Eight Links for Chanukah
Happy Chanukah! Talia is presently turning in her revised book manuscript and David is otherwise indisposed, so in lieu of a sandwich column we're presenting you with a holiday gift: eight newsletters from all across the wild garden of Substack for you to read. Here is joy, sustenance, hard truth, inspiration, thoughtful meditation, insightful analysis, careful reflection and sharp prose. We hope these eight offerings give you a little light in this dark month.
Love,
D&T
Bravely Facing the Truth
By Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Life is a Sacred Text
Human beings are going to human being, and we are often messy and complicated and very infrequently do we live up to the ideals that we are supposed to embody. We know this.
But the spiritual path—the one to which all our holy days point, including Hanukah—is about finding the north star of those ideals.
It’s about saying: Here’s what we are, what we can be for, here’s how we can aim to transcend the lazy, selfish parts of ourselves. The parts of ourselves that seek power at others’ expense. The parts of ourselves that look out for number one instead of reaching out to everyone being harmed. The parts of ourselves driven by fear, not by true courage—true valor.
Hanukah isn’t just about what happened in the past, on the calendar.
It’s about who we are capable of being.
It’s about the bravery, will and determination to reject tyranny.
It’s about the survival of the Jewish tradition, the protection of what is most holy to us.
Christmas Is a Helluva Drug
By A.J. Daulerio, The Small Bow
In elementary school, I was a full-blown snob about Santa. I would listen to my classmates discuss their holiday routines and watch them make their silly wishlists while thinking, “These fools have no idea.” I went to my next-door neighbor’s the day after Christmas, and after I inspected his haul, I said, “That’s it?” His mother was flabbergasted.
It all fell apart in fourth grade. A kid with a weirdly shaped head named Ryan not-so-gently broke it to me that Santa was not real. He was more pitying than cruel, but he didn't understand how I could be so naive. I still wasn’t convinced, and I asked my dad about it while we were driving back from basketball practice. He shook his head and reluctantly revealed the truth: “I wanted to tell you a couple of years ago, but your mother wouldn’t let me.”
When we got home, he told her what we had talked about. I was sad, but she was devastated. This was a real loss. The brightest light had gone out.
Prisons, Prose & Protest
By Mariame Kaba, Prisonculture
People who know me have heard me say many times that I see living mainly as a process of shrinking the gap between my values and my actions. There are challenges, of course, because our values are often in conflict with others’ and they are also contextual, so they are not brick walls. Still, we can try to do our best.
Some people (on the Left(s) and the Right) stay furious with me because I embrace transformative justice (TJ) as a value and practice. I believe what angers them is that they cannot bully me or force me to abandon my long-standing values. I’m committed to the practice. At the center of TJ processes is consent. No one is conscripted to take part. And there are many more people who want to take part than there are people willing to facilitate processes. I wish this wasn’t the case.
The ugly origins of the “War on Christmas”
By Parker Molloy, The Present Age
Back in 2019, I spent about a week researching and writing an article for Media Matters about the so-called “War on Christmas.” I wanted to somehow commemorate the 15th anniversary of Bill O’Reilly’s December 3, 2004 declaration that Christmas was “under siege,” and illustrate the destruction that’s come out of the fake annual freak-out. I wrote a piece that I was really proud of, and our great video team put together a great compilation of Fox News Christmas freak-out segments that’s worth a watch.
And while Fox News is largely responsible for the way Christmas has become a one-sided battleground in the modern sense (I think my description of O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, etc. as “cable news Don Quixotes” remains apt), it was not where this battle began.
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Hanukkah, Eggnog, and You
By Josh Gondelman, That’s Marvelous!
Recently, a stranger remarked to me that he had nothing against the Jewish people (which I believe, because when you have something against them/us, you don’t usually say “the Jewish people” in full like that), but he thinks there didn’t used to be so many Jewish holidays. Frankly, it was refreshing to hear an antisemitic conspiracy theory with such low stakes. Some people think the Jews control the media; this guy just thinks we want Hanukkah to be as long as Christmas.
But as far as I’m concerned, eight crazy nights don’t need to keep pace with twelve days! Hanukkah, now is your literal time to shine! Christmas may grab the headlines, but you’ve got a lot going for you: Open flames, signature potatoes, a reason to look forward to the sun setting at 4:45pm, just to name a few!
