A Hannukah Light

I am not Jewish by birth.  I am a New Jew – a marriage conversion intended to appease my husband Kurt’s very old, beloved, dying, and rather rich grandparents whose final wish was to have unadulteratedly Jewish grandchildren.  I figured fine.  So be it.  Dayenu.  Or whatever.

And really, I didn’t see that it much mattered.  Kurt is your classic Cultural Jew: circumcised, Bar Mitzvahed, reasonably fond of Passover, and unexaminedly agnostic.  He was hardly going to force me to sit in the women’s section at shul wearing a wig and sensible shoes.  And there’s a lot that I like about both the religion and the culture.  There’s a spiritual practicality I find comforting, as well as a strong emphasis on family and education.  I love the whole tikkun olam idea that God made the world unfinished, a little broken, and that it’s our job to repair it.  And, once I heard that traditional Jewish law allows a woman to divorce her husband for being…maritally unsatisfactory…I thought, “That’s it!  Sign me up!”

Plus, modern liberal Judaism allows for an ecumenically-oriented gal like me to still explore other philosophies.  As a result, having been deeply influenced by both Buddhism and my yoga practice, I am more than just a New Jew.  I am a Dr. Seuss character.  A New Jew Bu-Jew Hindu.  Very postmodern and chic.

Finally, I love the “they tried to kill us/we survived/let’s eat” nature of most of the holidays.  Speaking of holidays, Kurt and I primarily stick to Thanksgiving and Passover.  We’ll hit the synagogue on the High Holy Days if the timing is right.

Hanukkah is by far the biggest thorn in our side.  Clearly a minor commemoration blown completely out of proportion due to the commercialization of Christmas, and Madison Avenue’s desire for rampant, equal-opportunity consumerism.  And it’s just badly designed.  I mean, who came up with the totally idiotic Hanukkah man and the equally repugnant Hanukkah bush?  This is a People who produced Albert Einstein, Bette Midler, Mel Brooks, Tony Kushner, Irving Berlin, Itzak Perlman, Maurice Sendak, Fran Lebowitz, Marc Chagall, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and, well, JESUS and that’s the best they could do on a fake Christmas?

Anyway, once we had Luke, and Hanukkah rolled around, I let Kurt take the lead.  And he decided that it would be a purely Menorah-Centric Holiday of Maccabee Remembrance (with a little chocolate gelt thrown in for showing up and not complaining).  Presents, he declared, are for birthdays, visits from generous relatives, spontaneous expressions of parental devotion and/or emotional bribery, and that’s it.  Sorry about the whole stupid winter holiday gift-giving thing, but as Momma always said, “life isn’t fair.”  You get time off from school and probably a new snowboard anyway, so just deal with it.

Not a bad system, and we try to throw a lot of focus on the social justice/doing-good/peace-on-earth elements of the season: serving dinner at the soup kitchen, collecting clothes and toys for the needy, watching the Grinch, Rudolph, and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This year, though, I’ve had serious doubts about Tough Holiday Love.  Luke, at 11, is one of the most sensitive kids I’ve ever seen, and from the day we went to war, has been deeply upset about the whole thing.  What really breaks my heart is that he worries about everyone: the civilians, the soldiers, the press.

But he also worries about…insurgents…resistance fighters… He worries that people who kill – anyone who kills – are going to feel guilty about it forever.  He even worries about the President feeling guilty that he made the wrong decision.  He worries about other peoples’ guilt.  I think my son has invented Quantum Judaism.

To make matters worse, in August, his best friend Jake’s dad, Steve, a national guardsman, was killed in an ambush.

Vermont is a small place, and never smaller than when a beloved community member dies.  Steve was a champ – a deacon in his church, volunteer fireman, little league coach – the kind of guy whose untimely death just makes untimely death seem even more arbitrary, unjust, and outrageous than untimely death already is.

Luke and Jake, friends since their diaper days, have a kind of playful, affectionate relationship usually only reserved for girls and puppies.  They hug all the time, finish each others’ sentences, share clothes and comic books, and have even been known to bake cookies together.  From scratch.

I don’t think they’re gay, but secretly, I kind of wish they were.  I want them to be childhood sweethearts who get civil unioned, adopt a bunch of kids, and have a fabulous garden.  It would be truly something to have that kind of love carry you through your whole life.

Jake responded to his father’s death by deciding – almost immediately – to fill Steve’s shoes and bear the weight of his family firmly on his bony little shoulders.  If this had been another time and place, he would have sold his school books and gone to work in a mine. 

Luke, as Jake’s other half, jumped right on board.  They’ve been astonishingly adult about it.  They wore black for a month, helped organize Steve’s memorial, and even started an education fund for Jake’s little sister Emily.  There are coin cans everywhere - the library, the post office.  They even managed to call a special Town Meeting and get a resolution passed honoring Steve and his contribution to the community.

