patrick “aleph” beaulier

Hanukkah: Festival of Lights

December 7, 2015 By Ketzirah

So I’m sitting here listening to Matisyahu rock it on the Miracle remix EP and thinking about Hanukkah. I’ve been having this nearly heretical thought lately. I know, not shocking for me — but go with it.

Hanukkah is the festival of lights – right?

The solstice aspect and the reviving of the light is even older than the Maccabee aspect, if you think about it. There’s certainly ancient midrash about Adam at the solstice and such. The central ritual activity is lighting the 9-branch menorah called a Hanukkiah. Just about everything else we added on over the centuries, which is just fine.

But let’s go back to that light thing again. It’s the festival of lights….

Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about. All those super pretty lights, preferably the white ones – not the tacky color ones, that our Christian neighbors put up this time of year. Yeah…we have the festival of lights, but they put up the lights? I know it could be seen as the height of assimilation, but what if we adopted white lights on our homes too. It seems like the urge to put all those lights and candles up all springs from a deep mythic place where we are all afraid of the dark. Where we’re all afraid that the sun really won’t come back and it will just keep getting darker and darker.

I know when I walk home during the winter I’m so grateful for all those lights. They push back the darkness. The remind me, even the tacky ones, that I have neighbors and I’m not alone in the world. Someone must be there to make those lights happen right?

Trust me, I’m not for the Christmas-ization of Hanukkah. I had a “Hanukkah Bush” when I was a kid. It makes me a bit ill in retrospect. There’s just no way that tacky white plastic tree had anything to do with the Jewish wheel of the year. But lights I think we have a pretty valid claim on. I know traditional Judaism likes to put as many walls between us and breaking mitzvot as they can, but would some pretty white lights be so wrong during these dark days?

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Carly Lesser (a.k.a. Ketzirah – קצירה) is Kohenet, Celebrant and artist whose passion is helping Jews who are unaffiliated, earth-based or in interfaith / inter-denominational relationships connect more deeply with Judaism and make it relevant in their every day lives. She is an active blogger and prayer leader on OneShul.org andPeelaPom.com.

Hanukkah Watercolor Lantern – Jewish Crafts

December 7, 2015 By punktorah

These lovely lanterns are sure to brighten up your house on a dark Winter night. They are easy for little ones to make and the result is beautiful.

You will need:

White paper
Glitter glue, sequins, markers and any other decorations you might like to use
Some olive oil
An iron
Watercolour paints
Paintbrushes
An empty glass jar
A battery operated tealight

Start by painting the whole piece of paper. We decided to paint our paper blue, but you can pick a different colour or even use multiple colours, too.

Let your paper dry. When it has dried use a cloth or paintbrush to paint the entire paper with olive oil. This will make your paper see-through.

Place your paper between two tea towels and iron it on a low setting to remove any excess oil. This is a step for the grown-ups, so please mind little fingers!

When you have ironed your paper you can decorate it any way you like. We decided [Read more…]

Exciting News: G-d Talks To Non-Jews, Too! (Parshat Mikeitz)

December 7, 2015 By punktorah

In this week’s Torah portion, Pharaoh dreams of seven healthy cows and seven sick cows…and so on…and so forth. Come to find out, our boy Joseph can interpret his dreams. This gives Joey a rise to power and even more family drama than he had before.

But the real lesson in this week’s Torah portion is that G-d can (and does) talk to non-Jews. But Pharaoh didn’t know what his dreams meant. It took Joseph’s interpretative skills to put two and two (or in this case, seven, seven, seven and seven) together to mean anything.

G-d, it seems, is Universal: talking to everyone, actively involved in humanity’s shared life on Earth. But the Jewish people have a special place, taking the visions that G-d puts into humanity, and interpreting them, guiding them, and bringing them to life.

So on this cold (for us) Hanukkah night, let the warmth of the menorah and G-d’s splendor shine on you and the world.

The Real Miracle

December 6, 2015 By Leon Adato

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
— G.K. Chesterton

I picked up this picture and quote from my friend Aaron, who runs at OpenSource Judaism (click over there and say ‘hi’. Also congratulate him on his new baby.). It reminded me of a similar quote from my friend and teacher Naomi Chase.

She was talking about Chanukah, and the various narratives around it. Being a stuck up know-it-all at the beginning of what was to be a long (and ongoing) Jewish learning experience, I wanted my Chanukah information unvarnished and honest. No more baby stories about oil. I knew better.

The holiday is 8 days because the last holiday the Hasmoneans (ie: Maccabees) missed was Sukkot. So upon re-dedicating the Temple, they gave a nod to that festival and added an additional day at the end to commemorate their victory.
The oil story was added later, by Rabbis who were uncomfortable with the reality of Jew-on-Jew violence that the Chanukah story contains.
The whole holiday was a mere footnote on the calendar until about 150 years ago, when a certain other gift-giving seasonal event became prominent, and some people felt the need to compete.

