In a rare treat, yesterday was not only Christmas, but the first night of Hanukkah – something any Jew in the Western World outside of Israel can appreciate. After lighting the Hanukkiah and exchange presents, Michelle and I curled up on the sofa under our Costco-sourced sherpa blankets to watch Sunshine – sometimes title Sonnenschein – a 1999 movie telling the story of a Jewish family in Budapest over four generation from the 1890s to the late 1950's. As you can imagine, a lot happens. Given there are no Hollywood movies about the Hanukkah story, Ralph Fiennes playing the lead male across three generations of Ashkenazi Jews seemed like as good a Hanukkah movie as any.
I'm not a fan of rewatching movies time and time again – but there are some that are always good and the beauty of rewatching something with as much going on as Sunshine is seeing things you didn't fully notice the first time.
At the end of the film, the main character and narrator Ivan Sonnenschein finds an old letter from his great-grandfather Emmanuel Sonnenschien to Emmanuel's son, Ivan's grandfather Ignatz. The letter is a perfect distillation of family and generational wisdom – and something akin to what I can imagine my dad's maternal grandfather writing. Emmanuel's temperament and focus is similar to what I understand of Abraham Roth. One excerpt of the letter caught my attention:
Never give up your religion. Not for God. God is present in all religions. But if your life becomes a struggle for acceptance, you'll always be unhappy. Religion may not be perfect, but it is a well-built boat that can stay balanced and carry you to the other shore. Our life is nothing but a boat adrift on water balanced by permanent uncertainty.
In his 2011 hit book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Israeli history professor Yuval Noah Harari posits that religion and spirituality are two distinct things. Religion is about social order – it's a system of stories that help us act morally and cooperate on mutually accepted platforms. If we can all agree murder is wrong and charity is good – we all benefit and can agree on what defines unacceptable behavior and the severity of aberrant so there can be justice. Religions produced laws well before kingdoms, empires or nation-states and today still provide rules and laws their followers can adhere to that go beyond what a secular state may define.
Spirituality, on the other hand, is very personal. Each person's relationship to the divine is an individual journey that usually involves questioning the stories we receive as children including those from our religions. Spirituality involves seeking truth and finding personal definitions and understandings. People can be spiritual and not religious or religious and not particularly spiritual. Or both. Or neither. That's not to say religion can't be the vehicle from which someone becomes spiritual – it is for many people. It just isn't necessarily so.
Emmanuel Sonnenschein understands the distinction between religion and spirituality and makes a solid argument for religion despite it. And not only for religion, but for one's own religion – whatever you were given at birth. Because it defines you.
This is especially so for Jews where our ethnic identity and religion are bound together. Catholicism is shared by a diversity of cultures from Italian to Brazilian to Macanese. Many ethnicities embrace one religion. But Jews are a scattered people who share a religion. So, in the view of Emmanuel Sonnenschein, to shun Judaism is to enter an identity crisis. And, if all religions have God – and therefore a moral code – why struggle to be who you are?
Over the course of my life, I've come to more or less agree with Emmanuel. I'm not sure I agree with every last detail of Judaism, but I've also never found a religion I agree with more and no major tenet with which I disagree. While it might be nice to think that my personal spirituality is all I need, Emmanuel is right – we are all adrift and at some point in life – maybe several – we need a tow. Religion provides guidelines in a time of loss – you know what steps to take when you're completely devastated. People around you – whether its family or a community that shares your beliefs – knows what to do for you. There are rails to guide everyone.
Equally important there are moments designated for celebration – life cycle events providing us markers to track ourselves and those around us. Showing up to celebrate someone is as important as – and sometimes harder than – supporting them in a crisis. Judaism in particular has a tenet that a celebration is more important than mourning. We honor a wedding over a funeral. We show up for someone else's blessing despite our own tragedy or bereavement. Life and light prevail above all else. Even when it's a lot harder than it sounds. Which is why there were weddings in DP camps.
