First Night
It feels wrong in many ways to be celebrating Chanukah with what is happening in the world right now. It is a struggle to still celebrate the Maccabees overthrowing the Greeks for an autonomous Jewish Jerusalem when right now there are fascist Jews committing relentless genocide supposedly in the name of that same endeavor, as though our Arab cousins are somehow in any way comparable to the powerful empires whose leaders built statues of Zeus in our temple. People compare the dome of the rock to the statue of Zeus, but the dome of the rock was built to protect and keep holy the same foundation stone our temple had been built on. They are not desecrating our history they are revering it just as we do.
Besides, I do not feel like we became the Jews we are until that temple had been destroyed. It was the destruction of that temple and its priestly hierarchy that led us to revere scholarship and debate over hierarchy and tribute of blood. It was a blessing in disguise that taught us a better way to be. Through diaspora we came to learn so much about the world and became so diverse. I wish that my distant cousins in Israel could appreciate the beauty in that how we do here in Philadelphia
Instead, they build their own statues to Zeus. They worship Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and the violent monopoly on violence they have created. They serve a fascist dictator who was born in Philadelphia. How could he have lived in this amazing diverse city and not have seen how beautiful it is when we live alongside other peoples.
It feels wrong to celebrate Chanukah this year. But the Festival of Lights is about creating light even in the darkest moments of each year. Even when it is dark and cold and lonely and food is sparse and the world hates us—perhaps this year, for once, for good reason. Even in the deepest darkest, we light a couple tiny thin candles, and let there be a little bit of light. Even when we think surely we don’t have enough oil to last us much longer, the night continues to grow, and the miracle of Chanukah is that even in the deepest darkest that light keeps growing just a little, and it keeps persevering even when we feel burnt out.
I watched a video today of an Israeli hostage screaming with all she had that Netanyahu is a bastard and that she fears Israel more than she fears Hamas. Today on the trolley I saw three different people wearing kufiyahs, and at least one of them was definitely Jewish. Even as the US congress passes Orwellian laws redefining antisemitism to mean anti-war. I wonder if at last the tides might change. Perhaps the first, small, quiet light has been lit in the hearts of many who might finally begin to see that solidarity with Palestinians is the road to peace. The rebels who insisted on following the rules were slaughtered by the Greeks. The rebels who broke the rules were the ones who made change. More people are starting to break the rules and speak out. May the light keep growing, drawing from a miraculous fuel we cannot see.
Forgive me for my use of Manischewitz brand candles. I have had some nasty health issues this year and was not able to procure BDS compliant Chanukah candles in time for first night. The Vietnamese-Italian delicatessen bodega has had this box of Chanukah candles sitting on the shelf since August and it was all I could find in the time I had. They had been marked down to $1.90 for the box because nobody was buying them and the box was getting grody.
Second Night
I light my chanukiah Hillel style, starting with one candles and adding a candle each night. Ren lights their chanukiah Shammai style, starting with eight candles and subtracting a candle each night. I say melech in the blessings, and Ren says ruach.
Recently, we have begun pronouncing the Hebrew closer to an old world Ashkenazi accent, although we’re all starting from the strange Americanized Israeli accent that is now taught to American Jews in order to erase diasporic differences and move diaspora Jewish identity towards Israel. So we have to try and teach ourselves to say “b’mitzvosav” instead of “b’mitzvotav.” There are multiple different Ashkenazi accents for Hebrew. There is no way to say which specific one any of us would have learned had it not been erased by Zionists, given everyone has heritage to all sorts of different regions in our generation. Who can say if Northern or Southern Yiddish would have had more influence or if perhaps it would have merged and evolved and changed. Instead we have a homogenized accent that’s not-quite Sephardic not-quite Ashkenazi. We start at least with small things we know we can do: like bringing back the difference between tav and sav.
I still always say melech, but I also love the beauty of the meaning ruach. This year we are making latkes. And we also had someone make Sephardic sufganiyot. Tomorrow I am going to a Chanukah party where we are making funnel cakes. At my shul we sing both Ashkenazi and Sephardic piyyutim and have rabbis who are Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and both. I love all the differences. I love the diversity. I love the diaspora. Isn’t it beautiful that wherever you go, you will find Jews? We are not rootless and without a home, we are cosmopolitan and at home anywhere and everywhere. Learning local customs and bringing our own. Learning languages and bringing along every language we’ve learned. We are cross-pollinators of culture—bringing shakshouka to Minsk and bagels to Barcelona. In Korea, you will find Talmud. In ancient Buddhist caves in China you will find the Torah.
For centuries there were Palestinian Jews spoke a dialect of Yiddish infused with Arabic. It was banned by Zionists in Israel. I love our differences and diversity, and yet they want to create one unified “New Jew.”
Theodor Herzl has nothing but contempt for other Jews in Der Judenstaadt. Henry Kissinger said were he not himself a Jew he would be an anti-Semite. Zionism destroys us and the people who have worked to advance it have no love for our people. They have only contempt for difference. Contempt for our Palestinian cousins. Contempt for Jews from minority lineages like Ethiopian Jews and Indian Jews. Herzl saw Jews as a tool. A population who could be shaped into what he needed: a loyal exploitable workforce. It is not about who we are but who they want us to be.
We watched the Rugrats Chanukah special featuring an interfaith family like mine. In my Jewish suburb of Boston I was bullied for being half Irish. I had friends in the same community who were half German Jewish and half Chinese and for that they were the subject of racist jokes. When we were old enough to host our own Chanukah parties without parents around, we made sufganiyot with our South African Sephardic friend, whose mother spoke French. We also made sweet potato latkes (tip: use a 50|50 mix of sweet and russet potatoes). The Ashkenazim sang the blessings and the Sephardim spoke them quickly. We brought with us five languages, four continents, and six countries. Is it not so much more beautiful that we were all of mixed heritage and full of our differences, yet still could come together as friends in the same community mixing our minhagim and enjoying our time together? Of that group, one has moved to Japan and another to England. The diaspora adventures further around the globe, visiting new places, further cross pollinating.
Why murder tens of thousands for a tiny strip of land in only one part of the planet when we have an entire world to live in. There is enough room for everyone, if we only allow it. Borders are imaginary lines on a map. Human lives are real.
Third Night
On first night this year, I dug all the wax out of my menorah and there was more wax in the leftmost slot than the rightmost so I thought that I must have misremembered and the candles go from left to right and are lit from right to left. Well, no, I was right the first time. The candles go right to left and are lit left to right. So I’m changing the positions partway into the year.
