Free to Be (Secular) Me

It's Chanukah, that holiday of light and fried food, that time when I remember singing all sorts of songs around the menorah with my family.  As a secular Jewish family in the 1980s, we chose which holidays to celebrate and simply chose the happy ones.  If there were presents and good food, the holiday became part of our tradition.  If not, we would either ignore it or, in the fortunate case of a day off from school, head up to the woods in Vermont.

Chanukah is a happy holiday.  There are latkes  (different recipes from my father's family than from my mother's family) and dreidls.  There's an excuse to send four daughters twirling in a quasi-hora around the foyer.  There's even an excuse to clear the dining room table of its books galore, and to sit around lit candles and sing for awhile.

I was always scared of fire, so my big sister got to light the candles.  If I was lucky, I got to choose the candles' colors and order.  We would all go around a circle choosing a song to sing.  At first, family classics included "Tum Balalaika" and "Dayenu".  Never mind that they were either not holiday songs or for the wrong holiday; we knew and loved them.  Eventually, Dad would spring forth in to "Haveinu Shalom Aleichem" and he would make the most guttural "kh" sound and make us all giggle.  Perhaps it was a little irreverent.  Maybe even a lot irreverent?   But we had fun.

In later years, I learned Chanukah songs at Hebrew School and even in chorus club.  My guitar teacher taught me "Mi Yimalel" and I wanted to sing those songs at our menorah lighting.  My big sister, on the other hand, suffered great bullying about being Jewish and was snubbed by the few holier-than-thou Jewish classmates she knew. Her Chanukah request song was often the beautiful but distinctly Christian "Oh Holy Night" or the belters' paradise "You Light Up My Life."  My younger sister's choices ranged from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to Elton John, from nursery rhymes to  "You are my Sunshine."  We laughed, sometimes we fought, and we made family music.

Grandpa worked as a movie projectionist, and so my mom grew up with movable holidays.  If he was called in to work on a holiday, they would just celebrate on another day.  I was rigid as a child and resented carrying on the tradition of movable holidays.  In part, this is because we never really got all eight days of Chanukah.  The holiday fizzled out quickly each year, overshadowed by the bounty of lessons, concerts and parties that travel in tandem with December.  My parents' very logical argument was that we celebrated Christmas too-- a non-religious Santa Claus, stockings, ornaments, Disney version of the holiday, but one which provided presents and the spirit of giving.  This year, I'm very grateful for movable holidays because it's lonely being away from my family when they are far away, and we will be together in a week or so.

In the USA, Chanukah is a much bigger holiday than it is in the rest of the Jewish world.  Most people in my area of New Jersey even know how to pronounce it!  (This is different from the frequently butchered "Rosh Hashanah" and "Yom Kippur", which are much bigger holidays for the religious, but where few people know to make the O sound long...)     I know that it doesn't get the same media hype all over the world, and that even in the old world Europe days, Chanukah was more subdued. Last night, I decided to look through Yad Vashem's archive of photos from Chanukahs past to see what I could learn.

Berlin, Germany, 1930s, A boy lighting a Hanukkah candelabrum on Hanukkah
Published in the Jewish newspaper CV-Zeitung on 29/11/1934
Credit: Juedischen Museum Im Stadtmuseum, Berlin
Yad Vashem Archives 5409/3093

This picture spoke to me because of its simplicity and grace.  In my family photos, above, you can see that my childhood Chanukah candles might be lit when were much more casually dressed, even in nightgowns or sweatshirts. This boy is in his school clothes, with one hand on a prayer book and the other with a candle.

Berlin, Germany, 1930s, Hanukkah
Credit: Juedischen Museum Im Stadtmuseum , Berlin
Yad Vashem Archives 5409/1587

The wonder was still there, though.  Candles transcend time and space.  They transcend religions and oceans, too.

Lodz, Poland, 1943, Hanukkah in the ghetto
Yad Vashem Archives 37GO4

Look at the faces on these men in the Lodz ghetto.  The intensity stirs my soul. Note that the Hebrew sign refers to Chanukah as "Chag HaMacabeem", holiday of the Macabees.  I wonder if they found hope in the miracle story in times of desperation.

Westerbork, Holland, Lighting of Hanukkah candles in the camp.
Yad Vashem FA29/124 

In this one, the cramped quarters really speak to me.  I can count over forty people in this photo, but I can't come up with a certain number because people are so blurred together.  I also noticed that this group has both males and females in it.

This irony is not lost on me:  my ancestors came to America, in part, for freedom of religion.   I was brought up in a family that chose the freedom to be secular.  

Sometimes I have friends who criticize me.  They tell me that Jewishness is a religion.  In their view, you are either religious, or you are not.  If you are religious, then you are Jewish.  If you are not religious, then you are not Jewish.  But it doesn't work that way for me.  Judaism is a religion, yes, with many different ways of being.  My form of Judaism is Reconstructionism, and we focus on the culture, education, and social justice elements of Judaism.  But Judaism is a culture, too.  In fact, it is many different cultures united by certain songs, foods, wanderings, hopes, and languages.

Growing up in the second half of the twentieth century, I learned that I had the right to define myself.  At the Chanukah table, I could choose my songs with the same rights my sisters had to choose theirs.  At school, when my mother came in to teach classmates about Latkes, I could be petulant that day and refuse to help; my mother, for her part, could tease me (affectionately) for years to come about how a classmate named Antonia helped out instead.  I can choose to light my candles in a nightgown or sweatshirts, or not to light candles at all.  

Today, when I light the candles, I will give thanks for the miracle of freedom.  This miracle is one that we have worked hard for as a society.  We still have a lot of work to do, but I am grateful for mine!