Most religions have holidays to pull us out of our normal so we can pay attention to something important. Holidays visit a variety of aspects of life – of things we have to honor, consider or ways we have to show up which include celebration and release. Carnival/Mardi Gras (and all the other names for it) turns the world upside down for a day and in the Middle Ages functioned as a sort of societal release valve to allow the lower classes to blow off steam. It was easier to accept subservient roles in a steeply hierarchical social structure if one day a year they got to be king.
In my mind, Judaism's cannon of holidays is well designed. Over the course of a year, we have serious moments of contrition, times not only we celebrate our freedom but value it for others, show gratitude for the harvest and the bounty of what God gives us, appreciate the Torah – and in the case of Hanukkah celebrate kicking some military ass.
Hanukkah is both the only Jewish holiday predicated on a military victory and whose historical events can be completely verified. The Jews of Jerusalem did in fact go to war with the Assyrian army and the resulting victory catapulted the Hasmonean Dynasty to rule the area for the next 150 years. It happened.
What I didn't learn until a few years ago from a tour guide in Israel is that the war between the Jews of Jerusalem and the Seleucid/Assyrian Empire started off about taxes and subsequently had as much to do with a schism within the Jewish community as anything else. The Seleucid Empire which included Judea was of Greek language and culture. Its primary interest was suzerainty – laying claim to the area for taxation but allowing for local rule. Only two things happened around the same time that caused a war between the Empire and a group of religious Jewish leaders: 1. the Seleucid Empire wanted to tax the donated monies the Second Temple took in and 2. a rift was growing between the Hellenistic Jews – people in favor of assimilation into Greek culture – and the more religious Jews who wanted to remain distinct from Hellenistic society.
The refusal of the Cohanim (High Priests) and other leaders to pay taxes on donations sparked Antiochus IV to send his armies to Jerusalem while the attempt to ally with the Hellenistic Jews is thought to be why he deviated from the practices of his father and the Ptolemy rulers prior in coming down harshly on the religious faction. Besides the classical barbarism, the Seleucid soldiers invaded the Second Temple, desecrated it with offerings of pork and converted it to a temple to Zeus. Antiochus was essentially taking sides in a civil war to his own benefit.
The rest is the Hanukkah taught in Hebrew School. The religious faction fled to the hills, formed an army at first led by a Cohen named Mattathias and eventually by his son Judah. The family became known as the Maccabees – meaning hammers – because their army came down and crushed the Seleucid/Assyrian soldiers and rededicated the Temple (Hanukkah meaning rededication). All of this is fairly well documented and/or verified by archaeology.
The one part of the Hanukkah story that may have been added later is the miracle of the one last jar of holy, pure oil keeping the Ner Tamid – the light over the ark – burning for eight days and nights until more could be produced. I've heard some say this part of the story was added because the Rabbis of the Talmud had trouble countenancing a celebration based solely on military victory – it lacked the kind of sanctity required of a religious holiday.
True or not? I don't know. Does it matter?
And that's Emmanuel's point.
The actual Maccabees had no idea their wartime heroics or even the independent Jewish kingdom they created would eventually result in families lighting candles in their homes for eight nights, singing songs, spinning dreidels, eating potato latkes and jelly doughnuts (neither of which existed in their time and place) and giving presents. And certainly not watching a movie about four generations of a Jewish family in Budapest starring Ralph Fiennes.
But what a gift. Because whatever they did or did not intend, the Maccabees didn't just keep the Jewish people free and together, but gave us a piece of the well-built boat that can stay balanced and carry us to the other shore. In the movie, Emmanuel tells his son that in return for our following God's laws and commandments, he gives us familial love – the highest of all things. Hanukkah is not love itself, but it is one moment in the year when we have the opportunity to draw together.
Some of my most foundational childhood memories with my extended family on my mom's side were from Hanukkah. I don't remember most of the presents I got, but the relationships with my second cousins last to this day and we all still get together for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah with our children where third cousins now play and know one another. Whether or not a jar of oil in 167 BCE lasted for eight nights – and despite dynamics which can be termed something between eccentric and dysfunctional – Hanukkah provides the rails in life that ensures the continuation and growth of familial love.
So the boat carries us a little further along.
