How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (4 page)

I consider Sarah my cosmic reward for having made it through a decade at Jewish summer camp. We shared a bunk bed when we were eleven, and we got into a fistfight that year. (I won, Sarah; you know I did.) Our time at this Jewish summer camp was the source of much angst for me (and, later, much grist for the writing mill). It was a pretty soulless place. We often reminisce ruefully about the time we, along with all the other adolescent girls at camp, were formally lectured by a kindly and quite well-respected rabbi about the importance of marrying as early as possible and starting a family, and about how prioritizing career and/or self-actualization would mean not only that we would die barren and alone but that the Jewish people, also, would cease to exist.

Tonight Sarah is hosting Shabbat dinner, so we go to the market and shop for supplies. My contribution will be my signature vegan cupcakes, which are not remotely as unappetizing as they may sound, I swear to God (there is banana involved). In the frosting aisle, I pick up sugar letters (the whole alphabet, in triplicate!) and rainbow jimmies for cupcake adornment.

The Shabbat crowd is made up of Sarah's housemates and several of their friends, most of whom are weekly regulars. I can't overstate the wonder and joy of finding like-minded people gathered here for Shabbat, for Chanukah, for eating and hanging out. It's that most rare of religious phenomena: organic. One of Sarah's friends rolls two enormous blunts (“For après-Shabbos,” he says with a grin). In the kitchen, her housemates are ritually washing their hands while they make up an intricate rap—two play human beat box while the third interweaves the
bracha
and something about his “Shabbos bitches”—about, yes, ritual hand washing. Jackie watches them, agape.

“They're always doing that,” Sarah sighs.

First we light the menorah, and tonight everyone in the room knows the words and sings loudly along. Then we light the Shabbat candles, with, again, everyone join­ing in. Then we feast. Then we smoke the blunts. “In the basement!” Sarah insists. “But it's Shabbos!” we plead. She relents.

When I go into the kitchen to frost the cupcakes I find Jackie already arranging the pink sugar letters into words on each one. She's diligently arranged “fun hole,” “eat me,” “tits,” “poop,” “ass wipe,” “fuck,” “balls,” “jizz,” and a couple others even I won't repeat. Sounds infantile, maybe, but in our collective state of gladness they are the height of wit and creativity. Especially, of course, as the letter supply dwindles and we are forced to be extra inventive with spelling.

Is this what our parents had in mind for us when they chauffeured us to day school, Hebrew school, and bat mitzvah lessons? Is this what they hoped for when they waved good-bye and sent us off to that Lord of the Yid Flies summer camp? Pornographic vegan cupcakes, Shabbos blunts,
al netilat yadayim
woven intricately into a rap in a house high up on a hill in the Pacific Northwest? I must say that I think so. At first glance, the above might seem like religious perversion, but scratch the surface and you'll see a roomful of young Jews claiming that identity in the context of countless other identities. Dig deeper and you'll find a roomful of Jews owning Judaism—and loving it—in a way no easy parochial regurgitation or rote spawning could ever approach. Oh, how I wish that kindly and completely misguided old rabbi could be here with us now. If we could bottle this and sell it, surely we'd be knee-deep in Jewish continuity- hysteria-foundation grants. And just imagine the weed that would buy!

VII.

Another party tonight: New Year's Eve, though it's difficult to get all that amped up about a milestone so traditionally overloaded with good-time pressure. Every year it's the same, the anticlimax so much more prevalent than the purported climax. (Like hooking up with a future Jewish pop star. Or whatever.)

Sarah's friends from medical school arrive in clusters. A future anesthesiologist has brought the board game Cranium, which we are to play as the evening's entertainment. A future neurosurgeon bears a bottle of champagne in each fist. A future gynecologist brings her gangly, fifteen-year-old brother, because he had no other plans and she couldn't bear to leave him home alone for the last/first few hours of 2005/06.

Two old friends of Jackie's join the party too, thankfully rounding out the left-brain contingent. We four form a Cranium team, as the med students want no part of our liberal arts asses. The med students also Just Say No, which means that our team at first appears to be at something of a disadvantage.

Here's a piece of advice: don't ever play Cranium with a bunch of medical students. Especially don't ever play Cranium with medical students if you are a) someone with an iota of perspective on board games, b) someone with an iota of perspective on competition in general, c) extremely stoned, or d) all of the above.

