Hanukkah Miracles

I am not supposed to write today, because it is the Sabbath, nor should I be using the computer. But it's the last day of Hanukkah, and before I get too busy doing other things, I want to share my experience of my own, personal Hanukkah miracle, or miracles, really.

This season was full of them. In fact, I could feel the miraculous energy swirling around me sometimes.

Miracle 1: My mother sent me a Hanukkah card. This is my mother, who had nothing to say when I told her and my father I was Jewish, except, "But...what about Christmas?" I told her she could have all the Christmas she wanted. I had every Sabbath, and I had Pesach and Shavuot, and Rosh Hashanah, and all the rest. So we said nothing else about my religion, and I thought she would avoid the topic altogether. Then, a few days before Hanukkah, a card arrived in the mail, which I was almost certain would be a "Holiday" card, or even a Christmas-themed card of some kind, with a cheesy saying she'd made up. It wasn't overly Hanukkah-y. It sported a watercolor of a dove on the front, with "Shalom" in Hebrew letters (a word I recognized, thanks to my Beginning Hebrew class). Inside was a message about hoping my season was filled with Miracles, and she wrote that she wished me a Happy Hanukkah underneath. So that was miracle one, that she sent it.

Miracle 2 was that the card was on time. My mom has never sent a card to me on time, I don't think, in her life. And she was never on time to pick me up from school or to drop me off at band/choir/theater practice my entire childhood. The message to me was: my life wasn't important to her. But she responded to something different this time. This time I chose what was important to me, and I didn't need her approval. I didn't even need her support. But for the first time, she was able to show for me, on time, for something that was important to me, even though it, literally, goes against her religion. Halleluia to that.

Then there was the miracle of the Latke party. Weeks ago, I volunteered to host a Monday - fourth night - Hanukkah party at my house, in which I would make my first-ever latkes for all the guests. This was through a new Minyan in the area, and many would be invited, though I knew it wouldn't be a huge crowd, it being Monday night, and my house being far from most people, in the remote town where I live.

My friend Jen had volunteered to make sufganiyot that night, and I was afraid (though I didn't say it) that if she decided to do that at a different place, then most people would go there, since she is more well-known in the community than I am. But that worked out when she decided to just cook them at my house, so that we could do a joint party.

Then, as the date approached, I had more worries. For one thing, it rained the week before Hanukkah, and where I live, rain means the ants all move indoors. That's exactly what happened, and my house was becoming steadily overrun by tiny ants marching through the bathroom, living room, and kitchen. I put out ant traps that did nothing to make them go away, and the more I tried to clean them up and destroy their ant trails, the more they seemed to invade. I nearly called the party off just because of that, because even the day before, they were everywhere, including in my kitchen drawers, where I kept tin foil and bags and tupperware containers. But I held off. I didn't pick up the phone. Instead, I went to the hardware store, and I got a liquid ant killer that I'd been eying before, and decided to try. The ants started to eat it, and I hoped that would do the trick. Then another friend came by with a different kind of ant trap, and so I put those down, too, for extra protection. Thankfully, when I woke up Monday morning, all but a few ants were gone. It was a miracle! I was ready to rejoice.

But I had another problem. Lack of work meant that cash was tight. I had bought a few supplies for the party ahead of time, but that morning I found myself without enough cash to buy potatoes. It was a sad state of affairs. But I still had to believe that the party needed to go on. I had committed to it. People were counting on me. But not only that, I was counting on me. I had a need to make this happen - to make potato latkes, and open my home to people of the Jewish community, as had been done for me the previous year. Thankfully, my friend stepped in to help again. He saw my need, and even though he'd been having some trouble of his own, he helped me out. We went to the grocery store and bought a few supplies on a very tight budget. But it all worked out well. I was even able to make a small deposit to my bank account, which prevented (just barely) an overdraft on my account that I was worried about.

So that was Miracle number 3, and 4.

But wait, there's more. When I went to make the latkes, I discovered that, of all the things I had remembered to buy, frying oil wasn't one of them. Plain oil isn't something I normally keep in my kitchen. I generally only use olive oil. So I looked, and all I had was about a half a cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. My friend Jen offered for me to use the leftover oil from the sufganiyot, which had only a small amount of sediment in it, but still smelled a bit like doughnuts. I decided I would try olive oil. Two nights before, I had enjoyed latkes that someone had cooked in olive oil, and I thought it could work, or perhaps a mixture of the two. It looked like I had enough, and when I checked the label, I saw that it was certified kosher.

