A Hanukkah Gift
I was born on the 25th Kislev, the month of dreams and the first day of Hanukkah, the day of re-dedication and victory…
About ten years ago when my son was twelve and a half, my Mom sent us a Hanukkah gift. It was a blue plastic candle-holder and small candle; one of those little items that comes in cheap colored cardboard wrapped in hard, form-fitting plastic. It was Hanukkah and my son was with me: hence my Mom’s sweet remembrance. Before supper we took out the candle and set it on our collage table by the dining room windows near our familiar Hanukkiyot and precious items like the copper plate my maternal grandparents brought back from the Promised Land in the 1960s, incised with a picture of the huge Eshkol (Bamidbar 14).
The little candle was supposed to burn for fifteen minutes, the writing on the cardboard said, and the base would play “Maoz Tzur” for thirty minutes. “Wonderful,” we thought. How sweet and homey, like Mom Mom.
The miracle began when we lit the new arrival, shortly after saying the blessings and lighting the nairot in our two standby menorahs.
Surely it is not mere coincidence that the word for candles or lamps is cognate with our name…
We were reading some wonderful Hanukkah stories and noticed that the little candle had been burning a long time, much longer than advertised; we marveled at it, talking delightedly. The little light flamed for more than half an hour. Beautiful, a little miracle, something special: Mom’s love for us and the joy of being together after another long absence.
We read, and watched it, and marveled; it made our special time even more special; the power of Hanukkah blending with our happiness in the glad familiarity of our long-time home.
Then we realized something more remarkable was happening; in its perky, piping drone, the candle was ‘singing’ Maoz Tzur for much longer than thirty minutes. We started to pay attention: forty-five minutes, fifty, an hour; an hour and fifteen minutes. It took our thoughts from the stories and the sports flashing on the television. An hour and a half; then a few minutes more: we looked at each other with amazement and awe filled our delight.
More time passed; it was singing, determined and lively of the victory over Edom and all the oppressors and invaders; something very special was happening that put our precious time together on an even more special level. Our eyes and hearts were sparkling.
With the enthusiasm and wonder of youth, my son went to the table and looked closely at the candle: how could this be? We were the secret, our simple joy and the joy of Hanukkah. But youth has to learn: he reached his hand gently to the little blue plastic toy and picked it up: the song ended. We were a bit dismayed but our wonder reached new heights and with it some questions that will never be completelyll answered: it had been very precious indeed, a moment vivid to this day and always…
“Establish for us the seven shepherds…”
I was born on 25th Kislev, the first day of Hanukkah when the Temple had been purified and the Menorah lit again, a testimony to the love and rationality of providence, of the Creator’s design. When I was a boy in middle school, already I loved to read even as much as I loved baseball, and that was a very great deal. Already I was devouring the great texts, literature and history of Western culture. When I got to College and then again in Graduate School of course I read the “Old Testament,” as everyone is taught to call it, with special interest. But still it was part of my studies.
After thqt watershed of modern goddess rapture, the cult of divorce and throw-away fathers, amid my struggles to protect my son’s relation to me I began to study Judaism as a Jew who had an extensive knowledge of the culture of the West, the culture of Edom built largely of Jewish wisdom it deformed, just as rubble from the Second Temple was used to build the coliseum in Rome: no starker contrast of two cultures is possible.
The more I studied Derekh Yehudi, the more I discovered its profound wisdom for living; I gained a greater and deeper perspective on the uniqueness and unique madness and denial of the West and understood with deep appreciation the dictum of the sages that “it is an iron law of nature that Esau hates Jacob.” Not scholars of the classical Humanities, they didn’t know how right they were, how profound was their knowledge.
I wrote increasingly on this topic and began using it as a template for understanding the West; it informs the last three books I’ve written and even more so the one I’m at work on now, a study that contains no politics, focusing solely on the West as a cultural project that tries to establish a “pure” identity via art, an identity, however conscious of the desire it may be, to slough off its Jewish content that is so radically opposed to its worship of a constructed, idealized image, an image whose beauty or dazzle buries the confusion in its murderous, hybrid heart. I call it, the Head of Orpheus and invite seekers of truth, cultural peace, and an end to terrors and fictional history to contribute to it.
It seems that the structure and spirit built into my birth date is asserting itself as I grow older; and I see how it has given pattern to my life and studies. I have prepared myself to know and appreciate what the West is to its core and in all its glorious “golden boughs”; my love and struggle for my son, and to keep him attached to my parents and our traditions imbued the study of Judaism the finally enables me to see the West whole, from the outside as well as the inside. As told in a brilliant passage of Midrash HaGadol, Esau will not rest until he involves Ishmael in the murder of Isaac and Jacob, — and then takes him to court, in the Hague, no doubt, piously wringing his pig’s knuckles about genocide and gathering his most brilliant architects to build yet another holocaust memorial, their favorite “artifice of eternity…”
As I watch the candles burn, candles I lit three hours ago with my son on a cement window sill in a far away land, I think of that small miraculous blue candle and its spirited song, a song that goes on forever, until the appointed time and perhaps during it. And I, I stand astride the greatest cultural divide in history untangling its confusion and identifying the morbid predations of Esau for what they are; the sane joy and wisdom of Derekh Yehudi for what it is and can be. I see that the light of 25th Kislev has been glowing within me and structuring my difficult and unique road. Something of the persistence and courage of the Maccabees and all the House of Israel, I hope, is there too; it must be: were it not, I would not be here with you and still trying to separate the oil and water, the glaring deep darkness from the beautiful warm glow and chessed of the nairot that are rebuilding the Temple.