at Chanukkah (I see it as primordial scream, with a healthy dose of maintaining and celebrating our other-ness) which means not shying away from neutral light-bearing sort of stuff, but davka NOT adopting the stuff that has nothing to do with us, that is just jealously copying the neighbors.

Sura Choshech Halah Shchor. Sura Mipnei HaOr.