We are incapable of taking the game seriously, which frustrates our furrowed-browed, adorably Type A opponents to no end. While they huddle together and strategize, we gleefully sing rounds of “Light one candle for the Maccabee soldiers, with thanks that their light didn't die! Light one candle for the pain they endured when their right to exist was denied!” We lose track of whose turn it is. We shout out answers to other teams' questions, trying to be helpful and sportsmanlike. And, eventually, we legitimately win the game. This is infuriating to the losers, whose losing is almost enough to incite the kind of existential crisis usually sparked by fatal botched diagnoses in residency. They've lost Cranium to a bunch of
stoners
?!

“Good game. Congratulations,” they say tightly.

By then it's about eleven fifty-five, so we head out to the street with noisemakers and pots and pans, looking out over the city and the Space Needle, where fireworks will signify the end of the year.

Unbeknownst to us, the fifteen-year-old has been drinking champagne all night, and he starts vomiting his brains out (not literally) pretty soon after we welcome the New Year.

Once again we've forgotten the candles.

VIII.

We almost forget all about the eighth and final night, too.

When we finally do remember, just before bed, we load up the whole menorah together, no debate tonight about where the candles go. We set it in the window, the rest of the house dark and quiet. It is the first day of 2006 and tomorrow we'll all go back to our lives: Sarah to three months of internal medicine rotation in the middle of Idaho, Jackie and I to Chelsea and Brooklyn, respectively. It's going to be a big year for each of us: lots of changes and miracles and stepping-stones and new challenges we vaguely know are on their way. And who knows when we'll all be together again?

I am nominated to hold the
shamash
, which I find I'm excited to do, like when I was little and it felt like a great honor. I light the candles from left to right, starting with the newest and lighting one for each of the past seven nights as I go.

First is tonight's, eight, with my girls beside me and the sound of Seattle rain gently pelting the window under our three tone-deaf, exhausted voices. Then last night's, seven, and the collective ruckus we made banging our pots and pans to usher in a new year while fireworks exploded over the city. Six, Shabbos blunts and porno-cakes. Five at Sleater-Kinney. Four as token, pseudomissionary Jews in a roomful of well-intentioned holiday whores. Three at the Havurah party. Two alone at the movies. And by the time I make it to the last candle, the first night, Christmas, my uniquely fraught family and my uniquely fraught place in (or out of) it, I'm almost able to own even that. It's been a good week, it's a new year now, after all, and the whole menorah is glowing, full, finally complete.

Jackie and Sarah and I stand looking for a moment at the blazing menorah and its reflection in the window. Above it our faces are reflected, too. We linger for a moment and then we turn away, off into a new week, a new year, and a blessedly blank slate.

STEVE ALMOND

Chanukah Your Hearts Out!

A sermonette on the proper role of the holiday in the lives of modern atheist Jews

. . . I
SPEAK NOW TO THOSE OF YOU WHO GREW UP IN THE HAZE OF MODERN SECULAR LIFE, WHO, LIKE ME, DERIVE FROM THE SHTETLS OF THE PALE STEPPES, FROM
L
UBLIN AND
M
INSK, FROM BEARDED MEN WHO SPENT HOURS IN COLD STONE HALLS HUNCHED OVER LAW, WHO FOUND IN
G
OD AND
H
IS IRASCIBLE TINKERING THE SUBJECT OF AN ENTIRE LIFE, AND NEVER ONCE QUESTIONED THE
W
ORD.

I speak to you, the children and grandchildren and great- grandchildren of these men, who have known no other life but suburban America with its bright avenues and TV shows and bubble gum, with its idle afternoons, its pieties of plenitude. I speak to those of you who, like me, have fallen away from God, or never knew Him, the ones who snored through Sunday school, who learned bits of blessings at sex-starved summer camps, who became strangers to the shul, and learned to regard the Almighty as a lunatic superstition.

I speak to those of you who consider the essential miracle to be consciousness, our ability to perceive ourselves, to demystify the world we inhabit, to pursue our fraught paths toward happiness.

I speak to each of you today, my brethren and sistren—my scattered flock! my wayward tribe!—and I say the following:

Look not with derision upon the festival of Chanukah.

Neither mock the holiday with jokes or silly songs, nor dismiss it as a triviality trumped up to match the retail onslaught of Christmas. Let not these days pass as any others might, as if you were like any other person. You are not. We are not.

For all our wanderings, all our silent disavowals, all our half-acknowledged shame, we are Jews. The sons and daughters of Abraham. Abraham, whose grand delusion was of a singular benevolent father. Abraham, whose folly resided in the belief that one bloodline might hold the franchise on divine approval. Abraham, who nearly smote his own boy out of dumb loyalty.