While I was lighting the candles tonight, the second candle went out after being lit and I had to hold the shamash by it for a long time to get the wick out so it would burn and now it’s shorter than the others and is leaning out. The shamash then snapped at the bottom while putting it in the menorah so I need to watch it and make sure it doesn’t fall. This is what I get for buying shifting cheap manischewitz candles instead of spending more on something BDS compliant. These things are like birthday candles I swear.
Originally, my friend was going to host a Chanukah party tonight—but it was cancelled due to force majeure. Last minute we changed plans and instead after I’m done with candles and dinner I’ll go to a friend’s house to watch the new Doctor Who special.
Originally, I was to go back to work this week after many months of recovery from my accident. Then I got appendicitis and I’m back to rest and recovery for another two weeks.
Originally, there were a lot of plans I had for the second half of 2023, then I got a moderate concussion.
In the past, being autistic, I would have meltdowns over anything going wrong last minute. Anything not going as expected. As I’ve grown up I’ve gotten a lot better at coping with the ways life can be unpredictable. Sometimes it’s still a struggle but today I’ve been able to totally roll with the punches. It’s going to be a good night regardless of what happens.
Originally, I was going to write my thoughts about conversion tonight. I was “born Jewish” and was granted automatic acceptance because my mom is Jewish and I grew up in a Jewish suburb surrounded by Jewish culture. But I was raised secular. I only reconnected with the religious aspect at age 18 when I went to college and attended an Erev Rosh Hashanah service that was very meaningful to me. “Reconnecting with the religious aspects of my heritage” involved a lot of the same learning about Judaism that converts had to do, but nobody ever questions my Jewishness like they do the Jewishness of converts.
But, well, my mind isn’t there tonight. Instead I am thinking about order and chaos. My life growing up was chaotic and structureless. Judaism provided a comforting order and structure to life.
I inherited some Toxic Guilt from the Irish side of the family, and couldn’t understand how to forgive myself for any mistakes I had ever made, going back as far as I could remember. I had an ideographic memory before my first concussion so I remembered every mistake very clearly and every night when trying to sleep I would find myself going through every mistake and feeling guilty about each other worse and worse, totally unable to sleep.
The High Holidays gave me a structured practice for self-forgiveness. That first Rosh Hashanah I had an incredible spiritual experience of finally being able to forgive myself for the past 18 years of mistakes. I slept incredibly well every night from then on until 2020. My life gained structure. I had a schedule. I had classes and student activities to structure my material life and Judaism to structure my more abstract spiritual and emotional life. I thrived with that structure I had been lacking in my youth.
Even if all the details of my life are to be determined, every plan to be subject to change. Judaism gives structure to time. There will always be Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Chanukah, Purim, Pesach, and then Shavuot. There will always be Asarah b’Tevet, Tu b’Shevat, Tu b’Av. Even if I have to make the ritual happen on my own in my own way, the calendar gives me times for joy and times for grief, times for atonement and times for learning, times for humor and times and times for justice.
And those times might not go as planned but the seasons come and go just the same. Every week, a time for rest. There will be time to work later.
As I wrote this, the candles burned down, and the shamash did not fall despite the splinter. The warmth melted the wax back together, mending the fault.
2023 was always to be a time of rest and recovery, of solitude and wintering. I knew it would be because of GRS. But I didn’t think it would be quite this severe. Still, it is the time for it. There will be times for other things later. Now is the time for this.
Fourth Night
I didn’t really do anything today. I honestly can’t tell you what happened. I woke up at 8:00am. I had a nap around noon? I feel like I just lost today to scrolling through social media. So I think I’m going to write about funnel cakes. Even though I didn’t eat any.
Funnel cakes are deep fried in oil. They’re perfectly appropriate for Chanukah and it’s not like we were making latkes before potatoes were brought over to Europe from the Americas. Before latkes, fried cheese was more traditional, so why not funnel cakes. If you look at other Chanukah foods in the diaspora most of them are more or less donuts or funnel cakes.
My friend who wanted to make funnel cakes for Chanukah is from Texas. It seems like such a perfect way to blend that Texan history with a found Jewish present. I loved that symbolism. Bringing something in that feels like it fits the holiday. It makes a lot more sense than “Chanukah cake” or “Chanukah cookies” that I’ve seen capitalist marketeers try to sell to Jews.
Like I said in my last post, I was raised secular in a Jewish suburb surrounded by Jewish culture but very intentionally sheltered from most of the Jewish religion. My mom, according to her, was ostracized by her community for dating goyishe men. She used to work for Jewish summer camps and stuff and had been quite involved in the small but strong Jewish community in Maine, but their reaction to her marrying a goyisher man traumatized her and left her wanting nothing to do with Judaism. She ate pork and shellfish as a point of pride, partially to spite her mother, and she firmly rejected any time I expressed interest in things like having a m’beit mitzvah like all my friends were having. We celebrated Christmas with the Irish Catholic side of the family and our “Jewish holiday” was getting Chinese food and watching a movie after we were done appeasing the Catholics. She was never socially accepted into the Irish family, but she made no effort to connect with any of the many Jewish people surrounding us in Greater Boston. Like she absolutely could have found some Renewal Jews and fit in fine but she just didn’t want anything to do with being Jewish anymore. My dad had similar feelings about Catholicism. Instead I was raised on Deepak Chopra and other weird new age gurus.
As the kids, people fought over us. Jewish friends and family would tell me “your mother is Jewish therefore you are Jewish.” While the Catholics would say “your father is Catholic therefore you are Catholic and should be learning about Jesus.” It felt strange for these religions to be treated as so heritable when neither of my parents identified with either of them. Telling people I was half and half never was an acceptable answer. I had to choose only one or disavow everything. I told people I was neither and that would get a “How could you disown your Jewishness after your great grandparents survived pogroms to come to this country and your grandfather fought nazis in world war 2” or a “If you reject Jesus you’re not going to be saved!” Both were pretty alienating and it was 2008 and Kurt was on Glee declaring his Atheism because Religion and Gay don’t mix so I identified as an Atheist for a while and people left me alone.
I knew about bar mitzvahs and my friends would have me over for Chanukah regularly so I knew all about Chanukah but by 18 I truly didn’t know anything about the religious aspects of what it meant to be Jewish. Being Jewish to me meant being an outcast on both sides of the family and sometimes we’d make noodle kugel or latkes or crepes. Honestly a lot of the Jewish Culture I did have around me was so normalized to me I didn’t recognize it as Jewish at the time. Only as an adult have I looked back and realized what about my cultural environment was uniquely Jewish.
