Hanukkah is a Major Holiday

It's got candles, greasy food, and widespread popularity. What more could you want?

It’s Ḥanukkah, and that means it’s time for the common refrain that tired and snarky Jews alike love, especially when Ḥanukkah and Christmas overlap. That is: Ḥanukkah is a minor festival, actually. Real Jews don’t actually care about it. Any notion to the contrary comes from the supercessionist conflation of Christmas and Ḥanukkah, and so the only thing for Real Jews to do is mostly ignore the Festival of Lights, snickering at anyone who dares to wish them a Happy Ḥanukkah.

There’s a valid grievance here. But, as a Real Jew who loves Ḥanukkah, and as a normal person who has heard this line repeated half to death, I can’t help but to see flaws in the argument. For one, is there really so little value in a holiday near Christmas about resisting assimilation? After all, in American Jewry, this is the time of year we face the most overt pressure to assimilate.

Christmas brings with it an omnipresent air of yuletide cheer, and a certain assumption that anyone who isn’t participating is a grinch. Grinches need to be set straight. Sometimes gentiles take it upon themselves to convince unsuitably festive people to up the ante, like a Dickensian poltergeist. The anti-Ḥanukkah argument implies that gentiles conflate Ḥanukkah with Christmas for convenience, but honestly, having an excuse ready for people like that is pretty convenient for us, too.

Now, some people are incorrigible. The types who admonish people for their lack of Christmas spirit are probably not going to stop just because they find out the target is Jewish. In fact, othering non-Christians is a part of the point. So it is no small balm for the soul that our concurrent festival celebrates the struggle against assimilation. The Maccabees¹ were not told Merry Christmas, but the reason we still celebrate their miracle is the same reason why being told to assimilate is so grating. That’s something to lean into, rather than abandon out of annoyance.

That’s what this meme comes down to, it seems — annoyance. It’s everywhere. Annoyance with commercialization, annoyance with gentiles asking if we’re flying home for Ḥanukkah, and even annoyance with one another’s latke toppings. These are as good of reasons for irritation as any. Intracommunity strife is as Jewish as gefilte fish, and gentiles certainly seem to misunderstand what Ḥanukkah means more often than not. Sometimes that can be quite frustrating.

But, looking at how commercialized each and every goyische holiday is, from Memorial Day to Easter, I can’t help but feel that we’ve mostly missed a bullet. It’s saddening to imagine Jewish holidays becoming as commercialized as the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter.

Telling advertisers that Ḥanukkah is a “a minor holiday, actually” will just incentivize them to make chintzy decorations for something else. (A chill goes down my spine imagining Easter egg themed Pesaḥ plates at Walmart.) And in the case of everyone else, what does the “well, actually” routine accomplish?

It’s hard to say. For my part, I have trouble understanding why I should dunk on a well-meaning friend wishing me a Merry Ḥanukkah. Sure, it’s annoying that it seems to be the only holiday they know about, but the solution to that is more education, not less. And, in general, the way to tell someone more about yourself is not to start with, “Actually, what little you know is totally wrong, and I’m mad you even tried.”

Wishing someone a Merry Ḥanukkah is a gesture of goodwill on the part of most gentiles, an acknowledgement that their Jewish friends have different traditions which are equally worthy of respect. The ones who don’t mean this are beyond convincing and not worth worrying about. That leaves us with neighbors, colleagues, and friends who are aware they don’t know a lot, but know we’re different, and want to celebrate that. How self-effacing do you need to be to interpret that as a slight?

It is absolutely true that Ḥanukkah has not always meant this. But a living culture is constantly innovating its traditions, and sometimes that means finding new value in the old. For diaspora Jews, who overwhelmingly live amongst non-Jews, that sometimes means having our values and ideas changed or shaped by our neighbors. We’ve gotten some pretty good stuff this way, not the least of them being ḥallah, medicine, and writing the Talmud down. Ḥanukkah’s new importance can — and should — be another such positive change.

In a descriptivist sense, Ḥanukkah is a major festival in American Jewry. This year, one of my Tumblr mutuals² did a thread of polls asking Jews which holidays they celebrate. Though the rabbis may have designated Shavuot as a higher holiday than Ḥanukkah, it’s only celebrated yearly by about 45% of respondents. Conversely, Ḥanukkah is an annual holiday for about 80%, a number only hit by other major festivals like Pesaḥ and Rosh Hashanah.

I bring these numbers up because they confirm my internal sense of the community. Call it confirmation bias, but I think Ḥanukkah might be popular even among Jews who might be otherwise religiously unengaged. That’s incredibly good. In an era of increasing religious disengagement, anything that helps people feel more Jewish is a miracle in of itself.

This Ḥanukkah, take the opportunity to build better relationships with our neighbors who care, and shut out those who don’t. Instead of buying chintzy Ḥanukkah merch from Target, take the chance to check out a local Judaica shop or pull an old menorah out of storage, and give gifts. Engage with the coworker who asked shyly what the proper greeting was to a candle lighting. It might look different than the Ḥanukkahs of your childhood — and that’s for the best.

1. And fuck the Maccabees, anyway.

2. Cool kids still use Tumblr.