In Montreal, I run a discussion salon, frequented by searching Jews like me. I started these salons several years ago with a pretty basic goal: to have people come together, meaningfully and sometimes raucously, around a bonfire of ideas and debate. Our last salon happened just before Oct. 7. The next one happens Thursday, the first night of Hanukkah. When I sent out the invite, many people told me they were OK with the date but that, given the war and what’s happening in the Middle East, they were less comfortable marking the celebration.
“I wish the holiday was less chest-thumpy, less militaristic”, said one friend, referring to the Maccabees, the Jewish warrior heroes at the center of the Hanukkah story. Another salon regular said that, given it’s the first holiday celebration since the start of the war, “It should be a more private holiday this year”. Yet another asked if there was going to be a menorah outside the venue — and, if yes, whether there would be security, and if so, how much security.
In all of my years of thinking and organizing alongside largely progressive Jews — consistently grappling with and arguing over questions of Jewish identity and what it means to be Jewish — Hanukkah, with its kitschy consumerism and kid-centric focus, has never felt particularly contentious. It’s certainly not a holiday one might normally need to forgo for moral or ethical reasons.
This year is different. In Israel, there are reports of far-right groups embracing the nationalist interpretations of Hanukkah, with a “Maccabi March” to assert the right to full Jewish control over the Temple Mount. And I confess that, at this moment of global horror, I’ve wondered whether celebration of any sort can feel appropriate. But I also know that Hanukkah — an actual festival of light — is the best holiday a Jewish person of any stripe could hope to observe right now.
Apocryphal stories about oil and eight days aside, the true miracle of Hanukkah has always been its adaptability. It’s the most modern of Jewish holidays, reliably shape-shifting to address whatever the most pressing needs or hopes or desires of the community have been in a particular moment. And it’s long had tremendous communal value, especially for those of us who might describe ourselves primarily as secular or cultural Jews.
For Hanukkah in 2023, there are cold towns in Canada and wet boroughs in London that are removing menorahs from their city hall greens. Which means that, for Jews, this holiday is an important opportunity. Jewish culture in America can often feel overly fixated on the act of remembrance but it is time, pressingly, for Jewish people to examine our culture in the context of the current moment, and to ask whether what animates the core of our personal Jewishness is nourishing enough, resilient enough, to equip us to withstand both what is happening and what is on the horizon. This is the kind of thing that’s best done together.
In the early 20th century, as Eastern European Jews arrived in cities like New York and took up the celebration of Christmas as a way to prove their Americanness, synagogues and Jewish groups made a dedicated push to transform the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major December happening. After the Holocaust, Hanukkah, which in its most classic iteration commemorates the Maccabean revolt against the Hellenization of Judea in the second century B.C., became more tightly intertwined with the founding of the Jewish state — a way of introducing the diaspora to the idea of a contemporary Israel, and a way for the new nation to mythologize itself.
In more recent decades, as some synagogues struggled to fully embrace the reality of interfaith families — a frustrating and self-defeating reluctance, given that 40 percent of American Jews are married to non-Jews — Hanukkah has served as a simple and convenient bonding agent within families and among Jews and non-Jews. As a solstice-timed holiday centered on universal ideas of light-in-darkness, a more anodyne version of Hanukkah arose and took hold. The notion of “Chrismukkah” originated in the 19th century among German and Austrian Jews (the term they used was “Weihnukka”, based on Weihnachten, the German word for Christmas) but Chrismukkah, as a celebration of the blended family, really took flight in America when the phrase was featured in a minor plotline on the TV series “The O.C”. And it’s actually stuck — maybe because Chrismukkah highlights something of the open-ended generosity that’s inherent to Hanukkah. Everyone is allowed in. In Judaism, that’s a rare thing to be able to say.
Certainly, in my own life, Hanukkah has been the holiday I’ve relied on as both diversion and balm in tough times. Midst of a divorce? Plan a Hanukkah party for the kids. Recent death of a parent? Hanukkah can be an act of commemoration. If other Jewish holidays are tightly tethered to ancient traditional practice — and to no small amount of spiritual responsibility — Hanukkah can function simply as a celebration of the pleasure of having rituals, even if some of them are of a relatively modern vintage. Hanukkah has long been a potent symbol of resilience, as in the Isaac Bashevis Singer story “The Power of Light”, about the lighting of a menorah in the Warsaw ghetto: “That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left”. The traditional Jewish calendar is already filled with hardship, and its fair share of lugubriousness. Hanukkah’s lightness is its merit. It’s a way to validate Jewish joy.
Like many of my peers, I have never belonged to a synagogue — so Hanukkah has always been an important time to find my community. Instead of fixating this year on dismantled menorahs in public squares, I’ll focus on initiatives like a U.S. campaign called Project Menorah in which non-Jews are encouraged to light menorahs in their windows so that Jewish people who are afraid of having the only menorah on the block will feel more secure. Or the websites like Hey Alma that are sharing prayers for the release of the hostages in Israel — a worthwhile addition to our Hanukkah ceremonies. Or the groups, like one within the progressive New York synagogue Lab/Shul, that are lighting yahrzheit candles — candles for the souls of the dead — for the hostages and all the innocent victims of violence, along with their Hanukkah candles.
These are all creative ideas that fully consider the moment we’re living in, and turn that consideration into a building block. Because the Jewish future needs to be built on something — and it just can’t be fear and commemoration alone. There must, at the very least, be communal comfort and the will to gather.
So we’ll gather, tonight, on Hanukkah.
We’ll celebrate as a necessity and as a foil against isolationism. We’ll gather as conflicted souls and also as a force countering hatred. Will there be security? Yes — the kind in a uniform and also the kind that comes from open arms. As one friend of the salon told me — a woman, incidentally, who specializes in teaching people about grief — “Hanukkah is about joy and miracles. Why throw in the towel now?”
Mireille Silcoff is the author of the short-story collection Chez l’Arabe and an organizer of Jewish salons.