I'm not sure why but the candle flames are creating a bit of a lens flare in the photo tonight. A six pointed asterisk of a star. It brought back a particular memory. Most Jews won't tell you that Chanukah is their favorite holiday. It feels very glib and tacky to say that. Most people will say Pesach or Rosh HaShanah is their favorite, or maybe Sukkot if they're trying to be extra Jewish about it. I used to say Yom Kippur was my favorite which was kinda edgelord of me. But I think Chanukah might be my favorite. It's not as exciting as any of the other holidays but I think that's why I like it. It's very relaxing, cozy, and low pressure.
My family didn't celebrate Chanukah growing up, but I did celebrate Chanukah. It was sort of an open secret in our community that my family had some problems. Nobody could exactly agree on how to diagnose the issue, but something was clearly wrong with us. I'll spare you the details, but it's enough to say that it was very chaotic and there was a lot of fighting pretty much every day. I got a lot of comments from people who had been by my house to buy drugs recently about how weird my parents were, or how weird this or that thing in the house was. Friends who came over would tell me my parents made them uncomfortable with some comment of theirs and would suggest we only hang out at their house from now on, even when my house had the more convenient location for everyone to get to. "I'll pick you up" they'd say. "I'll give you a ride so you can come to my place. Do you want to stay the night?"
As I've written about before, my family had joined a cult when I was 6 that was oriented around some strange ideas about how to raise children. All of my friends, and most of my biological brother's customers, were also in this cult. Even within that cult, my household was a bit infamous. The matriarch of the cult, an elderly Israeli woman who supposedly had familial ties to the Haganah, apparently hated my mother. I only learned this as an adult, but I guess she would talk to the other inner circle adults about how annoying my mom was and how she felt bad for me. She was only ever kind and compassionate to me, but in a bit of a manipulative way. She would say she was grateful that the cult provided me a safe sanctuary to get away from my household, and used that to foster greater loyalty to the cult and its ideologies.
Still, she was regarded as a kind, wise, and gentle-mannered woman by everyone outside of that inner circle. She took pity on me, and so that influenced others to do the same. She encouraged people my age to see me as someone in need of social rehabilitation, not just an annoying kid with no social skills. Calling CPS would bring government attention to the cult, so that obviously was not the solution. The best thing to do would just be to create opportunities to get me out of the house and away from my parents. Whether she had actively spread this impression, or if people came to this conclusion on their own, it seemed to become the consensus among the community by the time I was 11 or 12 years old.
One of the ways people got me out of the house was that my friends would have me over for Chanukah. Pretty frequently, families of my friends would invite me over to stay a night, and oh, well, it just so happens to be Chanukah. What a coincidence. Some of the more conservative or Orthodox families probably saw it as a mitzvah to help a secularized Jewish child experience Chanukah. I was being deprived of Chanukah by my parents, and this needed to be rectified. I must be fed latkes.
Usually they'd even have a present for me, something small like Mad Libs or a pencil. For a night, I'd get to be a part of a relatively normal family with far more normal parents. We'd eat latkes, we'd light the candles, we'd sing Ma'oz Tzur. One of my friends had these like, cardboard glasses at his house similar to those 3D glasses, but something about the film on them made it so when you looked at the menorah through them, the flames would appear to create six pointed stars. Magen Dovid glasses. I'm not sure how they worked but as a child they were pretty cool. That's what this photo reminded me of. As I got older, the parents would be less involved, and I'd just get to spend the holiday with friends. It was nice getting to enjoy a holiday.
I really liked Chanukah even before I reconnected with the religious aspects of Judaism. It was cozy. It was relaxing. It was low-pressure. It felt safe. I remember asking my mom if we could celebrate Chanukah and, of course, the answer was a strong rejection of the idea. She said it was a boring holiday and that I clearly just wanted more presents. Telling her that presents didn't seem important for Chanukah since we already had Christmas just got me accused of lying.
As a younger child, I did like Christmas. I liked presents, obviously, but I also liked cinnamon rolls, making a gingerbread house, and decorating the tree. The Big Irish Family Gathering for Christmas Eve was more structured with various activities and it felt easier to engage with, and people seemed happy. I enjoyed the Yankee Swap in particular. But Christmas Day just had so much Pressure. It was a very high pressure holiday and I didn't understand what it was about. Chanukah, to my understanding back then, was a bit like Independence Day. Why we were celebrating Independence Day for a dead country was less clear, but it had intuitive sense. They tried to oppress us, we survived, let's eat. Nothing religious about it. But why did my family celebrate Christmas? We didn't believe in Jesus. My dad grew up with it but what mattered to him was just the gathering with his siblings and parents. But what about the rest of us? Why was this holiday so stressful in a way Chanukah wasn't?
As I got older, I came to realize that Christmas was about my mother's insecurities. I would often find her sitting quietly, in the dark, looking at the Christmas tree alone. If I approached her she would say something like "It is pretty, right?" There was a melancholic bitter sweetness to it. She seemed to always feel like she didn't know how to celebrate Christmas and that she was somehow doing it wrong. With every present was a high pressure to express sufficient gratitude and validate that she got the correct present. For some reason, it came to be my responsibility to find a movie for the family to go see, and I had to find a movie that everyone would sufficiently enjoy equally to avoid causing a fight afterwards. Everyone needed to spend a sufficient amount of family time together all in this one day for as much of the day as possible and we needed to be a sufficiently happy family in order to validate that she was a sufficiently good mother who did a good Christmas sufficiently. If we wanted to have any alone time, it meant she had failed, and it would result in a fight. If the vibes were ever low energy or calm, then we were failing to have fun, failing at being a family, failing at enjoying Christmas. It all had to happen on this one day. I know you just got given a new video game but you cannot play it today because we have to perform being a happy family to this empty Chinese restaurant.
