Apocryphal stories about oil and eight days aside, the true miracle of Hanukkah has always been its adaptability. It’s the most modern of Jewish holidays, reliably shape-shifting to address whatever the most pressing needs or hopes or desires of the community have been in a particular moment. And it’s long had tremendous communal value, especially for those of us who might describe ourselves primarily as secular or cultural Jews.
For Hanukkah in 2023, there are cold towns in Canada and wet boroughs in London that are removing menorahs from their city hall greens. Which means that, for Jews, this holiday is an important opportunity. Jewish culture in America can often feel overly fixated on the act of remembrance but it is time, pressingly, for Jewish people to examine our culture in the context of the current moment, and to ask whether what animates the core of our personal Jewishness is nourishing enough, resilient enough, to equip us to withstand both what is happening and what is on the horizon. This is the kind of thing that’s best done together.
In the early 20th century, as Eastern European Jews arrived in cities like New York and took up the celebration of Christmas as a way to prove their Americanness, synagogues and Jewish groups made a dedicated push to transform the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major December happening. After the Holocaust, Hanukkah, which in its most classic iteration commemorates the Maccabean revolt against the Hellenization of Judea in the second century B.C., became more tightly intertwined with the founding of the Jewish state — a way of introducing the diaspora to the idea of a contemporary Israel, and a way for the new nation to mythologize itself.
In more recent decades, as some synagogues struggled to fully embrace the reality of interfaith families — a frustrating and self-defeating reluctance, given that 40 percent of American Jews are married to non-Jews — Hanukkah has served as a simple and convenient bonding agent within families and among Jews and non-Jews. As a solstice-timed holiday centered on universal ideas of light-in-darkness, a more anodyne version of Hanukkah arose and took hold. The notion of “Chrismukkah” originated in the 19th century among German and Austrian Jews (the term they used was “Weihnukka,” based on Weihnachten, the German word for Christmas) but Chrismukkah, as a celebration of the blended family, really took flight in America when the phrase was featured in a minor plotline on the TV series “The O.C.” And it’s actually stuck — maybe because Chrismukkah highlights something of the open-ended generosity that’s inherent to Hanukkah. Everyone is allowed in. In Judaism, that’s a rare thing to be able to say.
Certainly, in my own life, Hanukkah has been the holiday I’ve relied on as both diversion and balm in tough times. Midst of a divorce? Plan a Hanukkah party for the kids. Recent death of a parent? Hanukkah can be an act of commemoration. If other Jewish holidays are tightly tethered to ancient traditional practice — and to no small amount of spiritual responsibility — Hanukkah can function simply as a celebration of the pleasure of having rituals, even if some of them are of a relatively modern vintage. Hanukkah has long been a potent symbol of resilience, as in the Isaac Bashevis Singer story, “The Power of Light,” about the lighting of a menorah in the Warsaw ghetto: “That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.” The traditional Jewish calendar is already filled with hardship, and its fair share of lugubriousness. Hanukkah’s lightness is its merit. It’s a way to validate Jewish joy.