So at 18, starting college, when my orientation leader pulled me to a Jewish Meet’n’Greet and people were trying to convince me to go on Birthright and inviting me to shabbos dinner and dragged me to Rosh HaShanah and I started reconnecting with the religious side of being Jewish, I just had major imposter syndrome. I felt like I had somehow lied by saying I was Jewish because I just didn’t know about anything and I had to ask questions and study and learn everything pretty haphazardly and mostly on my own time. I enjoyed all that learning and found a lot of meaning in it. But even over a decade later I often feel like an imposter speaking to the Jewish Experience or about what Judaism says about this or that because I wasn’t raised on any of this and it all feels totally unearned to me. I never had a beit din certify that I now know enough about Judaism to be Jewish Enough. The Conservative movement retroactively approved of my parents being married, and my own birth, a few years after I was born. My automatic acceptance as Jewish is qualified on a mother who, by the time her old shul decided I’m not avodah, she couldn’t care less anymore.
Which brings us back to funnel cake. My friends who are converts have had their conversions policed so heavily by random Jews in their lives who felt like they were the Jewish police who decided if someone was culturally Jewish enough, religiously Jewish enough, if their motivations for conversion were good enough, if they were assimilating enough and leaving behind their old heritage enough. I’ve been guilty myself in my past of pushing against converts for things like this in ways that were really upsetting and disheartening to those people. I know people who took over ten years of being in the process of conversion before they finally went through with getting mikveh’d because of all the imposter syndrome and the pushback and the policing.
And it feels so silly to me that converts will be told they “don’t look Jewish” while my freckled skin copper haired small nosed self is given automatic acceptance because my mom gave me some sunken eyes and thicker hair. Converts who converted as teenagers will be challenged as still not being Jewish enough to take an antizionist position as adults because they’re converts even though they started practicing religious Judaism earlier in their lives than I did.
Did you know that Israel will accept reconstructionist conversions for the purposes of immigration to Israel but then won’t accept those people as Jewish enough to do things like marry another Jewish person once they actually live in Israel? You have to convert, again, under Israeli orthodox procedures.
I think of the Jewish People not as being purely a religion or purely a bloodline. I think of us as a big world spanning tribe, possibly a nomadic one even. Our boundaries are defined by culture and practice not by blood or faith. In the Torah, Moses married Tzipporah, and she joined the tribe. You can join tribes. All over the TaNaKh and the Talmud our tribe, in our travels, meets people who were born outside of our tribe but who we come to love as family and welcome into the tribe. I think that’s beautiful. I am a big fan of found family. If your found family is Jewish, why not have a found faith? A found culture?
And if we love someone enough that we are welcoming them into our community, why should we ask them to leave behind parts of who they are? I want them to bring their entire selves. I can’t say my Irish heritage left me much to bring with me. Everything I carry is either Jewish or like... Aikido philosophy. I think it’s beautiful to have more colors. More foods.
I grew up with pierogi. But that’s a Polish food! Borscht is Russian. Crepes are French. Falafel is Arab. If we can find things in the world through our diaspora that we fall in love with, and bring those things into our own culture, and carry them with us, then when we come to love a person and bring them into our culture to bring with us, then why can’t they do the same? If they love funnel cake, then that is a diaspora food. That is just like Jews claiming Polish food as Jewish. It’s just like us claiming potatoes!!! We didn’t invent potatoes!
If we accept that converts really do become fully Jewish to the point that they are retroactively Jewish all along, as Maimonides says, then they have just as much of a right to bring in the things they love that weren’t originally invented Jews. I was very wrong in the past when I told converts they weren’t doing enough to leave behind being whatever other heritage they had. Because I now see how much better it is when they bring their full selves with them.
And like, why would you want to keep out funnel cake? It’s delicious. Isn’t life so much more sweet when we accept greater diversity among our people?
Fifth Night
I'm not sure why but the candle flames are creating a bit of a lens flare in the photo tonight. A six pointed asterisk of a star. It brought back a particular memory. Most Jews won't tell you that Chanukah is their favorite holiday. It feels very glib and tacky to say that. Most people will say Pesach or Rosh HaShanah is their favorite, or maybe Sukkot if they're trying to be extra Jewish about it. I used to say Yom Kippur was my favorite which was kinda edgelord of me. But I think Chanukah might be my favorite. It's not as exciting as any of the other holidays but I think that's why I like it. It's very relaxing, cozy, and low pressure.
My family didn't celebrate Chanukah growing up, but I did celebrate Chanukah. It was sort of an open secret in our community that my family had some problems. Nobody could exactly agree on how to diagnose the issue, but something was clearly wrong with us. I'll spare you the details, but it's enough to say that it was very chaotic and there was a lot of fighting pretty much every day. I got a lot of comments from people who had been by my house to buy drugs recently about how weird my parents were, or how weird this or that thing in the house was. Friends who came over would tell me my parents made them uncomfortable with some comment of theirs and would suggest we only hang out at their house from now on, even when my house had the more convenient location for everyone to get to. "I'll pick you up" they'd say. "I'll give you a ride so you can come to my place. Do you want to stay the night?"
As I've written about before, my family had joined a cult when I was 6 that was oriented around some strange ideas about how to raise children. All of my friends, and most of my biological brother's customers, were also in this cult. Even within that cult, my household was a bit infamous. The matriarch of the cult, an elderly Israeli woman who supposedly had familial ties to the Haganah, apparently hated my mother. I only learned this as an adult, but I guess she would talk to the other inner circle adults about how annoying my mom was and how she felt bad for me. She was only ever kind and compassionate to me, but in a bit of a manipulative way. She would say she was grateful that the cult provided me a safe sanctuary to get away from my household, and used that to foster greater loyalty to the cult and its ideologies.
Still, she was regarded as a kind, wise, and gentle-mannered woman by everyone outside of that inner circle. She took pity on me, and so that influenced others to do the same. She encouraged people my age to see me as someone in need of social rehabilitation, not just an annoying kid with no social skills. Calling CPS would bring government attention to the cult, so that obviously was not the solution. The best thing to do would just be to create opportunities to get me out of the house and away from my parents. Whether she had actively spread this impression, or if people came to this conclusion on their own, it seemed to become the consensus among the community by the time I was 11 or 12 years old.