Eventually, everyone gave up on Christmas. Too stressful. Too much work. Too expensive. We stopped getting a tree, stopped doing presents, and just started getting Chinese Food and going to see a movie. When I proposed Chanukah again, it was shot down again. This version of Christmas was easier. We only had to have one fight over dinner and one fight after the movie and then it would be over. Eventually, one year, after I had put in all my effort to pick out the correct movie everyone would enjoy, I woke up to an empty house, a $20 bill, and a note telling me to get myself some Chinese takeout, and the Netflix password in case I had forgotten it. Apparently, I was the only person who actually wanted to spend time with the family on Christmas, and my parents didn't even believe I was being genuine about it. Nobody enjoyed Christmas. It's just a holiday where you fight and feel guilty. Christmas was a sad, lonely holiday. With so much pressure in the air to be cheery.
But that year, even though I just kinda cried and ate chicken teriyaki sticks over Netflix by myself, I took comfort in remembering Chanukah. I had gotten to make latkes and sufagniyot with my friends. I got to have another winter holiday, where I spent time with people who actually wanted to spend time with me, and weren't just doing it out of obligation. Christmas told me I was alone and nobody loved me, Chanukah told me that wasn't true. I didn't need to perform being sufficiently grateful for Chanukah. I didn't need to spend Chanukah with specific people on a single specific day. People invited me to spend Chanukah with them. So my biological family didn't love me, that didn't mean nobody else did. That was the last winter that I visited my parents for Christmas. That was my last Christmas. I decided I was going to get my own stable housing, stay there through the winter, and I would host a Chanukah party. I would focus on the people who actually cared about me and I would have them over for Chanukah, whether they were Jewish or not, and we would make latkes, and we would listen to klezmer, and sing Ma'oz Tzur, and celebrate the holiday that I actually had happy memories of.
And so I did. My annual Chanukah parties before 2020 were beloved, warm, joyful, cozy, and fun. People would ask me in advance when it was going to be that year, anticipating it, so they could make sure they could come. Yes, there were people who didn't just pity me, but actively wanted to spend the holiday with me, and wanted to make sure it could happen. And I think one of my favorite parts of Chanukah is that, if they couldn't make it that night, that was okay! There were 7 other nights where we could do something smaller together, or see each other at someone else's Chanukah party. And if I was alone most nights of Chanukah, that was okay too. That was just this night. There would be other nights to see friends. Other nights to eat latkes. It's a low pressure holiday.
I also just love giving presents. I don't really like receiving presents that much, because of that precedent of feeling a lot of pressure to be sufficiently grateful, but I really enjoy giving the presents. I like thinking about what someone might like and giving it to them. If I can't think of anything to get someone, I just don't. Presents are an optional part of Chanukah and that makes it even more low pressure. It's a chill, low pressure, cozy holiday, where you only have to do the things that you want to do and will enjoy. You only have to see people who you want to see and will enjoy spending time with.
Lately, I've been seeing more and more photos of Palestine, where the Magen Dovid has been spray painted on the house of a Palestinian as a sort of threat. More and more, that six pointed star seems to be associated not abstractly with Judaism but more specifically with Israeli Jingoism. It's painful to see a symbol I once associated with warm safe chanukah candles now being turned into a sort of hate symbol. Nothing is sacred to Israeli Settlers apparently. To every religion, there are two sides. When that religion is the religion of the oppressed, and when that religion is the religion of the oppressor. There is the Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr and the Christianity of Candace Owens. There is the Islam of Palestinians fighting for liberation and the Islam of the Saudi Arabian government. There is the Buddhism of Tibetans and there is the Buddhism of Myanmar fascism. There is the Hinduism under British colonialism and there is the Hinduism of Modi. What we see now is that Judaism is far from immune. There is the Judaism of diasporic queer Jews huddled together for warmth. There is the Judaism of Yiddishist socialist labor organizers. But there is also the Judaism of Kahan, Likud, and Shash. There is Religious Zionism. There is the Judaism that becomes a worship of the Nation-State. It is painful to see that we were never immune to this.
I won't let Kahan and Shash poison Judaism for me. This is my religion and my heritage too and it does not mean what they have claimed it to mean. The Israeli Orthodox Rabbinate does not decide what is Jewish or who is Jewish or what it means to be Jewish. They do not get to decide that the Magen Dovid is to be a symbol of hate, jingoism, and fascism. The Judaism that took me in is not the same Judaism that keeps others out. The Judaism that gave me a chosen family is not the Judaism that creates orphans by fire. I won't let them claim the right to our religion and our religious symbols. I won't let Yisra'el mean Israel. I won't let the Magen Dovid be just the ugly Israeli flag.
Anyway, that is what I am thinking about tonight. A bit longer and darker than previous nights. But it's what has been on my mind today. Chanukah means a lot to me.
