Time of Faith series (Dec. 26-30, 2005)
A traditionally barren time for editors, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is often a time when they resort to reviewing the top stories, movies, headlines, meals, etc. of the previous year. When my editor sought a way to fill that week’s front-page news hole, my response was a series that looked at the ways in which religion is in play around the region. My favorite part was an in-depth conversations with area scientists about their faith.
SHELBURNE FALLS — The menorah that David Arfa and Kim Erslev lit with their children Sunday evening for the start of Hanukkah is a 4-foot-tall brass heirloom passed down from Erslev’s Danish family.
Lit in a darkened room of the family’s Mechanic Street home, it’s a magic ritual that takes place on each of the eight evenings of the Jewish holiday.
Together with 8-year-old Zachary and 4-year-old Eva, Arfa and Erslev say the blessings over the thick, white candles — the kind they also light each Friday to greet the Jewish shabbos (sabbath), rather than the thin sticks of multicolored wax that fit most Hanukkah candelabras.
They take a moment to enjoy the wisps of flame flickering in the darkness. They sing songs that recall the origins of the holiday, which commemorates the defeat of the Syrian army by the Macabees, a small band of Jews 2,171 years ago, liberating Jerusalem from Hellenistic domination.
And they dance in a circle around the living room and the menorah, which recalls the tiny flask of oil found in the ransacked Temple of Jerusalem that miraculously burned for eight days.
On the first night, each of the children receive a present from their parents. On each of the succeeding nights, there will be a single present from grandparents or other relatives. There’s a deliberate attempt to downplay receiving gifts on this minor Jewish holiday, which in contemporary American culture has been overshadowed by Christmas.
This year, with both holidays occurring at the same time (which only rarely happens), many American Jews are struggling to convey to their children that Hanukkah is not simply a Hebrew version of Christmas. Many also try to deepen their own understanding of the holiday.
“I loved Hanukkah as a kid,” said Arfa, 41, who grew up in a Detroit suburb where most families he knew were Jewish. Christmas was in the background, and he enjoyed growing up with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and other TV specials that he knew related to something outside his world.
“We lit the menorah each night. It was one of the peak holidays for my family.”
Not until junior high school, when Arfa’s family moved to Minnesota, did he realize how dominant Christmas was. By then, his Jewish identity was firmly established.
A few years ago, the weight of Christmas came crashing down for his son, Zachary — in kindergarten. There, the buildup of seasonal expectations from other kids and the heaps of presents they talked about left him in tears.
Arfa and Erslev, an architect who grew up around Philadelphia, try to spare their children the commercial onslaught by raising them without television, with its heavy dose of Christmas merchandising. Yet even Eva sees Santa everywhere, her father says, and she asks about Christmas.
“We explain that different families have different traditions,” Arfa says. “We explain that being Jewish is much more than Hanukkah and being Christian is much more than Christmas. It’s a whole year of celebrations, and I remind them of shabbos dinners and sleeping outside during Sukkot,” the autumn harvest festival when the family builds the prescribed temporary shelter outdoor hut for the week-long celebration.
There’s a magic, of adding one candle to the menorah each night, watching the light increase at this darkest time of the year, Arfa says, and pointing out that the holiday, defined by the Hebrew lunar calendar, is set against the waning of the moon, its disappearance Friday and then the first sliver of its light in a black sky.
The bearded, round-faced environmental educator and maggid, or traditional storyteller, recalls the teaching of a Warsaw rabbi of the late 1800s that the Hanukkah candles represent “the sparks of sacredness within us.”
For himself, Arfa adds, “I love very much that there’s a connection of the moon with Hanukkah. “It’s powerful, because the moon and much of nature is often invisible to us. So here’s an opportunity to go out and see the moon and have that awareness.”
Hanukkah also provides a time for the family in the evenings to spend more time together, not only singing, dancing and watching the candles and the moon, but playing with the dreidel (a small top), eating potato latkes, making cards and gifts together for other relatives, and also reading and telling stories about Hanukkah.