One of the ways people got me out of the house was that my friends would have me over for Chanukah. Pretty frequently, families of my friends would invite me over to stay a night, and oh, well, it just so happens to be Chanukah. What a coincidence. Some of the more conservative or Orthodox families probably saw it as a mitzvah to help a secularized Jewish child experience Chanukah. I was being deprived of Chanukah by my parents, and this needed to be rectified. I must be fed latkes.
Usually they'd even have a present for me, something small like Mad Libs or a pencil. For a night, I'd get to be a part of a relatively normal family with far more normal parents. We'd eat latkes, we'd light the candles, we'd sing Ma'oz Tzur. One of my friends had these like, cardboard glasses at his house similar to those 3D glasses, but something about the film on them made it so when you looked at the menorah through them, the flames would appear to create six pointed stars. Magen Dovid glasses. I'm not sure how they worked but as a child they were pretty cool. That's what this photo reminded me of. As I got older, the parents would be less involved, and I'd just get to spend the holiday with friends. It was nice getting to enjoy a holiday.
I really liked Chanukah even before I reconnected with the religious aspects of Judaism. It was cozy. It was relaxing. It was low-pressure. It felt safe. I remember asking my mom if we could celebrate Chanukah and, of course, the answer was a strong rejection of the idea. She said it was a boring holiday and that I clearly just wanted more presents. Telling her that presents didn't seem important for Chanukah since we already had Christmas just got me accused of lying.
As a younger child, I did like Christmas. I liked presents, obviously, but I also liked cinnamon rolls, making a gingerbread house, and decorating the tree. The Big Irish Family Gathering for Christmas Eve was more structured with various activities and it felt easier to engage with, and people seemed happy. I enjoyed the Yankee Swap in particular. But Christmas Day just had so much Pressure. It was a very high pressure holiday and I didn't understand what it was about. Chanukah, to my understanding back then, was a bit like Independence Day. Why we were celebrating Independence Day for a dead country was less clear, but it had intuitive sense. They tried to oppress us, we survived, let's eat. Nothing religious about it. But why did my family celebrate Christmas? We didn't believe in Jesus. My dad grew up with it but what mattered to him was just the gathering with his siblings and parents. But what about the rest of us? Why was this holiday so stressful in a way Chanukah wasn't?
As I got older, I came to realize that Christmas was about my mother's insecurities. I would often find her sitting quietly, in the dark, looking at the Christmas tree alone. If I approached her she would say something like "It is pretty, right?" There was a melancholic bitter sweetness to it. She seemed to always feel like she didn't know how to celebrate Christmas and that she was somehow doing it wrong. With every present was a high pressure to express sufficient gratitude and validate that she got the correct present. For some reason, it came to be my responsibility to find a movie for the family to go see, and I had to find a movie that everyone would sufficiently enjoy equally to avoid causing a fight afterwards. Everyone needed to spend a sufficient amount of family time together all in this one day for as much of the day as possible and we needed to be a sufficiently happy family in order to validate that she was a sufficiently good mother who did a good Christmas sufficiently. If we wanted to have any alone time, it meant she had failed, and it would result in a fight. If the vibes were ever low energy or calm, then we were failing to have fun, failing at being a family, failing at enjoying Christmas. It all had to happen on this one day. I know you just got given a new video game but you cannot play it today because we have to perform being a happy family to this empty Chinese restaurant.
Eventually, everyone gave up on Christmas. Too stressful. Too much work. Too expensive. We stopped getting a tree, stopped doing presents, and just started getting Chinese Food and going to see a movie. When I proposed Chanukah again, it was shot down again. This version of Christmas was easier. We only had to have one fight over dinner and one fight after the movie and then it would be over. Eventually, one year, after I had put in all my effort to pick out the correct movie everyone would enjoy, I woke up to an empty house, a $20 bill, and a note telling me to get myself some Chinese takeout, and the Netflix password in case I had forgotten it. Apparently, I was the only person who actually wanted to spend time with the family on Christmas, and my parents didn't even believe I was being genuine about it. Nobody enjoyed Christmas. It's just a holiday where you fight and feel guilty. Christmas was a sad, lonely holiday. With so much pressure in the air to be cheery.
But that year, even though I just kinda cried and ate chicken teriyaki sticks over Netflix by myself, I took comfort in remembering Chanukah. I had gotten to make latkes and sufagniyot with my friends. I got to have another winter holiday, where I spent time with people who actually wanted to spend time with me, and weren't just doing it out of obligation. Christmas told me I was alone and nobody loved me, Chanukah told me that wasn't true. I didn't need to perform being sufficiently grateful for Chanukah. I didn't need to spend Chanukah with specific people on a single specific day. People invited me to spend Chanukah with them. So my biological family didn't love me, that didn't mean nobody else did. That was the last winter that I visited my parents for Christmas. That was my last Christmas. I decided I was going to get my own stable housing, stay there through the winter, and I would host a Chanukah party. I would focus on the people who actually cared about me and I would have them over for Chanukah, whether they were Jewish or not, and we would make latkes, and we would listen to klezmer, and sing Ma'oz Tzur, and celebrate the holiday that I actually had happy memories of.
And so I did. My annual Chanukah parties before 2020 were beloved, warm, joyful, cozy, and fun. People would ask me in advance when it was going to be that year, anticipating it, so they could make sure they could come. Yes, there were people who didn't just pity me, but actively wanted to spend the holiday with me, and wanted to make sure it could happen. And I think one of my favorite parts of Chanukah is that, if they couldn't make it that night, that was okay! There were 7 other nights where we could do something smaller together, or see each other at someone else's Chanukah party. And if I was alone most nights of Chanukah, that was okay too. That was just this night. There would be other nights to see friends. Other nights to eat latkes. It's a low pressure holiday.
I also just love giving presents. I don't really like receiving presents that much, because of that precedent of feeling a lot of pressure to be sufficiently grateful, but I really enjoy giving the presents. I like thinking about what someone might like and giving it to them. If I can't think of anything to get someone, I just don't. Presents are an optional part of Chanukah and that makes it even more low pressure. It's a chill, low pressure, cozy holiday, where you only have to do the things that you want to do and will enjoy. You only have to see people who you want to see and will enjoy spending time with.
