I am a non-observant Jew. An irreligious one. Agnostic, if not an atheist.
But I will light the Hanukkiah (or Hanukkah menorah on Thursday night and for the next seven nights. I’ll don my yarmulke, say the prayers, follow the tradition. I do this not out of religious obligation or habit, but because of what the act signifies for me: A connection to a historic past and a declaration that — despite my irreligiousness — my identity, values, and being are part of a continuum.
Hanukkah is considered by many to be a minor holiday in the Jewish pantheon. It is what is called a post-biblical or rabbinical observance, unlike the holiest days of the Jewish calendar — the weekly sabbath, Rosh Hashanna, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Hanukkah, like Purim in the spring, is "not mentioned in the Bible,” according to My Jewish Learning. Its story comes from the First and Second books of Maccabees, and are not canonical, meaning they are not part of the Tanach, (the five books of the Torah, and the books of Prophets and Writings).
The holiday has always been important — the story of Jewish fighters who liberate Israel from an Assyrian regime bent on erasing Judaism, “a three-year campaign that culminated in the cleaning and rededication of the Temple” and the miracle of the oil.
The lighting of the candles for eight nights is meant to mimic and commemorate this miracle — one day of oil lasting for eight days, allowing for the rededication of the sacred Temple, and providing proof to the Jews of a god who (as the Hanukkah prayers tell us) “performed miracles for our forefathers” and “has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.”
But why would a secular Jew, an agnostic Jew, continue with a ritual that speaks of god (or G-d, as more religious Jews would write)?
Hanukkah, for me, is about identity. I am a Jew. I am a Jew, even if I refuse to attend religious services. Even if I find organized religion a massive racket, not so much in the Marxist sense of it being the “opium of the people,” but because it often runs counter to spiritual and religious belief, commodifies it, undermines it. Questions of justice and charity, for instance, are distorted through a tribal or congregational lens, with Jews donating to Jews, Catholics to the church, Muslims to their own, and so on, and defending their own even when the actions engaged in are indefensible.
The last time I attended synagogue was Rosh Hashanna 2001. It was exactly a week after we watched the Twin Towers collapse as a result of a coordinated terrorist attack. The United States was in the grip of competing manias — a false unity and anti-Muslim hysteria. We were mourning and raging, attempting to come to grips with the loss of friends and family, while also virulently demanding revenge.
I, like so many, sought community. Sought comfort in tradition. I was not a member of the local synagogue, though it was the congregation of my youth. My grandparents’ names are affixed to the Yarzheit wall. My dad had helped paint the building when it opened. But I was not a member and did not have a ticket — did not pay the fees associated with membership or buy a seat. While I was invited in, I was not truly accepted. Not really welcomed. I was consigned to a lesser status. Pushed to a storage room full of prayer books and tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls). There were folding chairs set up and a big screen TV. I was one of just three or four men in the room. Nonmembers. We were invited to pray, but not to be part of the larger community.
Some will see my complaints as petty. Congregants should get preferred seating because they are the ones who keep the synagogue going. That is the American way. But is it Abraham’s way? Abraham who “goes to great lengths to share his bounty with utter strangers.” Who, “blessed with plenty,” places the needs of others above his own desires.
This is my reading, a personal reading and response to my own upbringing and experiences. At 61, I still struggle with what it means to be a Jew, with the religious elements, the spiritual aspects. I wear a chai
— rather than a Star of David — to signal my connection, to my heritage and to the sanctity of living things.
I am a secular, ethnic Jew, which means I see my Jewishness as existing beyond religious affiliation. Beyond belief in god. I attended Hebrew school, went to schul on the holidays. My mom kept kosher for much of my childhood. This informs who I am, is where religion and ethnicity intersect. I am of Eastern European immigrant stock (third generation) and carry that traditional sense of Jewishness with me. “In the old country,” according to The Pluralism Project at Harvard, “Jews identified themselves as Jews rather than Russians, Poles, or Lithuanians.” We did this both because the nations from which we fled treated us as outsiders, segregating us into ghettos and limiting our movement, and because Jewish religious belief created a separation, marked us as different — different dietary customs and religious rituals. Jews
Despite having lived in a country for centuries, they had their own national culture, language, and society. This cultural phenomenon—Yiddishkeit, the Yiddish word for “Jewishness”—would not so easily dissipate in the New World. While Jewish religious practice was rapidly democratizing, secularizing, Americanizing, and undergoing schisms into different movements, Jewish ethnic, political, and cultural identity persisted through the immigrant era and into the succeeding generations.
“In America,” Samira Mehta wrote this week on The Conversation, Jews have long been full citizens, “free from the laws that had previously kept their communities isolated in many parts of Europe.” Our freedom of religion and movement meant that it was “easier for each individual to choose how much to engage with Jewish community, if at all.” That was a new and unprecedented concept.
I am a product of this democratization and desegregation, a beneficiary of it, living a life that was inconceivable to my ancestors. I have no restrictions on who I can marry or befriend, where I can live, or where or whether I worship. American Jews are privileged in ways we have never been, and yet we still face antisemitism and even violence — which is why I choose to continue the Hanukkah tradition, even as the holiday has grown into a festival of gifts and commercialism (paralleling the similar commercialization of Christmas).
To quote the poet Charles Reznnikoff:
The miracle, of course, was not that the oil for the sacred light— in a little cruse—lasted as long as they say; but that the courage of the Maccabees lasted to this day: let that nourish my flickering spirit.