So I cooked the latkes in olive oil, and they came out delicious. They were crispy on the edges, and not too brown, with just a hint of garlic, and few other spices for flavoring. Everyone loved them, including Roger, who had invited me to be on the planning committee for the Minyan in the first place. He waxed poetic about them, holding his hand up in the air with his fingers touching his thumb, and shook it in just that way that means what he ate was just so perfect, he couldn't even put his finger on it. He said, "See? You even made me talk like this!" And he did it again. It was all worth it.

And I found out later from a rabbi that, despite the doubt some people had expressed about the viability of cooking latkes in olive oil, it was probably the most authentic way to cook them, since olive oil is precisely the kind of oil the Maccabees had needed and had found and used in the Temple after they defeated the Assyrian Greeks.

And in a way, the way I found it was very similar. I found that I did not have what I thought I needed. The oil that my friend had brought was already "defiled" by having been used for the doughnuts, and so what I had left was a small amount of pure, unadulterated, kosher olive oil, which didn't look like enough to cook the huge batch of potato pancakes I had prepared. And yet, once I started cooking, I realized that I in fact did have enough, that it lasted as long as I needed it to, with even a little left over. And my pancakes were delicious, as perfect as I could have wanted them, and kosher.

It was all an amazing success, and even more so because I had not thought it possible that it could happen.

But Hashem does make the impossible possible. Where we see blockages and hurdles, G-d lifts us over and carries us through, if only we keep walking. Because that's what I did. I could have turned aside. I could have called the party off. But I had a vision for it that it was going to happen, and I didn't want to let that vision go. In the end, it became exactly as I had imagined it. But only because Hashem blessed me, over and over again, and made possibilities appear where I had only seen challenges.

And so I realized later that, just as it had said on the card my mother sent me, my Hanukkah was indeed filled with miracles.

Parshat Vayishlach

We had a difficult reading this week. I was somewhat gratified that the woman who gave the drash chose to speak about the Rape of Dinah - sometimes called the "Ravishing" of Dinah - but I have to confess that I differ with her on some points.

She started by linking what happened in the story with the tragic incident of a recent gang rape in Richmond, which took place in front of onlookers who did nothing at all to stop it.

But I believe it is too easy to look at the story of Dinah and say, "Look, she was raped. That is bad." And conclude that the Bible, the writers of the Bible, and Judaism itself condones rape. It's too easy to say that this is a story the glorifies the desecration of women, and just "goes to show" that we live in a patriarchal society that sees women as objects to be traded, or meat to be sold. To me, that is all too simplistic, because that is not at all what I heard when the Torah was read this week.

The text says that Dinah, "Went out to visit the daughters of the land" (Gen. 34:1) So maybe she had some friends. She wanted to go shopping. We don't know. But the text makes it clear that she wasn't leaving the house to consort with men. However, we are told that Shechem, who was the son of the country's chief ruler, Hamor, saw Dinah, and suddenly he "had to have her." He had to so much that he "took her and lay with her by force" (Gen. 34:2). We don't know how she responded. We don't know if she screamed, bit, kicked, or acquiesced. If he held her by the throat, does that mean she submitted willingly? But in the end it doesn't matter. The text is clear, she was taken by force. Therefore, she was not taken of her own will, it was not consensual, and moreover, Shechem is not a Jew. If she had wanted to go with him, her brothers still might have been upset, since they were not permitted to marry outside the clan.

I searched through my "Concise Book of Mitzvoth" for the particular mitzvah that prohibits the taking of a woman by force. I didn't find it. But I remember reading that there are specific guidelines regarding what does and does not constitute rape in the Jewish tradition. For example, if a woman is taken by force in a city street, and she screams, but no one hears her, she is raped, and the man is punished. If she is taken in a field, where no one can hear her, if she says she was raped, she was raped, since there is no one else who could have heard her, even if she screamed. If, however, she is raped in a city street, and she says nothing or makes no noise, and she could have screamed, then she is held at least partly accountable, because she could have called for help but didn't. So there are very clear prohibitions against taking a woman by force.

But there are other prohibitions that suggest that rape is something that is looked down upon. Among the prohibitions I am thinking of, there is "Not to take anything in robbery from one's fellow-man by main force," "Not to wrongfully retain anything belonging to one's fellow-man," and "Not to covet (desire) anything belonging to one's fellow-man." In this case, "to covet" means not only "to desire" but also to take some action toward obtaining the desired thing.

I do not mean to imply that women are or should be legally regarded as "objects" to be "obtained" by men, although you could say that might have been the going mentality of the time. But I think I mean more that, through making these prohibitions on objects or things that one might desire, which are not rightfully yours, the same would apply to a woman, if a man happened to desire her. And actually, if he did desire her and "take" her - by force or through action - it is wrong precisely because by doing this he DOES make an object of her.