Lately, I've been seeing more and more photos of Palestine, where the Magen Dovid has been spray painted on the house of a Palestinian as a sort of threat. More and more, that six pointed star seems to be associated not abstractly with Judaism but more specifically with Israeli Jingoism. It's painful to see a symbol I once associated with warm safe chanukah candles now being turned into a sort of hate symbol. Nothing is sacred to Israeli Settlers apparently. To every religion, there are two sides. When that religion is the religion of the oppressed, and when that religion is the religion of the oppressor. There is the Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr and the Christianity of Candace Owens. There is the Islam of Palestinians fighting for liberation and the Islam of the Saudi Arabian government. There is the Buddhism of Tibetans and there is the Buddhism of Myanmar fascism. There is the Hinduism under British colonialism and there is the Hinduism of Modi. What we see now is that Judaism is far from immune. There is the Judaism of diasporic queer Jews huddled together for warmth. There is the Judaism of Yiddishist socialist labor organizers. But there is also the Judaism of Kahan, Likud, and Shash. There is Religious Zionism. There is the Judaism that becomes a worship of the Nation-State. It is painful to see that we were never immune to this.
I won't let Kahan and Shash poison Judaism for me. This is my religion and my heritage too and it does not mean what they have claimed it to mean. The Israeli Orthodox Rabbinate does not decide what is Jewish or who is Jewish or what it means to be Jewish. They do not get to decide that the Magen Dovid is to be a symbol of hate, jingoism, and fascism. The Judaism that took me in is not the same Judaism that keeps others out. The Judaism that gave me a chosen family is not the Judaism that creates orphans by fire. I won't let them claim the right to our religion and our religious symbols. I won't let Yisra'el mean Israel. I won't let the Magen Dovid be just the ugly Israeli flag.
Anyway, that is what I am thinking about tonight. A bit longer and darker than previous nights. But it's what has been on my mind today. Chanukah means a lot to me.
Sixth Night
Y'all, do not buy discounted manischewitz chanukah candles for $1.90 from the Vietnamese Deli-Bodega last minute. Get some proper BDS-compliant candles from Narrow Bridge or somewhere these shmucks do not want to stay lit and burn out in less than an hour I swear.
I used to insist that proper latkes be made by hand grating an onion. I would say that my bubbe said that the crying you do making latkes represents the tears of our ancestors or something like that as a joke. I always thought food processors were cheating and just not traditional enough. I always split up latke making tasks at my party. Peeling, chopping, grating potatoes, grating onions, mixing, frying, etc. everyone gets involved and it's a part of what makes making latkes so fun. I had an annual tradition, before the pandemic, of having an arm wrestling competition during the chanukah party. Whoever won was given the "honor" squeezing all the water out of the potatoes.
When I started grad school for my library science degree, I was working full-time while also doing grad school part-time, I started driving everywhere instead of walking and taking the bus, and I started developing all sorts of health problems. For Chanukah 2018, I used a recipe I found on the Chabad website that called for dicing and sautéing the onions instead of grating them and mixing them into the batter that way. The latkes were much easier to make and also tasted better because sautéed onions are delicious. After I moved to Philly, everyone around me used a food processor for latkes. The latkes weren't just easier to make—for serving the huge crowds at these big philly chanukah parties where you weren't really "involving everyone" by involving 8 people—but also, I had to admit, the latkes came out a lot better when made with a food processor.
Since 2020, I've not been able to host big chanukah parties, and usually end up having a small gathering with Jess where we make her low-FODMAP latkes with a food processor and no onions what-so-ever. We use carrots instead. These latkes come out crispier and tastier than any of the more traditional latkes I made in Boston and Northampton for years and years. They not only do not have a hand-grated onion, they don't contain any onion. Carrying the "tears of our ancestors" with us all the time didn't really actually do anything for the latkes. You could barely taste the onion anyway. We were just making it really hard on ourselves because we were taught that it was that hard for our parents and grandparents so we gotta go through all that pain too. It's important to remember, again, that potatoes are an indigenous American food. Our ancient ancestors were not making latkes until a couple centuries ago, maybe a few.
I have this noodle kugel recipe I make and remake a lot. It started as my bubbe's kugel recipe. The original recipe called for absolutely insane quantities of sugar and dairy. Like, for one normal sized casserole dish, it was calling for butter, cottage cheese, sour cream, and sugar by the pound. When my mother passed this recipe down to me, she had annotated it to reduce all the quantities of sugar and fat. In her words: "This recipe is from before we knew food could be bad for you." I've never had my bubbe's version where the noodles are drowning in oil. I've only had my mother's healthier version, which I enjoyed quite a lot as a kid. But as an adult I lost the ability to digest dairy, so I modified the recipe. Cottage cheese was replaced by Tofutti Cream Cheese. Sour Cream became replaced with Tofutti Sour Cream. Butter was replaced with canola oil. It still tasted really good so I kept making it this way. Then I met Jess, who at the time couldn't eat any gluten. So I modified the recipe to make it gluten-free, which involved adjusting some ingredient ratios to account for differences in starch, egginess, etc. and so this became my famous dairy-free gluten-free kugel recipe. And then Jess's dietary needs evolved so I adjusted the recipe more. Tofutti contains gums, which she can't eat, so now I make it with oat yoghurt and vegan feta cheese, both of which are more sour and less sweet, so I re-upped the sugar content from where my mom had it, which made it drier, so I added more wet, and so forth.
At this point the kugel recipe really doesn't have a single part of it that hasn't been changed from how my bubbe did it. But everyone loves this kugel. This kugel was born from being willing to change things so that they aren't harmful to loved ones. To my mother, that meant making it less likely to clog your arteries. To me, it meant removing ingredients that make me sick, and then ingredients that make loved ones sick. I found ways to make it work to still be kugel, still be delicious, but also safe to eat.
There are a lot of traditions we pass down generation to generation that just aren't necessary, but we do them because we think we have to, just because it's what we had to go through ourselves, or what our parents went through, or our grandparents. The Conservative movement thought it was important to pass down Pure Jewish Genes, so our kids would all keep looking the same and stay nice and inbred and full of genetic disorders. This had the consequence of alienating more and more families away from Judaism, until eventually they realized they had to modify this tradition to let people love who they love and accept kids who look and act different from our not-as-old-as-we-think idea of how Jews should look and act.
