I was going to write another post about Synesthesia, but then today we went shopping and there were Christmas decorations EVERYWHERE. It looked like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was flying too fast after accidentally eating some little Christmas elves and half of Santa's bag of presents and puked green-and-red Christmas festiveness all over the entire store.
On behalf of my religion, Feh! Oy gevalt. Christmas is such a nudge. We Jews have been around for thousands of years and we get what? Bupkes! And don't even get me started about other religions!
Pardon my kvetching, but I felt extremely underrepresented. So today, I wanted to tell the somewhat little-known story of Hannukah.
Here we go:
A long time ago, around 168 BCE, some Greeks took over a Jewish temple and made it into a temple for Zeus. The Greek king, Antiochus, forbade them from practicing judaism and forced them to worship Greek gods instead.
As you can imagine, the Jews were not so pleased. They tried to rebel, but they were mostly struck down by the Greeks. Some of the rebels went into hiding, where they formed a great big, wonderful, and admittedly rag-tag group known as the Maccabbees. Perhaps you've heard of them.
Anyways, these Maccabees lead a rebellion and, against all odds, won their freedom! Then they went back to their temple, which was completely and totally spiritually desecrated and contaminated and defiled and corrupted by the Greeks and their pig-cooking, idol-worshiping ways. The Jews had to purify their temple with an oil-burning ritual; they had to burn oil in the temple's menorah (a candle contraption to measure the days that has eight candles, one for each day of the week and one to light the other candles) for eight days. They looked around, but they could only find enough oil to burn for one day. The Jews decided to go for it anyways, and, to their surprise, the menorah burned for all eight days!
This is not the hugest miracle in the Torah, as one might presume. I mean, Moses split the red sea apart and turned his staff into a snake. That's way awesomer than long-lasting candles. The story is less about the miracle of the menorah and more about the success of the Jews in standing up for their beliefs and fighting to gain freedom.
But you would be right in guessing that Hannukah is not the most important Jewish holiday. The Christmas season has seriously overblown the importance of Hannukah as well as super-commercializing it. Hannukah gets maybe an enitre row in most stores, but Passover, which one of the more important Jewish holidays, gets a shelf of tasteless matzoh-related products and nothing else.
Anyway.
In honor of this minor miracle, which is still a miracle, we light one candle each night in our Hanukkiah, which are menorahs that have nine candles for the eight days of Hannukah. We also eat fried foods, to commemorate the oil that lasted for eight days, like Latkes (potato pancakes) and Suvganyot (jelly doughnuts). Yeah, Jews are awesome. And, if course, we play driedel. Dreidel is more or less a gambling game. You have a dreidel, a spinning top that has four sides. On each side is one of four hebrew letters; a nun, gimmel, hey, and shin. They stand for nes gadol hiyah sham, which means "A great miracle happened there." In Israel, instead of a shin, there's a pei, because their driedals mean nes gadol hiyah po, "A great miracle happened here". Basically, you spin the driedel, and depending on what letter it lands on, you take some coins from the center or put some in. Whoever ends up with all of the coins wins.
As much as I hate the main-stream commercialism of certain holidays and conforming to society, I love this time of year. I love pretty much everything about Hannukkah, especially latkes. I love that everyone seems to be a little happier and a little friendlier, what with Christmas on the way. And I love how there is so much excitement and anticipation everywhere, and a general feeling of giddy joy. Most of the time.
So happy Hannukkah, everyone! Or, as my family says, Chappy Chanukkah!
And just because I can, here's that song about Hannukkah by the Maccabeats. Remember this?
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