And yet remember: we need not endorse the savagery of our holy book to recognize the beauty in its ideas. Consider the story of the Maccabees, insurgent rebels who came to believe that God carried them into battle, who fell under the spell of sanctified violence and turned their enemies into lakes of blood and reclaimed the Temple, then were slaughtered too. Madmen, of course, but ones illuminated from within by personal sacrifice, spiritual devotion, and valor.

This
is
our legacy, comrades. There is no separating the noble from the wicked within us. We are trapped by circumstances of history, often forced to make bad choices. We need look no further than our own promised land, in this very age, for proof.

It would surely be easier for us, as modern Jews—fully assimilated! credit-approved!—to disavow the tangled skein of our history. Chanukah
schmanukah,
we might say. More propaganda from the home office. Let the holiday slip past, like so much wind-blown tinsel. But, you see, we are not tinsel. We are a family, the children of monotheism. To ignore this essential fact of our being would be to unmoor us from our own legacy and cast us adrift in time.

It is true what the pop psychologists say: we don't get to choose our family. Our only choice resides in how we treat them. Do we assume a posture of convenience and self-regard? Or of gratitude and humility? To put this another way: Do we choose to acknowledge who and where we come from? Do we honor those whose sacrifices vouchsafed our own outrageous freedoms?

Today I exhort you, my fellow fallow Jews, to treat Chanukah this year with more dignity than perhaps it deserves. On each of the eight nights, prepare a meal and gather your loved ones to you. Turn off all electronic devices. Allow yourself the high cholesterol latke, the sour cream and applesauce. You need not light candles or sing the prayer, but you must dispense a blessing, one at least, each night.

Above all, you must reflect on those whose love binds you to this world, if you have done right by them, if you have been good to those in need of goodness, and spoken against those who would do this goodness harm.

That's what being Jewish is: summoning the means to question who you are and how you have behaved. Have you remained alight in the darkness of cruel wishes, like a lamp in an ancient temple? Have you forgiven? Have you lived up to the standards of your one and only heart?

It is still possible, after all, to forge a covenant that binds us not to God in obedience but to one another in mercy. We need only choose, this year, to keep the flame lit . . .

JENNIFER GILMORE

The Guinea Pig

P
ANIC, PURE AND UNADULTERATED, WAS WHAT MADE ME WANT A NEW DOG.
I
THOUGHT SURELY A DOG WOULD PROTECT ME, BUT EVERY PLEA WAS MET WITH THE SAME RESPONSE.

“That's a whole lot of responsibility,” my mother said.

“For me,” my father said.

“For me you mean,” my mother said.

Until one November day when I was eight years old, my mother suggested another kind of animal.

“One that doesn't shed or need to be walked,” she said. “How does that sound?”

“Sounds like the perfect Christmas gift,” my father said.

“Please,” my mother said. “Stop it.”

This was no different than any other holiday season in our home.

Perhaps here is where I should mention that my 100 percent Jewish father was—and remains—obsessed with Christmas. He decorated the mantle with his Christmas cards, hung candy canes from boughs of evergreens, taped mistletoe at every threshold, mulled his wine, and tried to get my mother to submit to an evergreen—and very tasteful, adorned with only one red velvet ribbon—wreath on the door.

“No!” she'd say. “I can't live with that, I just can't.”

My mother grew up in a Jewish household. My grandfather, a judge, had studied to be a rabbi. And Nana was on the committee of the new Reform temple in her town.

“Well, it's very important to me,” he'd tell her, tilting his head and hanging the wreath anyway. Though both of my father's parents were Jewish—from Western Europe, they proudly proclaimed—he and his sisters had not been raised observant. Recently, however, his father had turned quite religious, joining a Conservative synagogue in San Diego, where he and my grandmother had recently moved for their retirement. My father couldn't stand to hear him talk of it, of God, or of the way he kept kosher—but for the raw oysters my father would offer up to him, his father's approval given in the way he gobbled them up, then turned around sheepishly to see if any of us were looking.

“I don't understand how Christmas could be so important to you,” my mother said.

“It's part of my history,” my father replied. “I grew up in Minneapolis and I remember the lights on the streets, the lighted trees, the wreaths. It was always magical.”

My mother crossed her arms. “Have your holiday stuff inside,” she said. “But no wreath. Nothing outside this house.” Ludicrous, she'd call him as he searched the many cabinets in my room for the photos that were evidence he had celebrated Christmas when he was young. “We're Jews, for Chrissake,” my mother would say.

