A Chanukah Message from Chaim

returnofthejudai:

So Chanukah is on the horizon, the same night as Christmas Eve this year. And, as usual, while I’m annoyed that Chanukah gets too much attention relative to its importance in Judaism, I find its message of maintaining Jewish identity in the face of the of assimilation to be serendipitously seasonally appropriate, especially in these times.

Lately I’ve been torn between a desire to fight or to flee. I’m getting all sorts of mixed messages about how bad things are or aren’t. I’m feeling incredibly distrustful of a lot of different voices and I’d like to choose to disappear and just deal with my life, as if that were still an option. And even if it is an option, how much longer will it stay one?

I took two weeks off of social media at the beginning of December and have been generally trying to reduce my social presence. There are things that have needed my attention that I’ve been neglecting and, frankly, alternating between being angry and terrified is exhausting. Like Bruce Banner I don’t like being angry. I’m afraid of what I might do. I’m afraid of what I might hurt. But anger is power, and like other forms of power, it can and must be used responsibly and judiciously when absolutely necessary. I think we might have crossed that white line.

Today I jumped onto facebook and saw two distinct sets of posts. One the one hand, I see posts from my fellow minority friends who are terrified about the utter failure of the electoral college to respect the wishes of a majority of American voters. Those were combined with terrified posts about the assassination in Turkey and what it might mean. Finally there were the open threats issues by Stormfront against Jews in Whitefish, Montana.

Today, in a nutshell, was a disastrous horror show for a lot of us. 

Then I saw posts from my white gentile friends filled with cute Christmas Memes, pictures of babies in santa outfits and cookie recipes. 

Make no mistake. There are two different worlds out there right now and the gulf between them is becoming wider and more apparent by the day. On one side are the white nationalists and those they would protect. On the other side are the rest of us.  It’s also becoming blatantly apparent that we are facing a global systemic failure of leadership on an order not seen in decades. I hope I’m wrong, but history tends to move in fits, starts and cycles. We are at an unwelcome inflection point. Reactionaries are ascendant.Their grip on the levers of power are firmer than they’ve been in decades. And it’s clear that they intend to take a victory lap by running over those who don’t conform to their ideal vision of the world.

Writing on December 19th, less than a week from Christmas 2016, there is no Christmas for me. There is no “Happy Holidays” as an alternative. For me there is Chanukah and it’s real meaning. Not the one secular American society would ascribe to it, but its actual real meaning.

Chanukah is nothing less than a celebration of Jewish survival in the face of impossible odds. It literally means “rededication.” It celebrates a miracle not of Divine intervention but of our own resistance as embodied by the Maccabees. This Chanukah spend some time with your families to celebrate not gift giving or the dubious miracle of the oil but of the hard won miracle of our own survival for millenia against the worst that the world had to throw at us. Though we were dispersed, we outlasted the Roman Empire. They we were exiled, we outlasted the Inquisition. Though we were murdered in the millions, we outlasted the Third Reich. In the face of everything we are still here, we are still Jews, and we have always found the will, strength and wisdom to survive.

Wishing you and yours a blessed Chanukah. And may our lights never be extinguished.