One of my sweetest moments each Chanukah is hearing my mother sing “Oy Chanukah” in Yiddish. Our family gatherings now include the song in three languages — English, Hebrew and Yiddish.
I look forward to Chanukah every year, but not because I’m expecting a great new gift or anticipating a holiday bash. I relish the holiday now partially because of last year and the year before, because of my parents and my husband’s parents and our grandparents, because of our children and our hopes for them.
Though I was once a typical American Jewish child, looking forward to gifts and peak experiences, now I’m probably a typical American Jewish 40 year old, savoring the cycles themselves. As I grow older, I find myself looking forward to the ebbs and flows as part of the earth’s natural rhythm.
In my house, we place our store-bought chanukiyot beside the homemade ones and each year, our little card table seems more crowded. Atop our off-white cotton cloth there are candles for each of us to light.
And each night, after singing the blessings, we fill our house with Chanukah songs, sometimes anemically and sometimes with more gusto. Sometimes there are four of us and sometimes there are more.
This year, I’m certainly a little more melancholy because of my aunt’s recent sudden death. Why does a seemingly healthy woman die when we all expected to enjoy her for 20 more years?
How can I be sure that my own parents will be with me as I grow, as my children discover themselves and build their lives? To borrow my cousin’s metaphor, how do you know if the book of your life is long or short, if the page you’re living is in the book’s center or near its end?
Therefore vs. nevertheless
Perhaps the question that’s pressing most heavily on my heart is: How do you know if your life matters? Most people heal after a loved-one’s death; they talk and smile and laugh and work and make love and feel deeply. Another baby is born and the world keeps spinning.
I’m not yet able to cull wisdom from her passing, to talk about love and memories as the measures of good lives, or to appreciate the ways of fate as they transcend human wishes. This year, her death just feels wrong.
That grayness accompanied me into our Thanksgiving dinner this year. While the usual Thanksgiving food has never tickled my vegetarian taste buds, I am drawn to the opportunity to look inward and think about thankfulness.
Our extended family has never been one to sit around a table and talk about such things. Still I tried to prepare myself for the holiday by tuning into my feelings of gratitude. But it was hard.
It didn’t become any clearer on Wednesday night, Nov. 21, as I sat through the 22nd Annual Interfaith Mequon-Thiensville Thanksgiving Service. Rev. Barbara Jordan of Crossroads Presbyterian Church delivered one poignant message. She spoke about being thankful not as a “therefore” (“My life is good, therefore I’m thankful”) but as a “nevertheless” (“Life is difficult; nevertheless, I’m thankful”).
But the next morning, as I added too much garlic to my quinoa salad, it came to me: I am thankful for second chances. For all the ways that I am not good enough, for all the times I yell at my children or ignore my husband or get short-tempered or selfish or inconsiderate, I am blessed with the chance to stop, step back, rethink things and try again.
This opportunity for change is a reflection of the earth itself — seasons evolve into one another, and darkness and light replace each other again and again.
In the paradigm of life as an orb with no end, memories bleed into each other. A family lighting Chanukah candles measures its life in years, months, days and moments, each unique but part of one story.
I find this thought comforting and somehow supremely hopeful.
This year, gathered with my extended family, I will light candles and exchange cheap gifts without my aunt, and my family will feel her absence like a wound. As in the past, I will continue to bake her apple crisp, hoping that it might taste as good as hers.
I have no answers — I really don’t know much, I realize — but am left with the light of hope: that next year I will be able to stand with my family again around a little table jammed with chanukiyot; that next year I will hear my mother sing her Yiddish Chanukah song, my husband and I will sing it in Hebrew and my children will sing in English.
Happy Chanukah. Chag Urim sameach .
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