I
WAS A GIRL
with many secrets. By day I was a normal child in suburban Washington, D.C., and as day turned to twilight, my panic began until, by evening and then night, it had morphed into near panic. The spark that caught the flame of my fear was my sister's birth, when I was five. Her arrival propelled me out of my room next door to my parents' and up to the attic to make space for her. Moving to the attic seemed like a great idea at first, not least of all because the room had a window seat that looked out onto our suburban D.C. street, and a wall of cabinets that housed strange and unusual objects beneath its many doors: my father's old oil paints and horsehair brushes, tiny canvases thick with cracking paint, my mother's girlhood diaries, a list of boys—Jeffrey Seltzer, Martin Finkelstein, Harry Lefkowitz—written in careful script on the back of each one. Every cabinet of that wall was a window to who my parents once were, or perhaps more to what they had wanted—intended?—to become. And in the storage space beneath the window there were my mother's antique dolls.

A child of the seventies—or, rather, a child with an ERA-abiding working mother in the seventies—I was not allowed to have dolls or any gender-specific toys. Pulling these strange dolls out from beneath the removable, nearly hidden seat, with their broken porcelain faces, foreheads stuck with hair, exposed scalps, and yellowing satin dresses and frayed cotton shirts, was nothing short of thrilling.

But in the end the dolls could not protect me from my lonely new life in the attic. Those dolls lay in wait, and I imagined their burgeoning rage at being left beneath the window seat. There were other things: a woman in flames screaming from a burning house that I had inadvertently watched on television with a babysitter, as well as the swamp thing she had watched one afternoon. And there was my sister's constant screaming, over which was juxtaposed my parent's arguing, a noise that worsened as the decade moved along.

And in those moments I yearned for a puppy, another heartbeat in my room, something to give me comfort while protecting me from the dolls, who had all lost their once-good looks, and whose anger at being wrapped in old paper and stuffed in a secret compartment was sure to break them out of there. Would they come for me? A dog would surely anticipate such an attack and protect me in a way, it became increasingly clear, my parents never could.

W
OULD THIS HOLIDAY
bring me a creature with whom to share my life? Christmas seemed to me just another reason for my parents to fight: you do more, no I do more, you work late, no I work late, you love Christmas, no I do. But now I see it as the singular cause of these fights: a different way of looking out at the world and a different idea of how the world looks back.

These arguments grew into full-fledged fights over the way my father's family tried to cover up being Jewish. They were German Jews, not the Eastern European stock from which my mother hailed, and my mother believed they thought themselves above being Jewish. She told me that at their wedding, my father's grandmother (who had by then become a Christian Scientist!) had told my father, Better you had married a shiksa than a Polish Jew.

But what child growing up in this country does not appreciate Christmas? It is what we see on television, in the movies, in theaters and schools and the novels we read. Who doesn't want to be a part of this? We went to temple on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but we also hid Easter eggs. The story to me
then
was in the latter: what did you
get
? Was my father trying to give me every experience, or was he, too, ruled by a kind of fear, fear about what not having a standard American childhood would bring to his children?

My sister and I both cottoned to Christmas, but truth be told, I liked Chanukah. Looking back, I wonder if this—like so many things that emerged from the sticky soup of growing up—stemmed from my fear. Every night for eight days we lit candles and ate together. My father did not come home late, his little yellow Rabbit pulling into the driveway and screeching to a halt, my mother's crossed arms and wild eyes meeting his fierce whispers, which turned quickly to screams. Chanukah was like tax time, where I was comforted by my father's very presence, his awakeness. I knew he was downstairs trying to make sense of our finances, as I lay awake in the attic, scared of the wicked witch, of beauty's beast, of the ghost of Christmas past, of fire. I could feel the thread that passed between us then, from my scared, prone body down two flights of stairs to my father's seated figure, anxious about what we would have to pay, when each year there was less and less. Chanukah was comforting, and I enjoyed the stories my mother insisted on telling:
This was the oil; this was the fight for freedom. See here? The eternal candle.

Like the High Holidays, these times felt to me like my mother's days. They tethered me to her, whereas on most every other day, I felt quite far away.

But no matter what, the gifts came on Christmas.

“We need to be open to everything,” my father would say. “All cultures.”

“Don't you pull that,” my mother would say. “We know about all kinds of cultures. Your Christmas is a Hallmark card. Say what you will, but the issue here is not the Jews.”

T
HE
J
EWS,
T
HE
J
EWS.
There really wasn't much to dis­cuss with the Jews in my class about Chanukah, but come Christ­mas, I stood with the Christians during homeroom, swapping stories of leaving cookies out for Santa and writing a long note, not just about what we wanted but what the year had been like. The highs and lows, my father would say as he put the plate of Oreos—his favorite—by the fireplace. The embers burned and crackled as my mother hid upstairs, her rage traveling a straight line from her bedroom to the living room, where my father tapped a pen to his head, thinking of what my sister and I should tell Santa. And after we opened our presents on Christmas, I went straight upstairs to call my friends and see what they had gotten from Santa as well.

