Saying Hello to Hanukkah
Recently, there was an opinion piece published in the New York Times in which the author wrote about her choice as an adult and a parent to stop celebrating Hanukkah. The piece caused a stir on Jewish Twitter — there’s frustration about the major papers perpetually centering negative portrayals of Jewish life and celebration, there’s discussion of the Christian nature of our nominally secular culture, and there’s confusion and anger about a woman who identifies herself as not being Jewish writing a whole piece about not celebrating a Jewish holiday. There’s also a hunger for a piece on Hanukkah written by a Jewish person who loves being Jewish and celebrating Jewish holidays. So here I am — a Jew with a background not dissimilar to the Times opinion author’s, telling you about my experience of rediscovering my love of Hanukkah and Jewishness.
I grew up, like the Times author, in a household with a nominally Protestant mother and a nominally Jewish father. I say “nominally” because neither of my parents ever expressed a belief in God to me, or engaged our family in any kind of regular religious observance. Like the Times author’s family, we celebrated Christmas and Easter with no more overt religion than Thanksgiving or the 4th of July, and like her our celebration of Hanukkah (and Passover in my case) involved the chanting of the appropriate prayers in Hebrew. Personally, I loved this part. My fondest memory of my father is of him singing the Hebrew while he lit the candles at our kitchen table in the first house I ever lived in. I listened to him while I looked at the letters in a strange, different alphabet on the back of a box of brightly colored candles. I mouthed out the English syllables written underneath. It felt arcane, and special and magical. Like a spell that made those tiny candles brighter than they should be. We would place bets, my father and my brother and I, on which candle would burn down the fastest. We’d play dreidel and eat gelt while we watched to see who would win. I loved our small, wax-crusted menorah. I loved the blue box of candles, and the particular smell of them that was somehow importantly different from birthday candles. I loved seeing our kitchen get brighter and brighter, night by night, and the extra time with my dad, and the sound of Hebrew that got more familiar every year.
As I got older I learned what the Hebrew words meant, and while God was no part of my upbringing or my personal belief system at the time, it didn’t occur to me to have a problem with reciting those words along with my father. It didn’t seem any more strange to me than singing Silent Night, or Oh Come All Ye Faithful, or We Three Kings — all songs that my mother loved, and that I sang along with as a child, despite having no belief whatsoever in the message conveyed in the lyrics to those overtly Christian songs. Hanukkah, and even Passover, with it’s direct readings from Exodus, certainly seemed no less “secular” to me than Christmas or Easter.
When I was ten, my parents divorced. I spent far less time with my father, and I was angry with him. I was angry with him for nearly twenty-five years. Hanukkah celebrations stopped being a full week of special time, and became a thing that I did at my dad’s house for maybe one or two nights a year, depending on how the weekends fell. At some point, I don’t remember when, it didn’t happen at all anymore. When I was thirteen my grandfather died. The annual Seder that had always been at his house moved to my aunt and uncle’s house. Attendance dwindled, and after a few years we didn’t really bother anymore. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I was no longer celebrating any Jewish holidays at all. We still did Christmas and Easter every year though.
I was solidly a teenager now, and no longer casually atheist because my parents were, but aggressively atheist. I was atheist in opposition to the conservative politicians I was becoming aware of, and to the friends parents who tried to get me to go to church. I was atheist in opposition to my parents asking me if I wanted to study for a bar mitzvah. It was a defensive opposition, because I said no even though I wanted to say yes. I said no because it sounded hard, and I felt like I was behind my peers who had been going to Hebrew school for years already. I said no because I was very, very angry at my father. Even though he didn’t care, it was a way of letting him know I was rejecting him. I said no because my equally aggressively atheist peers reinforced my idea that participating in something like a bar mitzvah as a non-believer would be hypocritical and inappropriate. These were the traditions of our parents that we were supposed to be rebelling against.
Like the Times author, I saw myself as proudly bucking family traditions. Leaving behind the old world superstitions as I strode boldly forth into a rational, purely secular future. One in which, of course, we still celebrate Christmas. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I started to be honest with myself about who I was and what I wanted. Things were changing again, maybe even more dramatically than when I was ten. My wife and I were going to have our first child. My father and I were mending our relationship. Then my father was diagnosed with a terminal kind of cancer. The kind that moves quickly. The kind where whatever you’re doing to mend your relationship, you have to do it now, fast. My father lived long enough to meet my son, and died before he was a year old. It was important to me to make sure, as I was saying goodbye, that my father knew I wasn’t angry with him anymore. I wanted to make sure he knew that I remembered happiness with him. I did my best to remind him of the things I loved from my childhood with him, so I told him about the songs I remembered singing with him, and the games I remembered playing, and stories he read me. I told him about Hanukkah, and how much I loved it, and how special those memories are for me.
The next year, I decided that I wanted my son to have those memories too. We bought a menorah and candles. I looked up the prayers. I thought I had forgotten them, but they came right back, melody and all. I sang them as I lit the candles, and stared at the flames with my son. I loved it just as much as I did when I was a kid. It still felt special and magical. It still felt like it was mine. We did Passover later that year too. I started digging more into the traditions that I’d forgotten. I started learning things I hadn’t known before, that put my memories of my grandfather and my aunts and uncles in a new light. I started figuring out just how joyful and beautiful and rich Jewish life is. I realized how much I’d missed it, and how much I’d been longing for those traditions to ground me and root me in my own life and my life as a father.
There is so much pressure in modern, progressive, intellectual circles to say goodbye. There are a million reasons to leave the past behind — especially when the past is Jewish. There’s always a rationalization for why it makes sense to keep celebrating Christmas while letting your menorah gather dust in the basement. I want to say more hellos. I want to give more greeting hugs to the traditions of my ancestors. I want to open the door to more prophets that my family has known for generations. I want to own my ability to be progressive and intellectual and religious, regardless of what I personally believe. If secular Americans can celebrate Christmas and mumble the lyrics about Jesus into their sleeves, if they can turn a blind eye to the nativities in order to decorate Christmas trees without a sense of cognitive dissonance then secular American Jews can celebrate Hanukkah without tying themselves into knots over saying blessings over the lights. Hanukkah is ours. It’s okay for us to love it. We deserve to keep it.
