Chanukah - the Family's Favourite Festival

The family’s favourite festival

Someone asked if we were having a service for the first night of Chanukah – no we’re not.  Because there is no such special service.  It would simply be a weekday evening service, with the candle lighting.  And though the kids would enjoy the candles, they wouldn’t be thrilled by the service!

Chanukah is a minor festival – at least technically.  It is a home festival.  In Britain it was, of course, a midwinter festival of lights – as it is in Israel - when it got dark early and the nights were long and cold, lots of light, and lots of fund, presents, laughter – and hot, sticky, sugary, jammy doughnuts were just the thing!

It is a bit different here. We can have the lights to light up the dark – or the young kids – but not really both, since it is mid-summer (though admittedly it is a bit earlier than usual this year – as I have pointed out, Chanukah in November is a relative rarity, and 27^th November is absolutely the earliest it can ever start.  Next year is a leap year – the whole extra month of Adar Sheni – Second Adar – being inserted, so that Chanukah will be back in late December again in 2014).

We’re planning a mid-December Chanukah in Myanmar trip next year, so please let the office know ASAP if you’re interested in finding out more about this nine day visit to Myanmar, including its capital Yangon, and its unexpected Jewish history – we’ll be lighting the candles with and meeting this small but fascinating Jewish community.

It’s a great example of the Chanukah story – one of Jewish survival against the odds – of keeping the delicate balance by integrating somewhat to be part of the wider community, but not assimilating and disappearing entirely.

Indeed, this can be demonstrated by looking at the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, the first ‘State of Israel’, some 200 years after it was established following the death of King Solomon.  The Assyrians managed to resettle the people who then assimilated to the extent that the Israelite traditions were practically obliterated, so that we still talk of ‘The Ten Lost Tribes’.  From time to time groups are discovered who seem to have maintained some scattered remnants of biblical traditions and who may trace themselves back to these tribes over 2700 years ago, but all in all the assimilation was pretty thorough.

Perhaps because of this painful history, the response to the Babylonian exile was different when Judah was conquered 136 years later.  Uniquely, the Judean exiles did not disappear, but instead gathered to pray and remember their land and develop a new identify as a people, exiled from their land – not because the Babylonian gods were stronger than their God, but specifically because their God was punishing them for their backsliding – but would return them to their land. In other words, rather than demonstrating the weakness of their God, it showed the strength and power and capability of God to fulfil the threats and warnings, even outside their own land, by utilising the Babylonian non-gods!  It was from this response and this experience that the Judaism of the synagogue and prayer and rabbis developed from the cult of Temple, sacrifice and priests.  Yet the integration worked so well, that when only 50 years later the Persians conquered Babylon and the prophesy came true, and King Cyrus offered them the chance to return, most Judeans decided they were quite happy being Babylonian Judeans, thanks!  Yet the fact that they had successfully integrated without assimilating is proven by the fact that this became the strongest and most influential Jewish community in the world, which produced the Talmud and generations of Jewish leadership, which continued right up to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and which struggles on, as just a remnant, in today’s Iraq.

Perhaps, therefore, those families who think it is the most important festival are right, in a sense, despite its official designation as a post-biblical and thus ‘minor’ one, without a service of its own!  When we light the menorah and put it in the window to advertise the miracle of Jewish survival, we are demonstrating the power and wisdom of contributing to, learning from and being a part of the wider community, neither standing entirely separate from, nor completely assimilating into it.

Chag Urim Sameiach – A Happy Festival of Lights!