Here too was connection—me to my father, an unbroken line strewn with pine needles and candy canes, a cheery connection that in turn connected our family to all the families we saw on television.

F
INALLY, WHEN
I
was eight years old—three years after my sister's birth sent me to the attic—my mother and I walked into the pet store on Wisconsin Avenue on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. This was the store next to the denim and boot shop, where three months earlier, just before I'd started third grade, my mother had made me try on Wranglers and had brought her hand up between my legs. “How's the crotch?” she'd screamed, and I swear to God, she'd yelled it out of the store and onto the street, where young, cool teenagers ate Mexican food beneath the swaying canopy, and into the sky for other countries to hear. I reddened now just walking by the place and into the pet store which was part of that strip on the long, busy stretch of street that connected the District to my neighborhood.

We had been to this pet store many times at my insistence, the least my mother could do after humiliating me to the very heavens. The store smelled like hair and jungle and sawdust and crap, and we were greeted by the warm sound of bubbles rising to the top of aquariums and birds chirping. I went straight to the small-mammal section: hamsters, gerbils, bunnies. And then I saw the guinea pigs. If I could not have a dog, a lovely golden retriever, his bushy tail wagging at my every arrival, this, then, was what I wanted for Chanukah or for Christmas. Not some tiny little smooshable hamster, or a regular bunny like Arnold Rothstein across the street had—a guinea pig seemed exotic, and big enough to put a leash around and walk the block with. A real pet, another heart: company.

I was very excited by my choice; a calico, the clerk, a woman in Birkenstocks, her waist-length white hair streaked with black, described him. Black with bits of orange, some white. I loved the way he felt cupped in both of my hands. I could feel teeth gnawing at my palm.

“Ecch,” my mother said, shivering. “I'm sorry, but it's just disgusting.”

“I think he's cute.” I rubbed my cheek against the guinea pig. “I love him already.”

My mother grimaced. “I don't think you should have that in your room,” she said.

I looked up at my mother, my eyes filling with tears. “Please!” I said.

“Is it sanitary?” she asked the pet store clerk.

“If you change the cage often enough it is,” she said. She smelled of patchouli and sandalwood soap. Smiling beatifically at the animal, she took him from me, placing him carefully back into the store cage.

“I'll do it,” I told my mother. “I promise I will!”

“Well, if your room is any indication . . .”

The woman smiled at me and my mother. “I'll hold the guinea pig for you,” she said. “Why don't you take a few days to figure out if it's exactly what you want.”

“It is!” I said. “It is exactly!” And if I could not have that dog and his big sloppy kisses, I wanted this guinea pig desperately.

“Thank you,” my mother said knowingly. “But we would really like the guinea pig.”

“To be honest,” the clerk said, “we like to protect the animals. And before Christmas, it's just such a chaotic time. I never let them go on Christmas Eve.” She rubbed her nose and her silver rings caught the light from the glowing, bubbling aquariums. The guinea pig sucked happily at his water bottle, his tiny teeth clicking against the metal spout.

“Well, not in our house it isn't,” my mother said. “We're Jewish.”

“Oh,” the woman said, considering it. “Well, then it should be fine.”

My mother nodded encouragingly. “Really,” she said. “Christmas Eve is nothing in our house.”

I looked at my mother as she said this and waited for her to elbow me or wink, but she made no move to acknowledge the ruse.

W
E PURCHASED THE CAGE,
pellets of food, the water bottle, the salt lick, the sawdust, and nothing short of a mini-playground—to the tune of what my mother said, as we drove home along Wisconsin Avenue, was more a year of college than stuff for a hamster.

“Guinea pig, you mean.”

“You sure better enjoy it,” she said.

“Oh, I will,” I said. I held the guinea pig, GP—I'd named him just as we passed Mazza Galleria and the American Café on the way home—in my lap. “I will!” I could feel him nibbling softly on my thighs, his thick, pelletlike body warm on the very crotch my mother had grabbed not three months before when she'd bought these jeans, and I stroked him lovingly.

My father greeted us at the door, a wooden spoon in one hand, for stirring his wine and spices, my sister in the other. “Ooh,” he said as I walked by holding GP with two hands. “Couldn't you at least have gotten a rabbit? When I was a kid—”

“Enough about when you were a kid,” my mother said.

“It's ugly!” my sister said.

“Is not!” I said.

“Rabbits are trainable, you know,” my father said. “They can poop in one little corner of the cage. Once I knew a rabbit who could go to the bathroom on the toilet.”