Naomi listened to my dissertation, nodding in understanding. I was proud that I had learned the grown-up version of the holiday. I didn’t need any babyish…

“What about the miracle?” she asked.

I was at a loss. I had just explained that the miracle story about the oil was added later.

“Yes,” she continued. “But as much as some scholars – ancient or modern – might have been prone to either equivocation or exaggeration, they weren’t in the habit of publicly pronouncing a miracle from God where there was none.” she stated. “If our liturgy talks about miracles as explicitly as it does, then it is incumbent on us – even though we *are* adults and not babies – to determine why they would add that language. The Jews have won a lot of military conflicts through the years, and none of the rest of them have this kind of attention. So I’m asking again: What about the miracle? Al Ha-Nissim and all that, ‘We thank you for the miracles’. What miracle are they talking about?”

Deflated and defeated (but now curious as well), my meager supply of Jewish knowledge used up, I replied “I got nuthin.”

And that’s when she laid it on me. The quote that matches Mr. Chesterton’s above:

“The miracle we find in the story of Chanukah isn’t whether oil lasted for one day, or three, or eight.

It’s that, after all they had been through and all they knew could befall them in the coming weeks and years,

the people still chose to light the menorah in the first place.”

I’ve since connected with the idea that this is the reason we light the candles each year. Not because we are re-enacting the first oil crisis to hit the middle east. No, we are recreating the act that mattered:

The Jewish people: some alienated from their own faith by years of assimilation, others polarized into fanaticism in an effort survive when other groups had been consumed, and still others trying to reconcile where they stand day by day, moment by moment. Both groups healing from hurts (real or perceived) inflicted on them by the other – those people still felt it was worthwhile to clean up their holiest space, to set things right again, and to observe an ancient practice not because they were obsessively holding onto the past, not because they were fearful of anything new, but because they believed it was an essential part of who they were.

More importantly, they believed it was important to express – visibly and publicly – that belief in who they were.

I recognize that many things are the same today as it was then. In the spectrum of the Jewish people, some of us have assimilated, some have clung to tradition, some are in motion between those two points. All of us have an emotional stake in where we are and where we want to be. In our varying views we haven’t always been gracious or supportive or even polite to the other. Hurts – real or perceived – remain unhealed. The Holy Temple – our spiritual center-point that exists today in our heart rather than any fixed place on the planet – still needs to be put back in order.

But this year most of us (even those who have lost hold of any of our other traditions) will stand again in front of our Chanukiah – a reflection of the Temple’s menorah during that initial moment of dedication after destruction. If we reading carefully, the abrupt shift in tense – from past to present – will not be lost on us.

Al Ha-Nissim…

“And [we thank You] for the miracles, for the redemption, for the mighty deeds, for the saving acts, and for the wonders which You have wrought for our ancestors in those days, at this time“

(Originally posted on The EdibleTorah)

Slaughtered An Assimilated Jew Lately? A D’var Torah For Hanukkah

December 6, 2015 By punktorah

By Patrick Aleph

The miracle of Hanukkah, I think, is the fact that we turned a civil war between fundamentalists and moderates into a celebration of potatoes and jelly doughnuts. Let me explain.

While it is true that the Hanukkah narrative involves the rededication of the Temple ransacked by the Syrians, the actual conflict leading up to the temple desecration was a cultural move away from what at the time would be considered traditional Jewish practice, to a hybrid of Jewish law, in the context of Greek culture. The Hellenistic Jews, it seems, were assimilated Jews who wanted to combine the best-of-both-worlds into one practice. And this really made the orthodox Jews angry. War erupted, with the traditionalist Maccabees winning against the Hellenists. Then comes the oil miracle, and now we play religiously sanctioned gambling with chocolate.

“If the Maccabbes were still around, we’d be dead” said Michael, our Alterna-Rebbe. And I agreed. In 2004, a group of rabbis tried to revive the Sanhedrin in Israel, a move that did absolutely nothing but make Westernized Jewry laugh. But I do wonder, could a time ever come where a court of Jewish law will slaughter anyone that doesn’t fit into the religious mold that the traditionalists set, as we are told to do in Exodus 22:17, Leviticus 20:27, Exodus 22:19, Deuteronomy 13:13-19 and Deuteronomy 13:7-12?

The miracle of Hanukkah, it seems, is that we’ve taken a holiday that, when experienced historically would have been the downfall for many cultural Jews, and turned it into a holiday that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit over oppressive forces. So put that in your jelly doughnut!

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