Some other mitzvoth that I believe apply here are the the prohibition "To do nothing whatever from which there can result hillul Hashem, a desecration of the Divine name," and "To destroy no holy thing and to erase no name whatever among the holy names [of God]," mitzvot 155 and 157, respectively. These have to do specifically with the names of God. But a mystical reading of this idea could say that in a way, we are all letters of Torah, and all letters are part of Torah, which contains the Name of God. Each person contains a spark of the Divine Light, and so the Name of God in some ways, is written by our very being. The description of this second mitzvah, 157, quotes the scripture from which it comes, "You shall not do so to Hashem your God," (D'varim 12:4). Therefore if you are not going to do it to Hashem, by extension you are not - or should not - do "it", that is, destroy, your fellow human being. "It is forbidden to break and to destroy any object of holiness."

And that is exactly what rape does. It destroys a person. It breaks holiness. It erases part of a person's name, their sanctity, their identity. It dims their light. It robs them of joy, of life, of themselves. The Jewish people of old knew this as well as we know it today.

And that's where the woman who gave the drash was right when she said that nothing has changed. But not only has it not changed that rape still can and does occur, which is tragic and lamentable. It has also not changed that people hate it now as much as we did then. This is evidenced by the reaction of Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi.

Simeon and Levi were "out in the field" when all this took place. Because Shechem didn't merely "take" Dinah and let her go. He brought her back to his house, and went with Hamor to Jacob to negotiate over how he could get Dinah to be his wife, because he claimed to "love" her.

This is clearly a case where we have a mixed message. Shechem "loves Dinah" and so he "spoke to the maiden tenderly" (Gen. 34:3). But he also took her by force, which means, it is not possible that he loved her in the true sense. This would be an example of love in the distorted, arrogant sense that means you believe you have the right to anything you desire. It means you think if you love a person, that person "belongs" to you. It means you don't bother to seek the other person's permission. You railroad them with your feelings, leaving them numb and invalidated. It is abusive love, at it's worst. And the Torah makes no excuse for it.

No one supports Shechem's action, except his own father, so we can assume the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And they are punished in a way a lot of us would probably like to see someone punished who degrades so severely a member of our family. Dinah's brothers take action to save her honor that most of us would not only be afraid to do, for fear of legal consequences, but we just plain wouldn't have the guts to carry out.

So Jacob waits for Simeon and Levi to come back from the field, while Hamor is there, trying to negotiate a way to get his son access to Dinah as a wife, even though he has already pretty much "had" her. The brothers come in, and we're sure they are pretty angry, but they exercise a huge amount of restraint. Rather than tackling the men right there, risking their own lives, they pretend to collude with them. And by doing that, they get more than just petty revenge. They "speak with guile" "because he (Shechem) had defiled their sister Dinah" (Gen. 34:13). They put up a challenge. If Hamor gets Shechem and all the men of the city to circumcise themselves, then Jacob will let the men marry his daughters. Meanwhile, if they don't do it, the Israelites will pack up their beautiful maidens and leave. So Shechem and Hamor, thinking they are about to get a really good deal, go off and self-mutilate their genitals.

When they have done this, Simeon and Levi wait three days, and "on the third day, when they (the men of the town) were in pain" (Gen. 34:25) (because they had just circumcised themselves), Simeon and Levi stroll in, armed to the teeth, but under no suspicion because it was believed that they were on Hamor and Shechem's side. They then surprised the men of the town and slaughtered as many of them as they could, plundered everything, and took back Dinah.

Of course, they couldn't stay there anymore, after that.

But they did defend their sister's honor.

Compare their action to supposed "honor killings" in some Muslim communities. Not all Muslims do this, of course, but for those who do, the belief is that when a woman is raped it is somehow "her fault." You know, like she looked too beautiful, or she walked just so - she was "asking for it." And this doesn't happen only in Muslim communities. Many men is Western, developed nations try to blame women for their own sexual assault. But in some extreme Muslim communities, it is acceptable, indeed, sometimes expected, that to save a woman's "honor," a husband, brother or father will hunt down the rape victim and kill her.

That happens now. Today. And it's abhorrent. To my mind, this practice is orders of magnitude worse than what occurs in Parshat Vayishlach with Dinah, and we should be much more worried about that than about whether or not this story is "difficult" to read. Of course it's difficult. Because life is difficult. And the Torah doesn't sugar-coat it for us.

Dinah was raped. There is no question about that. But nobody blames Dinah. Nobody persecutes her, and nobody punishes her. Quite the opposite. Her brothers are inflamed with anger because her body was desecrated, but not at her. At the men who took her. And not only do they seek out to harm the men who hurt her, they first use their bargaining power to cause the men of Shechem to essentially violate themselves to be in pain for three days before the brothers arrive to liberate their sister.

Every woman should be so lucky to have brothers ready to defend her honor with such passion.