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.

Hanukkah night One

I thought it was nice that the hosts of the party wanted everyone to have their own menorah. They even brought a supply of extras to give those who didn't have one. It's a cheap tin thing, but it holds eight candles - nine, counting the one you use to light them.

Again, it's about synergy. One menorah probably would have done it. But the effect of lighting so many more candles means the light combines to create even more light, not in an additive way, more of a multiplication. Two candles isn't one plus one so much as two times two. Which is twice as bright as two on their own.

Kind of like human relationships.

And I had another gift. After I arrived and washed my hands, I came into the kitchen and announced to the host that it was my first Hanukkah, and that I was converting. "Mazal tov!" she cried. She thew her arms around me, and sang the "Mazal tov" song while dancing with me in circles around the kitchen. It was a magical moment.

That is how I see Judiasm. Magical moments that enhance the light of your soul without regard for who you are on the outside. It honors the truth of your just being there. Which is worth dancing about.

Some people believe you have to be born Jewish in order to be Jewish. Other people say a Jewish soul is a Jewish soul, whether you were born into the tradition or not, and can only be revealed by exposure. I don't know if it is presumptuous to say I might have one or not. All I know is I feel like I'm coming home.

Hanukkah by surprise

Hanukkah started over a week ago, on December 12, when I went for a home-grown Shabbat dinner for those seeking their way in Jewish spirituality. Those in attendance included a former Ultra-Orthodox woman who now felt nervous about wearing pants and her not-so-Christian Christian boyfriend, some old, thoughtful men, a woman with a strong accent, another old woman who had lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust in Germany, but who's own family had "assimilated" themselves and consequently she was raised in a highly anti-Semitic atmosphere, and to this day cannot go to synagogue because she can't stand to be around 'a lot of Jewish people,' and future converts, like myself.

Just after I walked in the front door and met the hosting rabbi, a young girl, about six, trotted up to me, in a woven hoodie, and said, "Would you like a dreidel?" She held out a bright orange plastic dreidel, and I said yes, thank you. I told her, this is the best dreidel I've ever had! Which was true. It is the only dreidel I've ever had. Not counting one that we played with at my grandmother's house when I was small, and we learned about spinning dreidel and Hanukkah gelt as sort of a cultural curiosity, in comparison to our Christmas traditions, which were clearly more advanced.

This dreidel was real.

"You're welcome!" the girl chirped, and scampered off to the kitchen to offer more dreidels to other guests.

That was Lucy. She was a special girl and a real light to the evening. She lit up the room, and seemed like she knew what she was doing. I knew her mother. I had taken a class with her, and she is the one who had told me about the organization, and that's how I ended up at the Shabbos dinner. And I knew that her mother was converting. What I didn't know was that both she and her husband were converting together. They both looked like they could have been Jewish, if they had said, "we're Jewish," and you didn't know any differently. (I am only now becoming familiar with what Jewish "looks" like - though my caveat here is that there really is no way that "Jewish" people "look." For every one person that fits the stereotype, there are five or seven who do not. And the "stereotype" is not even a fixed definition. So you really can't know.) But they were choosing it together. I thought that was just beautiful. And I think their inspiration was their child. It almost seems as if she came along and infused their lives with a love and need of God that they hadn't known was there before. And she took on the job of a child with zeal and unadulterated enthusiasm. She was there to take the cover off the challah, to offer words of wisdom, to greet people, read their souls, and give them gifts.

Throughout the dinner, Lucy would go off to the other room, and periodically return with a "Happy Chanukah" card, colored in marker, for each of the guests. To me, she gave a puzzle. "Do you like puzzles?" She asked. I do, I replied. She disappeared and returned with a "Happy Chanukah" puzzle, colored primarily in purple marker. "You can put it in a special place and work on it every day," she told me. Thank you, I said.

I did put the puzzle in a special place. But I wouldn't dream of taking it apart. It's the work of a special girl, and also a very special gift.

I like the thought of Hanukkah. To me, before it arrived, I had the sense it was a minor holiday. It's not as important as Rosh Hashanah or Pesach, and it's a more recent addition to the Jewish calendar, sometimes derided by Jews as a lame way of competing with other major religions who also have a light-related holiday around the darkest time of the year. But why shouldn't they have one? It makes rational sense.

At the beginning of the Shabbos dinner, the rabbi asked us all to say one thing that made us feel a sense of light and warmth. I thought it seemed a little condescending, a little childish, and the answers were predictable. The answers were of course the things that we do in the dark and cold to make us feel light and warmth - gathering with family and friends, lighting candles, and eating warm, spicy foods. My answer was that we can be thankful for the dark and the cold for making us appreciate these things all the more.

But later on, I could see the wisdom of focusing on the light instead of the dark. Even if the light is very small and the dark is very big, and the cold more pervasive than the warm, it is still a good practice to focus on the good within the bad. It makes you feel better. If you lament the cold and dark that is everywhere, that is where you will be - alone, and outside longing to be in. It is better to be drawn in by the light. Let yourself fall into that tractor beam, and then your worries and your self-delusions will be a little less harsh. You will all leave your baggage outside, to be consumed by the wind, or eroded by the elements, and your tiny, shining inner self will join with the light of others to create not one tiny flame, but a great ball of warmth that will effectively thwart the effects of loneliness and create a cohesive whole. It's about synergy. Inclusivity. Focusing on the positive. It's about strength.