Festival of Lights

The holiday season is upon us bringing peace, joy and overeating.

As a child celebrating Hanukkah, notwithstanding Adam Sandler’s rationalizing that instead of only one day we get “eight crazy nights,” something always seemed somewhat lacking in our tree-less living room.

As an adult, I have learned to appreciate Hanukkah for what it is and accept that in our tradition Hanukkah is not a Jewish version of Christmas. It is just not a “top tier” holiday. In fact, it does not even make the David Letterman list of our top ten.

I put it somewhere between Talk Like a Pirate Day and Wear Pajamas to Work Day.

I am also kind of partial to Talk Like Yoda Day so maybe we can put on our PJs and mix all three together with Hanukkah to move up the holiday charts.

“Aaaaargh, dreidel, like to play would you?”

Hanukkah’s lowly status and unique celebrations have its advantages, allowing me to avoid buying and decorating a tree and the inevitable bodily harm that would come from attempting to string up holiday lights.

Some Jewish families break down and get a Christmas tree and tell themselves it is really secular so no big deal.

Some (like mine growing up) are convinced that lightning would immediately strike if there was a Christmas tree in the house.

Others try to compromise by getting a tree and calling it a “Hanukkah Bush,” but there is no such thing (see Jerry Seinfeld, who claims his mother told him they got a Hanukkah Bush and he can see it right outside the window).

To tell you the truth, Hanukkah actually does not even involve giving presents. Presents on Hanukkah is just us copying the rest of the country during the holiday season. Is that what they call “appropriation?”

So what’s Hanukkah all about?

In the second century BCE, Israel was ruled by the Greeks, who tried to force the acceptance of Greek culture and beliefs onto the Israelites.

Why was someone else always coming in and ruling Israel? I don’t know; the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Ottomans. It seems like we used up our best plagues on the Egyptians.

In any event, the Israelites were fearful of gyros, souvlaki and spanakopita and other food that they could not pronounce, let alone spell, so a small band led by Judah the Maccabee, fought and defeated the mighty Greek army.

Judah did at one point consider simply protesting by throwing a sandwich at the Greek soldiers, but it was very hard to find a Subway restaurant in ancient times and none of the Greek diners would cooperate.

As you may know, sandwich tossing is a long-standing method of protest that did not originate with the Maccabees and was even invoked recently in our nation’s capitol, when (former) governmental employee Sean Dunn threw a Subway footlong at a Customs and Border Protection agent to protest the presence of national guard troops and federal agents in his city.

We here at Making Good Time do not condone throwing food at law enforcement, especially when having just purchased a footlong that could instead be used for one’s dinner, but when a grand jury refused to indict Mr. Dunn, the government nonetheless continued to pursue a trial.

As Sol Wachtler, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, once famously pointed out, district attorneys could get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich if they wanted to, but footlongs come in many varieties so go figure.

During cross-examination, Dunn’s defense team put into evidence a photo of the “largely intact” sandwich “post-impact” and when pressed for specificity on which toppings tarnished the bullet-proof vest, the assaulted officer tried not to laugh but said that he “absolutely ended up with mustard on his uniform and an onion on his radio antenna.”

Certainly quite dangerous, but Mr. Dunn was acquitted after a jury found his actions a “harmless gesture.”

We can rest assured that Judah Maccabee was never prepared to throw a ham sandwich (whitefish or pastrami, yes, but not ham).

After their victory, the Maccabees reclaimed and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem and when they tried to light the Temple’s Menorah (which was supposed to always remain lit), they found that they had only a single days’ supply of oil.

Somehow, miraculously, one days’ worth of oil lasted for eight days, until new properly purified oil could be prepared.

Kind of a lame miracle compared to parting the Red Sea, but if we had better miracles we would not have been ruled by the Greeks in the first place.

In remembrance, we light candles on each of the eight days of Hanukkah, terrifying municipal fire departments throughout the land.

Hanukkah does hit the general Jewish holiday standard of “they tried to kill us, it did not work, now let’s eat.”

Speaking of eating, the primary Hanukkah food is a latke, an oily potato pancake that reminds us of the oil of the Menorah and all the other heavy ethnic food that is clogging our veins.

The latke is made by buying a potato knish, which can be found on many New York City street corners, and then smashing it with a hammer flat as, well, a pancake.

Some people add cheese to their latkes, supposedly to remember the story of Yehudis.

Don’t worry. I had 12 years of Hebrew School and I never heard of her either.

Apparently, in 164 BCE, the beautiful Yehudis helped save the people of her village by charming and then slaying the vicious Greek general Holofernes after feeding him salty cheeses and then quenching his thirst with kosher wine so that he was too drunk to see.

I have a hard time believing that anyone could drink that much kosher wine without feeling ill well before feeling drunk, but based on many meals at my mother’s house, the combination of heavy food and Manischewitz could alone quite plausibly kill a vicious general.

All in all sounds more effective than a Subway sandwich.

Another tradition that plays into all kinds of stereotypes is to provide children with Hanukkah “gelt” (i.e., money). The gelt is meant to teach children about giving “tzedakah” or charity, although actual money is often replaced by foil-covered “chocolate gelt.”

Our family tradition was to hide the chocolate gelt around the house for our kids to find, forget where some of it was hidden, and then find melted chocolate in July under our couch cushions.

Finally, there is the dreidel, a four-sided spinning top that traditionally was used to fool the troops of Greek King Antiochus. The King had outlawed the study of Torah so children learned to study in secret but if a Greek patrol came by they would quickly hide their books and pretend that they were playing with the tops.

The dreidel has one of the Hebrew letters on each side, and the game is won or lost based on which letter the dreidel lands on when it is spun.

These letters put together make a Hebrew acronym for “a great (okay, kinda decent) miracle happened there.”

Well, that is what we are told, but I believe the correct translation is “remember to always follow through when throwing your sandwich.”

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