Skip to main content

choosing what to light

As the sun sets on the last day of Chanukah, I want to talk a bit about our Chanukiyot.  I have mentioned earlier that when I take photos of our lit  Chanukiyot each night of the holiday that it feels almost like a portrait of the person who owns that particular Chanukiya.

Today, as I cleaned up all of the built up wax and polished each Chanukiya before I put it away, I thought about each one and the deep connection we each have to our particular Chanukiya.

 My late mother-in-law used to say often that she was terrible at choosing gifts for people. She usually managed this by giving cash as a gift. When my kids were little and money meant very little to them they found this choice baffling. 

But once when my older son was at the height of his train love,  my in-laws called me. Their synagogue gift shop was selling a train shaped menorah, did I think it would be a good gift for my son? My son was deep into his passion for all things train. He ardently watched "Thomas the Train". He owned a set of wooden trains that gave him so much joy that he would wake up in the middle of the night to play with them quietly in the living room.

The train Chanukiya was a great gift.

It was a perfect gift. My son is no longer passionate about trains and hasn't been for a long time.
 But this Chanukiya represents a moment where my in-laws were able to really see my son and what he loved.

Behind the train Chanukiya, you can see s simple chrome mid-century Chanukiya.  My husband's family used to light it when my husband was growing up.  The custom in my husband's family was to just light one Chanukiya for the whole family.

In the years since my in-laws died, my husband has been lighting the Chanukiya of his childhood, as he says it he lights "the real one".


Our youngest received this Chanukiya which disassembles into a dreidle as a bar-mitzvah gift.

It's clever and beautiful. but in the middle of the holiday my son switched to using this oil Chanukiya that came from my in-law's home.

They probably purchased it in Israel, or it may have been a gift. The text in the flame back reads, "A great miracle happened there". 

It has a design flaw though. Normally you use the shamash, or the candle off to the side to light the other candles. That isn't possible with this design, so my son shared my shamash with me.

I received
this Chanukiya as a birthday gift from my parents on my 7th or 8th birthday.  One one of those birthdays I was given a tanach with my name inscribed on the cover on the other I got to graduate from a Chanukiya that used birthday candles to a grown up one that used regulation sized Chanukah candles. I used this one from childhood until after my mother died.


Since then I have been using this one.


My parents had found it in an antique store in Quincy. It's an old Eastern European piece, clearly all hand made. It weights a ton. My parents displayed it prominently in our living room. I remember how giddy with joy they were when they brought it home.


Unlike my husband, I grew up in a family where each of us lit our own Chanukiya.  As someone who makes ritual objects I am aware of how the particular ritual object you use can change your relationship to the ritual. For each of us in our family our choices of what we choose to light are connected not just to this moment of lighting this year, this night, but to memories and connections long ago.



Comments

  1. Rituals are so important to connect us with one another and our pasts. This was so clear to me in this holiday season as my daughters got to gather with their cousins, introducing their children to the wonder of celebrating and playing together. Monday we gathered to eat and visit with the friends with whom we collectively raised our children, we're all grandparents now, and the hostess came up with a silly new game (our gatherings usually included one.) Last night it was apparent again as we gathered with a small group for our 37th New Year celebration together...Each time, we shared memories and added to our collective heritage.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah I love your stories. This past December 24th at our UU church our minister mentioned that it was also Chanukah. There were some details she could not remember and asked the congregation if any could answer. There were those from the Jewish faith who answered and were invited to state the prayer which I had never heard before. One started and it was sung others in our church who knew the prayer joined in the song. I felt chills it was so moving.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sue---rituals ARE important.

      Penelope- thanks for sharing. The melody for the blessings is wonderful. Although it comes out of the Askenazi ( German Jewish)tradition, it has pretty much been universally adopted, as has the German melody for Maoz Tzur ( it's translated as Rock of Ages but the words have nothing to do with the Christian hymn).

      This year we discovered that the melody our family sings for Ha neirot halalu ( these candles) while not great-- is a whole lot better than some of the alternatives that are out there---so now we sing it with much greater appreciation. it's a little odd living in a Christian majority society how a fairly minor holiday has grown in importance because it is near to Christmas on the calendar...Imagine if Michaelmas suddenly became the only Christian holiday non Christians knew about...sometimes it feels like that about Chanukah.

      Delete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...