2005-12-26 - 8:47 p.m.
Nya and I exchanged presents the morning of the 25th. I felt cheap that I�d only gotten her a DVD of �The Office� holiday special (she said she wanted it some time ago), because she got me something I�ve long wanted: a mint-condition first edition of Jane Jacobs� The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I can�t explain how much that means to me. Maybe I�ll try in a later post.
We went to a Chanukah (or Hanukkah; no one�s ever bothered to settle on a definitive English spelling) festival at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. There were so many small children at it, running around and screaming and proving that little Jewish kids can be just as annoying as little Gentile kids. They had a table of snacks: juice boxes and �bagels�. I was incredibly disappointed to find that a freakin� center of Judaic culture only offered the dreaded anti-bagel � the bread ring.
Bagels are so much more than just dough baked in a circle with a hole in the center. Maybe this is a New York thing, but texture is essential here. A true bagel needs to have a resistant crust on the outside and be the right degree of chewy on the inside. Bagels are one of Jewish culture�s few contributions to cuisine. Unsurprisingly, flanken (boiled beef from the cheapest cut) and derma or kishka (intestines stuffed with chicken fat) never took off. I know this is the Midwest, but come on.
There was a somewhat befuddling performance by Yuri Lane, the human beatbox, that made me think it was the early 1980s. He asked if anyone knew what a human beatbox was. I was thinking that this may have been a legitimate question to a white audience in the early days of hip-hop, but if you don�t know what a human beatbox is by now, you�ve probably been living in a cave for the last few decades.
Of course, this was a show geared towards children, so maybe they might not be expected to know. But they certainly dug the music, judging from the number of little audience members shaking their bodies and bopping their heads. It was excruciatingly cute. This was probably another reason I felt like it had become the early �80s again. That�s when I was a little kid myself, doing Jewish kiddie things like going to a Chanukah festival. (Also, Nya pointed out that most of the adult attendees� clothes seemed to have been styled in the early �80s�)
Before we left, I bought a really nice menorah. It�s made of several different metal pieces and can be laid out in a circle. I�ve always preferred circular menorahs to the traditional linear ones. I think the shape speaks more to the core idea of Chanukah (increase the light). I also like that it�s not designed in that tacky torn-metal-and-lucite-60s-modern, third-degree-knockoff-of-Wassily-Kandinsky style that so much Judaica uses for some reason.
Then we set off for a traditional Jewish Christmas of Chinese food and a movie. We saw �The Producers� (Uma Thurman appears to be at least a foot taller than both Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick) at a theater downtown. When we were in high school, Nya sang a parody song of �Springtime for Hitler� about unrequited crushes that she and another girl had on boys who liked someone else: �Springtime for Kendra and Sheigh ------ee, winter for Nya and Kate / We think that they�re ugly personally, but Robbie and Nick think they�re great��
Then we went to the upscale China Grill in the Hard Rock Hotel for their prix-fixe Christmas menu. Nya decided she could take a break from vegetarianism for the holidays and got the rack of lamb entr�e, which was quite tasty. The place is also home of the �saketini�, a cocktail made with sake. I�m not normally a fan of calling non-gin-and-vermouth drinks by a name riffing on �martini� just because they�re served in a martini glass, but these were surprisingly good (if expensive).
Later that night, we lit the first candle on the menorah. It kind of made my apartment feel like a home. We talked about religion while the candles burned down. Nya was partly raised as an American Buddhist. Buddhism is a non-hierarchical practice with no central authority, incorporating as widely disparate sects as Christianity. The American variants tend to be a mish-mash of a wide variety of regional traditions, but her faith follows largely Mahayana principles.
She told me the story of how Siddhartha Gautama found enlightenment and became the Buddha. Maybe you already know this, but I hadn�t heard it before. He was born a prince and prophesied to become a great king or a great spiritualist. Wanting to keep his future on the great king side, Siddhartha�s father raised him shielded from knowing anything not beautiful that might raise spiritual thoughts about what greater forces could allow a world with inequity in it. But one day while his father was away, Siddhartha snuck outside the guarded royal city he lived in. He found a leper outside and could not understand how such suffering was possible.
To gain comprehension, he embarked on years of asceticism. (Many Buddhist monks seek to follow a similar path, not as a practice of self-denial as with Christian monks, but in the hope of rising above the desires which are the root of suffering.) After finding asceticism unenlightening, he sat under a tree and meditated for a long time. Eventually (and no, despite my assertion, this wasn�t prompted by an apple falling on his head � that was Newton), he understood It All, in a way that we can all aspire to reach. I guess I�m certainly trying myself, for one.
I talked a bit about the meaning of Chanukah. Not the damn commemoration of the unsatisfying �miracle� that the small amount of oil in the Jerusalem temple rededicated after a takeover by the oppressive Seleucid regime of Syria lasted eight days instead of the expected one. This is the �meaning� repeated ad nauseum to those little kids at Spertus or to me as a little kid. If you find this a spiritually satisfying holiday, the reconsecration by the independence-fighter Maccabees of a temple that stopped being central to the religion millennia ago, victory over an oppressive regime that�s long gone, I can�t really help you.
Chanukah does have a message for us today, but I doubt you�ll learn it in a Hebrew school or cultural center aimed towards children. Is it any wonder so many become disenchanted with the faith after being indoctrinated in a childish version of spirituality? Staying true to your faith is vital to any time, though I�ve never seen any parallel drawn between the persecuting Seleucids and later regimes (of course I�m no history expert, so maybe after oppression in the second century BC, nothing bad ever happened to the Jews again�).
And it�s vital to any beliefs, not just Jews�. Yet I�ve never seen any comparison between Jews who stood for their faith against the dictates of an ancient occupying government and iconoclasts who believed that all people should be free when others believed in human enslavement or who believed the earth revolves around the sun when everyone knew it was vice-versa. This doesn�t seem a hard parallel to draw and maybe it�s been done. I�m just saying I haven�t seen it.
Finally, I think that increasing the light with the growing number of Chanukah candles each night is intimately tied to the goal of tikkun olam. This �healing the world� is a central tenet of Reform and other progressive Judaisms. You must leave things better than you found them. You must separate and nurture the sparks of God found everywhere from the egoistic dross of the material world. You must both help those in need around you and liberate the Divine spirit within you.
Maybe Chanukah really was a minor celebration that would have faded out if not for its proximity to Christmas. But it didn�t and we should draw a lesson from it relevant for today. I think healing the world is what increasing the light means and maybe it�s why a round menorah speaks to me more. Completing the circle of light isn�t a task that can be finished for real in our lives, but I like that it can be symbolically closed over the course of the holiday.
Belated happy holidays, bizatch�
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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