By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
(Wikipedia photo by Gil Dekel)
Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Judaism occupied both the center and periphery of daily life. At the center was my father’s abiding, multigenerational connection to his working-class Jewish foundations; the periphery was defined – more or less – by my mother’s secular, middle-class sensibilities. But there was one locus if neutral faith intersection: Hanukkah.
Like any number of my friends’ households, in my family Hanukkah was celebrated even in the absence of formal religious practice elsewhere. On Rosh Hashanah (first day, anyway) and Yom Kippur I accompanied my father to his Orthodox synagogue on the East Side not far from where we once lived, but that pretty much was the boundary of my principal house-of-worship experience.
True, there were innumerable Bar Mitzvahs (and the occasional Bat Mitzvah) to attend while in middle school, but my mother’s insistence that I already had enough to deal with as an adolescent was enough to exempt me from this conduit to Jewish adulthood. On the first night of Passover, we tromped over to New Jersey to my mother’s brother Henry (where practically nobody spoke) – second night was spent at my father’s sister Edith’s in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach (where everybody spoke – and spoke – and spoke).
Shabbat was, well, kind of a cipher that my parents chose not to decode. But Hanukkah was a consistent entry on the annual calendar. Inevitably there was the commensurate anticipation of nightly gifts (typically one big one on the first night, followed by a succession of gradually diminishing recreational diversions. Yet what I recall most vividly is not whatever baubles came my way, but the menorah we rescued each year from its requisite pantry cabinet.
It wasn’t a vaguely modern menorah, inlaid with turquoise mosaics but nothing at all grand. The receptacles were maddeningly constricted, which inevitably meant jamming each candle in place, hoping against hope it would topple over and ignite whatever lay nearby.
My father would don a kippah and recite what I now know was an abbreviated blessing, though on the first night taking care to include the Shehecheyanu blessing — thanking G-d for sustaining us to reach this particular moment in time. The import of that blessing tended to be lost on me, perhaps because my Hebrew vernacular was limited to shalom, mazel tov and – for Pesach – a boisterous declaration of dayenu! My father would light the shamash, with myself, my younger sister and my mother following, usually in that order.
It’s a stretch to say that I entered anything approaching spiritual grace – the entire process was over in a minute or two, so there was scant opportunity for contemplation. Still, once the menorah was placed in our kitchen window and the lights switched off, I could sense a genuine manifestation of calm. And once the tiny flames had flickered and died, a sense of loss bordering on sorrow.
My father was always an emotionally effusive man, prone to telling me “I love you” when I was well into adulthood. After the Hanukkah candles were lit he’d hug me and say those words, which from him sounded nothing like a cliché of parental affection. It was at those times that I realized, in my modest fashion, that I was foundationally Jewish.
Such were the small wonders of my Hanukkah observances. I didn’t need to be in in shul, dipping into a siddur or engaging in formal declarations of faith. Back in those years I didn’t spend much time pondering issues of Jewish identity. I was eminently flexible in that regard, so much so that if I visited a son of interfaith parents – with a menorah on one side of the living room and a Christmas tree on the other – I was unfazed and unconcerned.
The seasonal dualities of Jewish and Christian faith traditions seemed perfectly natural in a city that was fundamentally multiethnic and multi-theological. The lobby of our West 86th Street apartment building was an exemplar of residential tolerance, if not complete authenticity: an artificial Christmas tree with gift-wrapped empty boxes and an electric menorah with orange light bulbs in place of candles.
Not exactly ecumenical, but somehow comforting by virtue of its faux-fir, plug-in flavors of tradition. Upstairs in Apartment 8B all was right with the world, made whole amid our unassuming Hanukkah ceremonies. The narrative never veered right or left from one year to the next. Yet if there was no overt prayer, there was a kind of latent prayerfulness, a not-so-vague acknowledgment of what it meant to be Jewish, illuminated by flickering candlelight that – even when down to the last vestiges of waxen residue – always bore the promise of radiant, sustaining renewal.
Andrew Adler is the Managing Editor of Community.