In The Spirit of Hanukkah
Hanukkah at Home
Slides Below:
1) Hanukkah 2018, 2-3) Hanukkah 2019, 4-5) Hanukkah 2020, 6-8), Decorated plants
Shalom, y’all! I do have a schedule I’m trying to stick to for this blog, and this post is sort of a bonus, JUST FOR YOU! Because why not talk about the holiday that I’m experiencing, now that I have this set up? Just a warning, this post is text heavy. If you’re interested in just reading my stuff, feel free to skip the history section in the middle. I’d still read it if I were you, though. Might as well.
Hanukkah at my house has looked different every year that my immediate family has celebrated it together. Looking back at it, you can see how it’s developed its own little traditions that have been special in our home.
My family has celebrated Hanukkah for at least 12 years. The first few years were filled with a couple Hanukkah parties where we read about the Maccabees, learned how to play dreidel, lit the candles, sang the songs, ate latke’s, all of the things typically associated with the holiday.
At my house, my siblings and I sort of started to integrate some of our own ideas into making the holiday a little more unique to our household.
One of the things we started to do was finding decorations for the occasion and spending a few days putting them up for Hanukkah. It’s pretty difficult to find Jewish holiday themed things in my hometown, so we’ve had to get creative at time. And actually, that is what we started to do. We filled jars with colored rocks, sticking with a general white/silver/blue theme for the holiday. We’d decorate with the jars and with fabrics and then we started making our own decorations by painting rocks or signs. In the slide you can see my favorite sign that I had ever made. Last year we even included the house plants. I treasure my memories from these seasons, and thinking about how much fun my siblings and I have had decorating and making things.
It’s hard to not be home with them this year. But so far, it’s looking and sounding like it’s going great, and I am excited to have this holiday time with my 4 lovely roommates and the community here within Bridges for Peace.
About the Holiday
Let’s talk about the reason (I know) for the season (I know…). First and foremost, I’m giving you a link to the article Hanukkah 101 because I don’t want people to just take my words and run, I want y’all to explore it a bit for yourselves either before or after I talk about it. I did do research, but it doesn’t matter, because every time I hear this story (even here), it’s always different, or they all point out different facts. So these points are what I found the most interesting and discussable.
Now for my bit: Hanukkah (meaning “dedication”) is the Festival of Lights. It’s the recognition and celebration of the miracle of the lights, and it’s a holiday that lasts for 8 days. It’s a holiday that Jesus even knew about, and was actually in Jerusalem for if you go and read John 10:22. This is also where He gave His “I and the Father are One” message, which I found fascinating that he did it there, at that time, while it was such a celebration about God’s faithfulness and glory.
In the second century, Israel was under the control of the Greece, more specifically the Seleucid Empire, which was a Hellenistic culture. During this time, the Temple was desecrated and turned into a shrine to every god but God, and the beliefs of that Empire were pushed on the people of Israel to the point of death. There was an uprising of Jews, lead by Judah Maccabee (who was the son of Mattathias, a priest), who we know today as the Maccabean Uprising. They were a small army of men who did end up wining and restoring the Temple in Jerusalem. So not only was their victory an epic miracle, so is this next part…
What you need to know beforehand: In the Temple, if you read about the construction of it and what God commanded for it in the 5 books of Moses (the Torah), it describes that there are to be 7 lights lit (Numbers 8:2-3), that the oil the candles burn has to be pure (Leviticus 24:4), and that every light has to burn continually and through the night (Exodus 27:20-21). These are super important to keep in mind as it was the job of the priest to make sure that there was purified oil and that they kept the lights lit all day every day.
Because the Temple was desecrated by the Greeks, the Jews wanted to rededicate it after the Maccabees returned from the battle, and resume the commanded actions. What was it that God commanded them to do? Right. Light the lights on the menorah, and keep them burning. But they only had one jug of that refined oil, and that was only enough for one single day.
Here’s the second bit of information you need to know: the Maccabees were, according to the law, unclean. They were soldiers who had just returned from battle, and had dealt with corpses. That means that by that law, for 7 days, they were unclean. And because they were unclean, they were not able to make clean, pure oil for the Temple. But that’s just 7 days, so it’s important to know that it would have taken one full day to make that pure oil.
Detail from “The Story of Hanukkah” by Ori Sherman.
When they returned, they lit the lights in the Temple with that single jar of oil. And while they, the Maccabees, waited their 7 days to be clean once again, and that 8th day to make more oil… That single jar had lasted the whole time. And this is the second miracle of Hanukkah, that God let that oil last until the people were again able to light the lights and make the oil, like He had commanded them.
That’s pretty great, right? To this day, people celebrate by lighting their candles (one every night, being lit by a “servant” candle), playing dreidel (the 4 Hebrew letters on the top spelling out “a great miracle happened there”, or if you are actually in Jerusalem for the season, “a great miracle happened here.”), and eating oily foods like doughnuts or latke’s because of the oil needed to make them.
Hanukkah in Jerusalem
Hanukkiah lights from the first night.
It’s such a blessing to be here for this experience. It’s been a joy to walk through the city in the chill (hooray, cold weather!) of late fall/early winter, to see more and more hanukkiah’s (a hanukkiah is a candle stand with 9 candle bowls instead of the traditional 7 of a regular menorah) pop up around my neighborhood and the rest of the city, grab a sufganiyot (a round jelly doughnut) and see the lights in the windowsills. I like to think about and be thankful for the history of the Maccabees, and thinking about visit Z6 made to Mount Arbel (story to come, photo below), which is one of the sites that the Maccabee’s fought the Greek armies for Israel. It’s fascinating to go places and hear about their importance. To say that I’ve seen it and trying to picture the horrors or the victories that happened there. Or forgetting about the information until a holiday rolls around, and you suddenly remember you were told that historical fact… Which was the case for me this time.
Sufganiyot at a party.
The caves of Arbella.
How I’ve been celebrating the holiday this year has already been a joy. We kicked it off with a Hanukkah/surprise party on the 28th because it was the first night, and the next day was Angela’s birthday. We celebrated that second night with a party for her, and had such a great time visiting a light show in a park right outside of the Old City walls and then some of us walked through to the Western Wall and stood outside of Jaffa Gate, where there was a nice group of people and music and performers. The people here love Hanukkah. I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did. Over the last few nights I’ve seen so much pride and joy in this people.
For the rest of the festival, we have another Hanukkah dinner planned (and, me celebrating from a distance, my moms birthday on the 4th. Happy birthday, momma!), as well as a walking tour of the Old City on the 5th. I’m looking forward to the rest of this holiday season as it gets darker and colder, and getting to experience more and more of this rich culture. Every day I’m grateful to see new things play out, with my own eyes, in this land.
A great miracle happened here.
Here.
Thanks for reading!
- Mads