Some of Arfa’s favorite stories — ones he loves to share with Zachary and Eva — tell of Hershel of Ostropol, who in one tale is so poor that he could only play dreidel with buttons, and whose father is so sick and hungry that they even consider selling their beautiful menorah, adorned with deer, bears and flowers. As the boy’s father sleeps, a stranger comes to the door and plays dreidel with Hershel using a sack of gold coins — which Hershel eventually wins. The stranger even offers to buy the menorah, then leaves to fetch more gold to make the purchase. Hershel’s father awakens, feeling better and questioning whether the mysterious stranger could have been the prophet Elijah.
“Could that really have been Elijah, who always keeps his promise?’ asks Arfa. “Yet, as my mother told me, For Elijah the prophet, 500 years could be just the snap of our fingers.’ So maybe some time in the future, there’ll be someone in need, and they’ll have an open heart, and Elijah will be back.”
Such miracles are at the core of Hanukkah for many Jews. Yet in contemporary American culture, dominated by commercialization of Christmas, it sometimes seems a miracle that the deeper meaning of the religious holidays can survive at all.
“For me, there’s the parallel with the Macabees,” Arfa says. “Just as they were trying to hold their (Jewish) values in a time when Greek values were coming in all around them that were very secular, I see a similar fight with the consumer society, with so much advertising and the commercialization of buying things, and how to have something different than that going on.
Here’s a holiday when we can remember that the marketing and consumerism doesn’t have to define us, even though we are living within it.
***
Hanukkah, teaches Efraim Eisen, the spiritual leader of Temple Israel in Greenfield, is all about rededication.
Coming a few months after the Jewish High Holy Days that began the new Hebrew calendar year, the “festival of lights” recalls not only a victorious battle over Hellenistic dominance thousands of years ago, but the rededication of hearts to keep faith with individual promises to lead a holier life this year.
“It’s time for me to take my New Year’s pledges and rededicate myself again,” says Eisen. Pointing ahead to Passover in the spring as a time to rid homes and hearts of leavening, he says, “The whole (holiday) cycle allows us to take another look within ourselves.”
There are other meanings, as well, at Hanukkah, Eisen points out: how by being very persistent in keeping their faith, a small band of very committed Jews could commit themselves to lives of purpose.
The miracle of a tiny flask of oil lasting for eight days may not have been as great as we think, says Eisen, pointing to contemporary society’s heavy dependence on finite oil resources and its need to conserve and find alternatives. The greater historical “miracle,” he said, may have been that the Syrians were attacked on another front while fighting the Macabees and were forced to turn their attention elsewhere.
The “miracle” of getting the holy Temple back, Eisen said, is hard for contemporary society to even comprehend, because at the time when there was yet no other monotheistic religion, that was the center of all Jewish life.
“If we’re moving in the right direction, God will help us out,” he says.
The fact that most of the deeper meanings of the eight-day holiday were not widely taught to today’s Jewish population isn’t all that surprising, Eisen says, in the generation that followed the Holocaust. “Most of our great teachers went up in smoke,” he said. “It’s taking us, one by one, to rededicate ourselves.”
Jonah, Ciaran and Talia are glowing with special presents this Hanukkah: menorahs they’ve built from potatoes and hardware, with help from their parents, Julie and Jamie Godfrey.
Nine-year-old Jonah, his 8-year-old brother, Ciaran, and their 3-year-old sister, Talia, also had a hand in decorating the paper bags that served as “stockings” for a few small Christmas morning treats supplied by their parents.
The Godfreys — an interfaith couple who will soon be next-door neighbors with the Arfa-Erslevs as part of an “intentional community” they are building together — pay special attention not only to making their religious holidays meaningful but also trying to enrich their own religious traditions to deepen their values as a family.
Julie Godfrey is an accomplished furniture maker whose work has included the doors of the ark that holds sacred Torah scrolls at the Washington, D.C. synagogue where her parents were married.
In suburban Virginia, where she grew up, she remembers lighting the Hanukkah candles every year and celebrating the holiday with her immediate family, grandparents and other relatives on the first and second nights. They shared a traditional feast that included potato latkes, challah, and chicken soup with matzoh balls, with games of dreidel and small presents each night.
“It was a holiday about tradition, about bringing the family together and eating traditional foods,” recalls the 47-year-old woman, one of only five Jewish students in her 500-member school class. “There was something special about being Jewish at that time. I think there was conscious effort in some way to be Jewish because there was so much Christmas around. Jews are so bombarded by Christmas that it does feel important to have a holiday to hold onto.
