After I got home from work today, I pried my hair off my sweat-soaked neck and flopped down on my bed. Flipping on the air conditioning, I turned my computer on and searched for an episode of Friends that I hadn’t seen yet. Knowing there were none, I settled into a re-run, as happily as if it had been a brand-new episode.
The one I chose featured one of the main characters, the lovable paleontologist Ross, attempting to teach his half-Jewish son, Ben, about Hanukkah. Spoiler alert: to combat the young boy’s obsession with Christmas and Santa Claus, Ross dresses up in the only costume he could find: that of an armadillo. Dubbing the creature “the Holiday Armadillo,†he attempts to teach Ben about how Hanukkah is just as fun as Christmas, even if there isn’t a man in a sleigh with presents.
Watching this episode reminded me of all the things I love about Hanukkah. It’s so much more than a Jewish Christmas. Yes, the two holidays fall at the same time most years and, yes, Jewish kids do get presents the way Christian children do. But Hanukkah has a spirit of triumph and good conquering evil, something that the birth of Jesus doesn’t inspire in me. Maybe that’s just because I was born and raised Jewish, but the will of a people and the miracle of holy oil lasting eight nights is a testament to their faith and trumps a birth. If the Christians had put one of Jesus’s miracles around the same time of the year, maybe there’d be some competition.
To me, the Jewish people are like the oil in that menorah. People have expected us to give up, peter out, disappear. They’ve tried to kill us, burn us, smoke us out, but we just keep on surviving. To me, that’s one of the central messages of Hanukkah. It’s not just that G-d is with us, which is true. The message, to me, shows the defiance of the Jewish people in the face of all the odds. There really was just enough oil to last one night, but it kept going for longer than anyone expected. In the end, it resulted in a whole new holiday. In the same way, the more that people have tried to exterminate the Jews, the more we have risen to the challenge of existing and cemented our place in the world.
I’m aware that this is the wrong time of year to be waxing lyrical about Hanukkah—the weather outside bears no resemblance to the chilly frosts of December. However, the holiday’s message is timeless, as is that of the Holiday Armadillo episode of Friends. Just as the oil lasted, so do the Jewish people. So, too, must the Jewish tradition, by passing it on to the next generation. We can’t expect to endure challenges if the Jewish tradition doesn’t exist in the future. It doesn’t have to be religious Judaism, in my opinion, for the legacy of Judaism to continue on. The courage and heart that we have carried with us for centuries is enough. That, to me, is the spirit of Hanukkah.