There is this stereotype of the Jewish Mother and all the ways that she is. Overbearing, hypercritical, nosy, invasive, pushy, unloving. It's sort of miserable to be raised by someone like this, but we write it off as cultural. This is just how Jewish mothers are! This is how our mothers were raised, and our mother's mothers, and our mother's mother's mother. We justify it by saying it's because they only want the best for us, because they want us to survive above all else, etc. etc. but it makes people anxious and miserable. We don't need to keep hand-grating the onion. In America, most Jewish children are not in such a precarious position that they need their suburban Jewish mothers pushing them to be perfect successful doctors and lawyers (or to marry a successful doctor or lawyer) in order to make sure they don't die alone in poverty. This isn't the shtetl in the Russian empire in 1848. We have food processors now. We can make latkes easier and tastier without all the tears. When we discover a way to get the water out of the potatoes without squeezing them by hand, I will embrace the potato squeezing machine.
I read a post in /r/relationships today on Reddit by a goyishe woman whose fiance and boyfriend of six years suddenly wants her to convert to Orthodox Judaism before they get married in order to have Jewish Children who are entitled to the Law of Return to Israel. Apparently he was never particularly practicing of Judaism for six years. Never hosted or attended shabbos dinners. Never went to shul. But ever since 10/7 he's become very observant and concerned about the continuation of the Jewish Lineage. So he's given her an ultimatum to convert. I, and many other jews, commented to tell her that Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements all accept patrilineal Jews as Jewish so long as they participate in shul/hebrew school and identify as Jewish. The Conservative Movement has a quick and easy way to convert a patrilineal baby to full Jewish. She does not need to do an Orthodox Conversion to have Jewish Children. If her fiance is giving her an ultimatum, the answer should be no. Cut your losses girl and dump him or tell him to cool down and disengage from the news for a while and think this through. The strict fixation on Jewish Blood is an old tradition that just doesn't serve us anymore. Her fiance had some generational trauma triggered by the attacks, by the propaganda saying that it was the most Jews killed since the holocaust. But she shouldn't capitulate to that trauma response. She shouldn't let it determine the course of her life and the life of her children and neither should he.
My bubbe had a lot of trauma from the holocaust. She lived in Maine during the holocaust, but there was distant family who were killed in Lithuania and Minsk. Her boyfriend, my zeyde, enlisted to fight in world war II. She was a teenager, and she was terrified of losing everyone she knew. No matter how many decades passed in America without any signs of there being anything even approaching a holocaust, she always lived in fear of it. She warned me which politicians she thought would be the next Hitler. She told me all about the terror of the Czar and the pogroms her father went through. She had once been an active member of Hadassah, the Zionist women's movement. Her support of Israel was based entirely out of fear. She wanted to believe there could be a single place in the world where Jews would be safe. But she never talked about Israel to me. I think she realized that Israel was not any safer than anywhere else. The world is not safe. My bubbe thought it was wonderful that, due to my Irish side, I "don't look Jewish." She said it would make my life so much easier. That she didn't have to worry about me as much. In her mind, it was still the 1930s. It would always be the 1930s. She died of dementia last year, often asking questions that implied she believed she was a teenager again. That it was the holocaust. That zeyde was off fighting in the war. She could never leave behind the trauma of the 1930s and 40s.
My mother inherited her mother's anxiety. She was terrified of things that made no sense to be terrified of. She never spoke of antisemitism as one of her concerns, but she was afraid of pretty much everything else. She was that hyper-critical overly concerned overbearing Jewish mother that her own mother had been to her. When my dad criticized her for this behavior, she would justify it by saying it's how her own mother was. And clearly, she turned out great.
I inherited my mother's anxiety. I've realized as I've gotten older how often I am a codependent, overbearing, anxious person who struggles to watch other people make minor mistakes without trying to correct them and give them unsolicited advice or even to just do it for them because they clearly can't do it themselves. I fear that people in my life will end up on the street because of some 8-step chain reaction that starts with not wearing proper winter clothing, or not pursuing a stable career path. I fear that my own life will fall apart, which while it is a somewhat precarious life, it is not as precarious as I often think. I optimize everything I do as if a matter of minutes is what will determine everything falling apart.
I have sometimes thought that I want to raise children, but that I shouldn't, because I don't want to become my mother, to become what bubbe was to her, to become what my bubbe's mother was to her. I don't think this is really true though. I don't think it's inevitable that I become a stereotypical Jewish Mother. I don't think we are doomed to pass on generational trauma like a second family heirloom cherished even more than the menorah you see in these pictures.
I think the problem is that too often we have used the family recipe when raising children. We think we have to hand-grate an onion. We think that the tears of our ancestors are, for some reason, an important thing for our children to experience. Why? Why is it important for our children to cry during chanukah. Why is it important for them to risk cutting themselves on the grater and experiencing the sting of getting onion juice in a fresh cut. Why do we think it's important to criticize them for not being careful enough when their blood gets in the onion so we have to start over?
We have food processors now. We don't need to do this. We can change the recipe. We can want what's best for our children without putting them through the same miserable parenting styles we had to experience. We can pass down our heritage and the importance of our history without passing down the traumatic stress of living through that history.
I see so much generational trauma in what drives people to fall for Israeli propaganda. They're terrified. They think about how when nobody would take holocaust refugees, Israel was there to take them in. But holocaust survivors in Israel are living in poverty, and many of those countries turned away refugees intentionally as part of an agreement to get them to move to Israel instead. Germany profited off of basically selling Jews to Israel prior to the Holocaust. Israeli didn't pay for the Jews though, the money came from the refugees themselves. It was this elaborate arrangement where the assets of refugees was seized, used to purchase construction supplies from Germany, and then upon arrival in Israel the remainder would be returned to them, and Israel would receive the construction supplies for building more settlements. Israel has treated holocaust survivors terribly, blaming them for their victimhood, and it never distributed German reparations payments among the survivors, who are among the poorest in Israel. Most Jewish refugees taken in by Israel since the holocaust were as part of population exchange programs (considered a crime against humanity under the UN declaration of human rights) or due to anti-semitism that only arose in response to the Nakba.