Even within the family, which practiced Reform Judaism because the only Conservative synagogue was 45 minutes away in Washington, Christmas made a token appearance, with “Uncle Jeff” showing up as Santa Claus with a present or two for each child, a small, unlit plastic tree and poinsettias as house decorations.
“Christmas is such a cultural American holiday that it was possible for us to celebrate it without it having any religious significance whatsoever,” explains Ms. Godfrey. “It would have been difficult for my parents to tell us Santa didn’t come to our house when he came to every other house in the neighborhood.”
Hanukkah, however, did come attached with some religious significance and as a girl, Ms. Godfrey was taught about the Macabees and the miracle of the oil.
Only recently, while taking Eisen’s weekly “Judaism 101” course that the interfaith couple is taking together, did she learn any deeper meaning for the holiday.
“It’s a chance to remember how you want to steer yourself toward a just life and walking in the path of God. That was revelation to me,” says Ms. Godfrey.
For the Godfreys, who have been together for 12 years, it’s important to be raising their children to appreciate their different faiths.
“Many people are afraid and think their children will get confused by going to both,” she says. “I think that by learning other traditions, you can get deeper into your own tradition. Jamie likens it to growing up bilingual. It takes them a little while to sort it out. Our kids certainly are able to understand where the distinctions lie. Of course, it helps to have a biblical scholar in the house with a master’s degree in religious education.”
At 52, Jamie Godfrey is director of family ministries at Greenfield’s Second Congregational Church. It’s been easier for him to relate to Judaism than for his wife to feel comfortable with Christianity. That, he says, makes perfect sense considering the history of anti-Semitism and his own background growing up as a Catholic with an ecumenically minded mother.
Getting past dogma to the spirituality and levels of meaning in both Christianity and Judaism, he said, it becomes clear there are many similarities — including the value of giving, which the Godfreys make a key for their children. They volunteer at the Shelburne Falls community meal, for example.
The proximity of Christmas and Hanukkah this year makes it even easier than usual to do meaningful activities that can count for both traditions, said Ms. Godfrey.
“We had the idea of baking cookies — Christmas cookies? Hanukkah cookies? Ciaran wanted to decorate a tree outside and we were talking about the idea of hanging cookies to feed the birds. What’s not to love about that? So it sings a little bit of Christmas and it has a spirit of caring for the earth. I don’t feel like we need to fight against either idea.”
Ms. Godfrey, who says it has become more comfortable for her, through the couple’s interfaith work, to enter a church, added that the children are focused on the holidays as primarily about fun and presents — even though the gifts are modest. But she knows that the modeling she and her husband do around their interfaith dialogue pays off.
“Why would we not want our kids to be exposed to all kinds of people, all colors, cultures and languages?” she asks. “Why would you not want them to be exposed to all the different traditions as well? It’s the richness of human culture: all those different ways of thinking, all those different stories? It only adds value to their lives.”
She adds, “I’m just watching the transformation of myself, and I feel it’s the best thing I’m doing in my life as well as the best thing we’re doing for the kids.”
As a Catholic teenager in Maine influenced by the writings of Thomas Merton and St. Francis, Godfrey expressed an early desire to enter a contemplative life. Now he asks his 9-year-old son whether he considers himself Jewish or Christian.
“Seventy Jewish, 30 Christian,” is Jonah’s reply, adding that he likes going to Hebrew school because it’s fun to study the language.
Godfrey, a member of Temple Israel just as his wife is a member of Second Congregational, says he feels not the least resentment to their children’s preference for Judaism.
“My conviction is that there are many paths to the center,” Godfrey says. “The deeper I’ve gone into my own tradition, the more open I find myself drawn to others. Julie and I have seen our relationship taking us deeper into our own traditions.”
Godfrey believes that “the consumer acquisitive culture” has made it difficult for Jews and Christians alike to approach the real meanings behind their distinctive holidays, which share many of the same values to make room in our hearts for being better human beings. The future, he says, needs to hold the kind of bridges of interfaith understanding and respect that he and his wife are building in their home.
“Here’s what’s important for me,” Godfrey says, alluding to a passage from Deuteronomy: “that my children grow up equipped at any moment to choose life.’ The path they choose will be their own path.”
—RICHIE DAVIS