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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
Totally Random Book Excerpt
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
One paragraph from "The Blue Team," a short story by Joshua Braff, from the new collection: How To Spell Chanukah ... and Other Holiday Dilemmas: 18 Writers Celebrate 8 Nights of Lights.
As a ferociously reluctant yeshiva boy in the 1970s, I thought that Chanukah was without a doubt the most joyous time of the year. Unlike the four hundred and twelve other Jewish holidays that surround it on the Hebrew calendar, the festival of lights used to arrive like a life raft of optimism for any of us who felt Judaism had been crammed down our throats. And yes, of course, it, too, is a holiday that recalls an incident in which a mighty king decided that the Jews of the time where having too much luck or fun or prosperity. And yes, of course, this resulted in mass bloodshed throughout the streets of Judea. But unlike Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, it was always made clear that the story behind Chanukah held relatively little significance. And I always appreciated that. It was about a guy named Judah Maccabaeus and his four brothers and how they rebelled against King Antiochus because he ordered the chosen people to reject God and all their Jewish customs. After three years of gorging each other with spears and swords, the Maccabees won the war and the Syrians were forced out of Judea, which would become Israel. Judah and the boys reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem and were granted a miracle of eight days of light from only one day's worth of oil. The result of this miracle for me was that my horrific school was closed for a week, a mountain of gift-wrapped boxes formed in my living room, Rudolph and Santa Claus were both on TV in Claymation form, and not once did anyone tell me to fast. Even my Moroccan-born yeshiva teachers were in good moods, showing us their tobacco-stained smiles for the first time since Purim.
-- Text by Joshua Braff
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
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