Is the existence of Israel really protecting us from another Tree of Life shooting? Support for Israel has become a wedge issue that isolates us from other communities who would stand up for us in solidarity here in the US. It divides more than it unites. And regardless, do you see any pogroms these days? What anti-semitic attacks do happen in the US are small and rare. Culture has by and large moved on from persecuting us. Jews are prospering in the Western World. We do not need an Israel as some sort of blood-soaked comfort blanket to soothe away our fears of another holocaust. If history ever does repeat, if there is recidivism and prominent antisemitism that would truly lead to Jews fleeing countries as refugees, it is not the existence of Israel that would help in that situation. It is internationalist solidarity, solidarity with other communities, that would create safe places for us to be sheltered, that would create allies to defend us. Having the biggest gun only brings more war. Israel is using an old recipe inherited from the British Empire, with a grated onion as an added ingredient. A recipe that made Apartheid South Africa, Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg laws, and casteist India. It's a shit recipe. It results in blood and tears and misery and it doesn't even taste good. American Jews have started treating support for Israel like another family heirloom, and it's just not worth it. We do not need to pass down that which was passed down to us. L'dor v'dor applies to shabbat, not to trauma, not to fear, not to fervent nationalism.
I don't know where I'd store it, but eventually I'm going to get a food processor with a grating attachment. So I can make better, easier, tastier latkes. Grating the onion was a thing we used to do that sucked and isn't necessary anymore—if it ever was. We don't need to keep being afraid all the time. We don't need our ancestral anxiety disorder. We can start a new tradition: healing.
Further reading: I really liked this article from Jewish Currents I read last year called Beyond Grievance that I think is really good.
Seventh Night
At this point in Chanukah, placing the shamash on this menorah starts to get really precarious. The heat from all the candles starts to burn your hand if it's held event quite a distance above the flames and trying to around them to get the shamash in risks setting your sleeve on fire. Furthermore, all the feat form these candles starts to melt the shamash from the bottom, so it gets really drippy and the wax gets all over the menorah.
It's not a very smart design for a menorah. Having the shamash elevated is halacha, but moving it to one side is objectively the better design than having it set back in the middle like this. This menorah is a family heirloom that was brought over from the old country. I believe it was Minsk? I saw a very similar menorah on an antiques auction site going for $2000 and dated to about 1840 so this is a very very old menorah. I am careful to clean and polish the bronze every year once a year, either before going into storage or after coming out of storage. I use the oven to melt all the wax off. I take care good of this thing. And despite all the work I put into taking care of it, it's designed so that it drips wax all over itself from the top down. Despite being cast from bronze, despite being very old, it clearly was a commercial product that was probably mass produced given that I have seen duplicates show up on my tumblr dashboard and given that even just posting picture these pictures on cohost someone else commented that they also have a family heirloom menorah exactly like this one that came from the old country.
It's an important artifact to me. Besides my own genetic sequence, it's the most material connection I have to my heritage. It represents something about my history that goes back further than my own immediate biological family and all of its drama. My great grandfather fled to this country as a teenager due to the antisemitic terror of the Romanovs. He was a tailor with gentle steady hands who meticulously worked on the finest details of garments. He cheated his way through immigration by giving a false surname and implying that he was already married to a German Jew living in the US. That surname became his legal surname and it is my legal surname. He didn't have much but he thought to bring this menorah. He made it special in that act. He made it into more than mass-manufactured metal with an impractical design. He made it the sole material relic of the continent he came from and he passed it down. That makes it special. It sets it apart from other chanukiot I could find in the United. States. It's a relic of an older stage of the diaspora. It comes from a Minsk where Judaica was widely sold. It comes from the Minsk that was over 50% Jewish. It comes from a city that no longer exists.
As I've written about before, it was cities like Minsk that made Zionism into a fringe movement when it had first started. Minsk was majority Jewish as was much of the surrounding area. Sure, it was oppressed by the Russian Empire, but it was a full built-up city with infrastructure and community and history. It's no wonder that they said to Zionism "you want us to go die in the desert building a new nation? We'd rather stay in the diaspora and fight for our liberation." Jewish socialists and labor organizers in the Russian Empire were critical to overthrowing the Czar and the new Soviet government ensured equal rights for Jews, protections for the Yiddish language and laws requiring public schools to provide Yiddish education at any school with even just a few Yiddish speaking students. Yiddish theater was funded. Antisemitic laws were abolished. After groyszeyde left the old country, his neighbors seemed to really have fought and won liberation.
And then there was the holocaust, and world war II, and the portions of the USSR which were completely destroyed by the Germans were the heavily Jewish border territories. Minsk was so heavily destroyed that much of the city today is post-war infrastructure. It's not recognizable as the same city. Some historians frame it as the Soviets "building a new city on the ruins of the city that was destroyed in the war." These heavily Jewish areas were so devastated by the holocaust that the remaining Jewish populations are so small they don't even show up as a statistically significant population on demographics charts.
Today I saw that video going around of the Polish politician using a fire extinguisher on the symbolic menorah lit outside of Parliament. I saw the takes on Twitter where people asked why Poland would light a menorah when there are essentially no Jews living in Poland. I was so doubtful of that. Someone said less than 0.01% is Jewish? But nearly everyone I know has some amount of Polish ancestry! I'm 1/8th Polish at least. So much of Ashkenazi Jewish food is just Polish food. Pierogi and bagels being the most obvious. But I looked up the statistics and it's true. Jews don't even appear as a statistically significant minority in Poland. The holocaust was just that devastating. The entirety of the surviving Ashkenazi community is dead or managed to move to other parts of the world. The Soviet Jews became atheists and assimilated. What remains is only history.
While the menorah was burning tonight, at one point that red candle near the center right had burnt down about midway and then the wick, which i is far too long, fell to the side and it seemed as though the candle was going to go out on its own. Only right as it seemed completely extinguished, it found a second wind, and burned extra bright and resumed its burning.
Zionism has this idea of the New Jew. The strong, homogenized, Hebrew-speaking, stoic Jew who will never be a victim to anything. But Ashkenazim had another culture. The old Jew. The scholarly, tender, sweet, funny, intelligent, and gentle Jew. The "eydlish" Jew. People like my groyszeyde. I think it often seems like our people are dying. We are assimilating into white American suburban homogeneity or we are becoming the zionist New Jew. Yiddish declines in native speakers. Shul attendance declines. Jewish and Zionist become increasingly synonymous. Our accents merge. And there is much fear-mongering about the half-and-halfs like me who don't even look Jewish anymore.
But I don't think the candle is burning out. We are continuing to evolve and we are continuing to live. I see for us a flame that burns bright again. I see in left-wing Jewish communities, in Reconstructionist communities, in anti-zionist communities, a new passion for our people. One not rooted in power or blood, or in conservatism, but in taking what we love about our traditions and bringing them with us and making them meaningful again. I see the diaspora thriving. I see new Jewish folk music being born and spreading. I see new takes on Jewish foods. I see us making our heritage special.
