If you light your candles Hillel style like I do, then eighth night is the brightest night of Chanukah with the most fire. We made it! The box of shitty manischewitz candles lasted us eight days! A great miracle happened here. But by the final night usually everyone is kinda done with Chanukah so besides getting to take your picture of all eight candles lit it’s pretty uneventful.
Chanukah has all this symbolism around keeping the flame lit. Passing down the flame. Perseverance. The fire never dying. Not running out. But then after it’s over you just stop lighting candles. It always feels weird to me like I made a big deal about keeping the fire going and then I just let it die.
In the story, the fire doesn’t die. They get more oil on the eighth night so they can keep it lit. They’re just not using the same oil anymore. So I guess I would wanna get another box of candles?
Though the Chanukiah in my apartment is not the menorah in the temple. It’s not supposed to be lit all the time. That menorah was stolen and is being held at the Vatican somewhere secretly
Some things are supposed to end. Some things cycle. Life has many seasons. Lately I've been thinking about life as being about accumulating experiences. It is okay for a good thing to end, because you still got to experience it, and that memory has been added to your collection. You got to do that thing. I've been thinking about this a lot because there are many things from my life before the pandemic that I miss and which it seems increasingly unlikely I'll be doing again in the foreseeable future. I don't need to terribly miss eating in restaurants, it's an experience I accumulated many copies of. Other experiences are more unique, but I still got to have them. It's better to focus my attention on experiences I want to have and haven't yet had the chance. How can I go through those experiences? Can I adjust them to be possible in the times we live in?
Life has many seasons, and many cycles. Chanukah, these days, is becoming 8 days where I get the chance to see each local friend in a small setting one last time before we hunker down for the annual holiday COVID spike. We enter a season of personal wintering. The cold, the low energy, the cozy, the dark, the quiet solitude. At the beginning of the pandemic, these moments were my greatest fear. The isolation of being an Essential Worker pre-vaccine had me so terrified and touch-starved and lonely that I was willing to consider uprooting my life just to make sure that I'd never be isolated like that again. Just to make sure that, if there was another emergency, I'd be going through it with someone I could ask for a hug. During the annual holiday COVID spike, I would obsess over the numbers daily. When would they fall low enough that I could be touched again. When would the isolation end. I couldn't trust that it would just happen. I needed to observe it, to collapse the quantum waveform and ensure that the number fell. Every day I feared it would go up before it went down. I fought the solitude, and the season, and the cold.
Now I live alone, so while my risk vectors are simplified, I'm more isolated than ever if the spike gets so extreme that it's unsafe to see others for a while. But I'm used to the season. After Chanukah, we all retreat to our warm little dens and bunker down through the storm. It is a time for reading, for quiet, for having an edible and listening to music alone. It is a time to indulge in things that only I enjoy. It is a time to put in less effort and be a little depressed but to not struggle against it all. A season that, by now, I know will end some time in late January or February, and so I can be content with only coworkers to talk to for a little while.
The next observance on the Hebrew calendar will be Asarah B'Tevet, which is the day which I tend to treat as my own personal TDOR to commemorate those who have been lost but their yahrzeits are not known. I mourn friends who passed due to mental illness or transphobia without leaving an exact day for when they crossed that threshold. I mourn those who went missing in wars, disasters, catastrophes, where we only know days later that they passed, or must assume it after months. It is a season for somber respect for the dead.
After that, in the cycle, is tu b'shvat. The birthday and new year for trees. I don't know how to observe it, but it tends to fall around when the post-holiday solitude begins to thaw and the numbers begin to decline again. The trees are mostly still slumbering for the winter, but it is a time to pay respects to the quiet nature. When I lived in New England, it was a time to march out into the deep forest, all sound muffled in the snow, and listen to the still quiet and the crisp cold air and simply exist on the planet on its own.
Then the isolation thaws. I see my friends and loved ones again. The world begins to warm. By Purim, the frost is melting, and things are joyous again. Energy surges back. It becomes a time of excitement, and aspirations. Every Purim, now, too, is a new year for the plague. Another year of this world that I managed to survive. We didn't die. Let's eat.
Yes, someday, there will be warmth, and excitement, and heat. But now it is time to let the candles burn out. To let there be a season of darkness. To let there be solstice. A time of blankets and slowness. It is good for things to end, sometimes, as the seasons continue to churn. There are more seasons than the four seasons of the weather, but they are seasons none the less.
Chag Sameach. Enjoy this last day of Chanukah. Eat something fried. I'll be over here snoozing.