The Hanukkah x Christmas intersection this year doesn’t diminish your excellence. It highlights it. No one ever tries to give you a double-digit number of birds as a Hanukkah present, for one thing. And Hanukkah celebrators spend a few minutes each night observing the holiday, and everything else is optional. What’s better than that? You’re a durable, delicious, customizable celebration! It’s been a weird year for us Jews (virtually evergreen statement) and now is an occasion to go whatever the Jewish equivalent of HAM is.
Also, a tip for Jews: When someone wishes you a Merry Christmas, there is no rule against wishing them a Happy Hanukkah in return if you want!
From the Kitchen: Holiday Menu Guide
By Alicia Kennedy, From the Desk of…
I wanted to share, before the end of the year is in full swing, an edited list of ideas for vegan holiday recipes. I’m low on mains, I’ve noticed, so that’s something for me to work on, but a big, flavorful rice dish is something good to serve anyone who doesn’t eat meat. Some of these recipes require a bit more planning (the peppermint bark sheet cake has a faux-white chocolate frosting that requires cocoa butter; vegan coquito requires coconut condensed milk), thus I figure it’s good to get the inspiration flowing early.
An Erin In The Morning Christmas Message
By Erin Reed, Erin In The Morning
The holidays can be hard for many people, and this is especially true for transgender people. For some of trans people, holidays mean visiting together with family they have not seen for a long time. This is stressful because these are the people most likely to misgender them and call them by their old names. For others, the holidays represent a complete absence of family, and things can feel very lonely in those circumstances. Transgender people in their first year of coming out often feel this the hardest—the experience can be jarring. I wanted to talk about the role of allies and the queer community during the holidays how they can possibly make things better for you and those you love.
When I first transitioned, I experienced a lot of family rejection. My first Christmas away from family after coming out loomed near and I was afraid it would sting so bad. It did, but that was muted because I built so many queer friends and allies during my first year of transition. When Christmas finally did come, I spent the entire time going from house to house seeing the people who loved me and invited me over. I very quickly learned the meaning of found family.
A Theory of Sprawling Holidays
By Anne Helen Peterson
Performing Christmas became a way to maintain middle-class domestic cohesion—to broadcast to your immediate and extended family and the whole block that we’ve got this on lock. (So many of the current attributes of Christmas reinforce the middle-class American family ideal: the primary signifiers [the tree, the visible lights] are “best” on display in the single-family dwelling; you can only get a (sizeable) tree with a car and someone capable of heaving it around. The “magic” of Christmas depends on the presence of children to experience it alongside; to spend Christmas alone is framed as some sort of unspeakable sadness).
You can see how Christmas Creation took over the month of December—starting with the weekend after Thanksgiving, with that initial push for massive consumption, then gaining speed and intensity, trying its hardest to absorb Hanukkah, all the way up until Christmas Day itself, which is often experienced as a sort of explosion followed by stupor. There are so many things to do, so many gifts to buy, so many family photo shoots to sort through and then pick the right photo to upload to Shutterfly. Some of it rules! Some of it does not. But the truth is that there’s not a lot of obvious ways for Christmas to continue expanding. Hence: the dog advent calendar I just saw this morning at Trader Joe’s.
Gilt By Association
By Talia Lavin, The Sword & the Sandwich
It’s Chanukah, day two of the Festival of Lights, where we celebrate the victory of heroic Jews over the bloated, overstretched Seleucid Empire in the second century C.E. It’s an emphatically postbiblical story, with God an unseen presence in the tale, and a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish pantheon—dwarfed by Passover, the High Holy Days, and fast days of solemn prayer you have probably never heard of, like Tisha b’Av or Shiva Asar b’Tamuz.
Chanukah as it’s presently celebrated is a fun, chill holiday and one I enjoy very much, centered around fried food, festive candelabras, chocolate, and gambling. The actual story behind the holiday, about a small band of religious zealots committing war crimes against Jews they deemed too assimilated, was retroactively given a softer focus by the Talmud’s Sages. Reasonably concluding that a holiday celebrating violent revolution might poorly serve a people in exile, they added in the story of the miracle of the oil lamp a few centuries later. In keeping with the Sages, most of the traditions associated with Chanukah today have developed within the last few centuries, at any rate the fun ones—and supplied, ex post facto, with convenient religious apologia.