The culture of the old world, the people who were there, are no longer there. I do not know what factory smelted this menorah and it is unlikely it still stands. But we are, at times, a nomadic people, albeit not usually by choice. We have new centers of cultural life in the diaspora and we are continuing to live. We are, genuinely, not just LARPing as Yiddishists but the descendants and continuation of the living culture we came from. It is our culture, and our religion, and we are doing that which every generation before us has done. There is continuity.
And I know I am being very Ashkenormative here, given my focus on Minsk, given that I am talking about my own family history and about this menorah, but I also see in America a new reunion between sephardim and ashkenazim starting to happen as well. It is not only in Israel that the diaspora can come together and cross-pollinate. At my shul, we sing both ashkenazi and sephardim piyyutim, and eat both sephardic and ashkenazi foods. We are still one people, and we are continuing our own lives here. This is another path we have taken in our journey. The Jewish story didn't end in 1948.
I am continuing to use this menorah. I continue to polish it. I continue every year to fumble to get that shamash in at the end of Chanukah without burning myself. We brought what was important to us with us on our journey. It all came with us. It's here now. In the new homes we have built here. Yes, we are still on colonized, settled, stolen land. But here, on this continent, we have by and large chosen a different path from the Zionists. Leftist Jews are on the front lines fighting in solidarity with other peoples all the time. Hell, the woman in Philly who got arrested setting that police car on fire in the Summer of 2020 was Jewish. We didn't choose to be born on this land where our grandparents fled to, but this is our home now. We are going to stay and fight for our collective liberation alongside the many marginalized groups living inside of this new empire we find ourselves in. New York is the new Minsk and Philly is the new Marijampole or Kiev and idk Chicago can be Warsaw. Once it was the Russian empire, now it is the American empire. We are truly the continuation of the people who came before us.
This is the flame that I wish to pass down l'dor v'dor. We are the descendants of the ones who survived. We will continue to survive.
Eighth Night
If you light your candles Hillel style like I do, then eighth night is the brightest night of Chanukah with the most fire. We made it! The box of shitty manischewitz candles lasted us eight days! A great miracle happened here. But by the final night usually everyone is kinda done with Chanukah so besides getting to take your picture of all eight candles lit it’s pretty uneventful.
Chanukah has all this symbolism around keeping the flame lit. Passing down the flame. Perseverance. The fire never dying. Not running out. But then after it’s over you just stop lighting candles. It always feels weird to me like I made a big deal about keeping the fire going and then I just let it die.
In the story, the fire doesn’t die. They get more oil on the eighth night so they can keep it lit. They’re just not using the same oil anymore. So I guess I would wanna get another box of candles?
Though the Chanukiah in my apartment is not the menorah in the temple. It’s not supposed to be lit all the time. That menorah was stolen and is being held at the Vatican somewhere secretly
Some things are supposed to end. Some things cycle. Life has many seasons. Lately I've been thinking about life as being about accumulating experiences. It is okay for a good thing to end, because you still got to experience it, and that memory has been added to your collection. You got to do that thing. I've been thinking about this a lot because there are many things from my life before the pandemic that I miss and which it seems increasingly unlikely I'll be doing again in the foreseeable future. I don't need to terribly miss eating in restaurants, it's an experience I accumulated many copies of. Other experiences are more unique, but I still got to have them. It's better to focus my attention on experiences I want to have and haven't yet had the chance. How can I go through those experiences? Can I adjust them to be possible in the times we live in?
Life has many seasons, and many cycles. Chanukah, these days, is becoming 8 days where I get the chance to see each local friend in a small setting one last time before we hunker down for the annual holiday COVID spike. We enter a season of personal wintering. The cold, the low energy, the cozy, the dark, the quiet solitude. At the beginning of the pandemic, these moments were my greatest fear. The isolation of being an Essential Worker pre-vaccine had me so terrified and touch-starved and lonely that I was willing to consider uprooting my life just to make sure that I'd never be isolated like that again. Just to make sure that, if there was another emergency, I'd be going through it with someone I could ask for a hug. During the annual holiday COVID spike, I would obsess over the numbers daily. When would they fall low enough that I could be touched again. When would the isolation end. I couldn't trust that it would just happen. I needed to observe it, to collapse the quantum waveform and ensure that the number fell. Every day I feared it would go up before it went down. I fought the solitude, and the season, and the cold.
Now I live alone, so while my risk vectors are simplified, I'm more isolated than ever if the spike gets so extreme that it's unsafe to see others for a while. But I'm used to the season. After Chanukah, we all retreat to our warm little dens and bunker down through the storm. It is a time for reading, for quiet, for having an edible and listening to music alone. It is a time to indulge in things that only I enjoy. It is a time to put in less effort and be a little depressed but to not struggle against it all. A season that, by now, I know will end some time in late January or February, and so I can be content with only coworkers to talk to for a little while.
The next observance on the Hebrew calendar will be Asarah B'Tevet, which is the day which I tend to treat as my own personal TDOR to commemorate those who have been lost but their yahrzeits are not known. I mourn friends who passed due to mental illness or transphobia without leaving an exact day for when they crossed that threshold. I mourn those who went missing in wars, disasters, catastrophes, where we only know days later that they passed, or must assume it after months. It is a season for somber respect for the dead.
After that, in the cycle, is tu b'shvat. The birthday and new year for trees. I don't know how to observe it, but it tends to fall around when the post-holiday solitude begins to thaw and the numbers begin to decline again. The trees are mostly still slumbering for the winter, but it is a time to pay respects to the quiet nature. When I lived in New England, it was a time to march out into the deep forest, all sound muffled in the snow, and listen to the still quiet and the crisp cold air and simply exist on the planet on its own.
Then the isolation thaws. I see my friends and loved ones again. The world begins to warm. By Purim, the frost is melting, and things are joyous again. Energy surges back. It becomes a time of excitement, and aspirations. Every Purim, now, too, is a new year for the plague. Another year of this world that I managed to survive. We didn't die. Let's eat.
Yes, someday, there will be warmth, and excitement, and heat. But now it is time to let the candles burn out. To let there be a season of darkness. To let there be solstice. A time of blankets and slowness. It is good for things to end, sometimes, as the seasons continue to churn. There are more seasons than the four seasons of the weather, but they are seasons none the less.
Chag Sameach. Enjoy this last day of Chanukah. Eat something fried. I'll be over here snoozing.