Illustration by Alex Chen
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I am a Jewish mother to two young children in the season of Hanukkah. This year, the beginning of the holiday is coloured with tragedy after the targeted attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.
How does one think about and approach the rituals of this minor Jewish celebration in such context?
I was introduced many years ago to a concept that set the foundation for a Jewish take on ritual and on action. Synagogues, on Yom Kippur, don’t have full day-long services – or at least the reform synagogue I attended growing up, Holy Blossom Temple, did not. To distract fasting Jews from their grumbling stomachs, Holy Blossom offered lectures, sometimes by prominent Canadian Jews, in the afternoons. Fifteen or 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, I attended a talk by Evan Solomon that stuck with me.
In his talk, he boiled down the difference between Christianity and Judaism to this: Christians, to be good Christians, must try to be perfect in thought and deed. That is, they have to do the good thing for the right reasons. Jews don’t have to be perfect in thought and deed, said Solomon. They just have to do the good deed, even if it is done for reasons people wouldn’t necessarily agree with.
Every Hanukkah is a reminder to me that it’s cool to be different
I’m not a good enough Jew to know what texts, if any, he was basing this comparison on. The idea, however, has expanded in my mind, infected my understanding of the performance of Jewish ritual and action and even leaked into other areas of my life.
Solomon’s principle, which I have interpreted to also mean that I must do the thing but I don’t have to mean it, follows me even into parenting. Parenting is all about the repetition of ritual and routine – feeding, singing, going back into my three and a half year old’s bedroom for the third time to tell him the story of the spider who lost his dada. A series of actions, over and over again.
Recently, I caught the flu. My husband did, and our 12-week-old daughter also did. Our three-and-a-half-year-old son had gotten the flu vaccine early and was spared, but the experience was nonetheless memorably difficult. During nights filled with a tiny distraught baby screaming into my husband’s and my ears, sniffles coming from all directions, I had moments where I felt like I couldn’t deal with being a parent a second longer – that I could not parent with anything close to my whole heart. Solomon’s principle reminded me that I don’t have to want to be a good parent, I just have to be a good parent. I just have to do the thing.
Despite being a largely cultural, non-religious Jew, meaning in ritual has followed me more closely in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, as being Jewish has become more complex than I have ever experienced it to be before.
What my children have taught me about Hanukkah
In the first couple weeks following the attack in Israel, a friend wanted to convene to honour the victims of that day. I was among the group of thirtysomething Jews, none of whom practice Judaism in any real religious way, who got together. We were sort of sheepish at first, not sure how to achieve the ask of honouring the victims. Then someone suggested we recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. In a vividly contemporary move, we pulled up the Kaddish on our phones and intoned it. Moved so much by the connection to this ancient prayer (a prayer written in Aramaic it is so old), I cried, a little embarrassed by the effect it had on me. This sort of reaction used to be unusual for me, when it comes to Jewish rituals. It is more common now.
Repetition of the thing one is called to do – called by imperative or by choice – each time, gives a person a fresh opportunity to find meaning in the thing, even though, as Jews, the meaning is secondary to the doing. We can move toward and away from meaning, during the many instances of repetition we perform, over a life. That is okay.
Hanukkah brings another opportunity to practice the same rituals I engage in every year. It will be my daughter’s first and my son’s fourth time experiencing it. Perhaps I will find meaning in the prayers and candle lighting this year, perhaps I will not. I will do these things regardless.
Jessica Rose lives in Toronto.