Hanukkah as Internal Civil War

The world's second largest Hanukkiah by Prospect Park

Dear friends,

"Here we find the historical miracle that Hanukkah implicitly celebrates," wrote Rabbi Jim Ponet twenty years ago. "the capacity to sustain intimate relations with another without totally ceding your own sense of self, the ability to love without permanently merging, to be enchanted by the exquisite beauty of another without losing sight of your own charms. This relational art is ritualized on Hanukkah by the lighting of separate wicks or candles that build daily toward a unison of illumination."

I find myself once again this winter holiday season contemplating the miraculous, searching for the nature of miracles, reaching for that mental state in which one can know they are miraculously blessed. And struggling to find it.

There are those moments in which it's there, like when I'm lighting candles with my four favorite people who I get to live with. Then I can sense Rabbi Jim's "love without merging." I can feel both the part of me remaining in myself and observing, and the part of me departing the self and moving out toward my loved ones.

But that blessed moment in which I am blessed with redemption passes, and then it's winter again, and I am again in the world of this 21st century, where miraculous gift-givers like Rob Reiner, and Rabbi Eli Schlanger z"l suffer a violent end. 

At my minyan this morning we were just reaching the climax of the Hallel, the psalms of praise spoken on holidays, which peak with the verse: 
מאת ה' היתה זאת, והיא נפלאת בעינינו
This all came from YHVH and it is miraculous in our eyes. 

That blessed sense of redemption had just begun to sink in, when one of the daveners broke into a sob. Sometimes redemption does that. The broken heart can be the clearest sign of being alive - because it encompasses both aspects of the internal civil war: love and fear, wholeness and fragmentation, goodness and ego.

Rabbi Jim's piece in Slate twenty years ago is entitled Hanukkah as Jewish Civil War. It encompasses the worldly, realistic part of the holiday, which feels so comforting to name. But without searching for miracles, without attempting to "eat light," as Rabbi Jim describes latkes, this Hanukkah wouldn't be complete. In order to experience Hanukkah as internal civil war we need both the world and the eternal light.

So I offer you two holiday foods to chew on. For Sufganiyot in the form of worldly thoughts I invite you to listen to Rabbi Jim's brilliant little Hanukkah interview on WNYC from Jerusalem in 2001.

And for latkes in the form of experiencing the joy of the miraculous I invite you to join us this evening for SHABANNUKAH in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It will, no doubt be a miraculous moment of peace and joy in the midst of our quite realistic lives. We're going to start the service promptly at 6:30 with candle lighting so please come a few minutes early.

Shabbat shalom and happy 6th night of Hanukkah,
Rabbi Misha