The thing is, while Jake has grown a kind of sad maturity,  Luke has absorbed all the emotional devastation of the loss.  His eyes are red all the time, and the volume has dropped from his voice.  He skirts away from any kind of joy or pleasure, and just seems cloaked in grief.  Or rather coated.  He’s like a shorebird caught in an oil spill – soaked with crude and freezing.  I fear he’ll never fly again.

As Hanukkah approached this year, I thought maybe the ritual would be good for Luke.  It seemed appropriate – and maybe even healing – to commemorate the Maccabees living through wholesale destruction, rebuilding the temple, finding whatever oil was left in the rubble, lighting it, and watching it burn improbably, miraculously, for longer than truth, chemistry, and common sense would allow.

We should always nourish the ability to rekindle hope.

Kurt had to go out of town on business, so on Day One of Project Hanukkah, Luke dutifully trudged into the kitchen at dusk and watched as I lit the up-top candle, the main one that lights the others – I can never remember what that thing is called – then set it to the first candle in the bottom row of eight.  From the wrong side, as Luke pointed out.

Rather than retelling the Hanukkah story as usual, I decided to sing the one Jewish holiday song I know by heart (because it’s a Peter, Paul, and Mary song I learned at hippie camp as a kid):

Light one candle for the Maccabee children

With thanks that their light didn’t die

Light one candle for the pain they endured

When their right to exist was denied.

Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice

Justice and freedom demand, but

Light one candle for wisdom to know

When the peacemaker’s time is at hand.

About to launch into the “don’t let the light go out” chorus, I took a deep breath, glanced up, and stopped.  Luke had burst.  Like a levee.  Pure, pure wet grief.  He hadn’t cried like that yet – at least not in front of me – and I thought it was a good sign.

I waited, congratulating myself for engineering a parenting maneuver of such brilliant proportions, but then his sobs morphed into one big yell, and my sweet, gentle boy swiped the menorah off the table.

Ok, I thought, I’m trying to be Jewish here.  How do the Jews handle moments like this?

All I could say was, “What’s up?”

“What’s the point?” he cried.

“What do you mean?”

“Justice, freedom, sacrifice – it’s stupid!  The peacemaker’s time is NEVER at hand!  It was war thousands of years ago and it’s war now.  We’ll never get it right!  It’ll always be one stupid little candle and war war war war war!”

I’m thinking: Oh, god.  Here we go, NewBuJuHindu.  Come up with something, and it better be good.  Oy.  Om shanti.

“Luke,” I said tentatively, “the thing you’re struggling with, what’s broken your heart, is the same thing that’s been breaking peoples’ hearts since the beginning of time.  Every kid that gets born is a ship just waiting to crash on those same rocks.”

“Oh, great!”

“No, what I mean is that you’re not alone.  And the very best thing about you is that you feel it like you do.”

“But it sucks!”

“Sure.  But it sucks because you care.  And you can’t do a thing to repair the world unless you care.”

“But why is everything so bad all the time?”

“You know, I think the world has always been a mess.  And we’re always going to be a mess.  And we just have to deal with that.  But the reason you’re in so much pain right now is because of how much you love.  How much you loved Steve and how much you love Jake.  How much you feel for them and for everyone who gets hurt.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Well, you know what Dad says. Life isn’t fair.  If you’re going to feel a lot, you’re going to feel everything a lot.  But I really believe there’s more love than pain.  More good things than bad.  And I think the reason we have rituals, why we tell the old stories and talk about the miracles, is to help us when we’re sad.  Help us remember that we’re not the only people who’ve been hurt.  We light candles to remember that there’s always going to be light in the dark.  Always. 

“But Steve –“

“Look, you can grieve for Steve – and all the bad things in the world – for as long as you want.  But you can smile and have fun, too.   And you can repair some of the damage.  Look at everything you’ve already done for Jake and his family.  You are amazing.  You are a candle in their darkness.  A miraculous lamp in their Temple.  Believe me, pain and happiness can exist together.  Life is just weird that way.  That’s how it works.”

Luke stared at me for a moment, and then went over to retrieve the menorah and the candles from the floor.  He set the menorah back on the table, replaced the candles, picked up my lighter, and flicked the sparker a couple of times.

“That was pretty dramatic of me, huh?”

I thought: My son is admitting to being a drama queen.  Maybe there’s hope he’ll be gay after all!

I said, “Yup.  Pretty dramatic.”

A long pause.  More flicking.

“Can I bring Jake tomorrow?  I think it’d be good for him.”

“Sure.  Of course.”

“Only, Mom?”

“Yeah?"

“Could you not sing that song?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty powerful, isn’t it?”

“Um…no.  That’s not it.”

“Oh.  OH!  I get it.  It’s regular old Mom Don’t Sing You Embarrass Me.  Sorry.”

Luke gave a non-committal, “Hm” and went into the mudroom. (Piano music begins)

He grabbed his coat, sidled out the door, and crunched his way to the middle of the yard.  He stood out there, alone, in the night.

I watched him through the window as the lighter came up in his hand.

Flick.

Flick.

Flick.

Flame.