Latkes or Hamentaschen:
A Hanukkah sermon on the human need for ritual
by the Rev. Kerry Mueller
Service at UUCSS on December
5, 1999
Opening Words
Again the earth did shift
Again did the nights grow short
And the people
of the earth were glad
and celebrated
each in their own ways
-- Diane Lee Moomey
Opening Hymn #223 "Rock of Ages"
The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting Statement
CHALICE LIGHTING
Life is a gift for which we are grateful.
We gather in community to
celebrate the glories and
the mysteries of this great gift.
Marjorie Montgomery
PRAYER
We gather in the chill of winter solstice,
finding warmth from each other, nourishing
hope where reason fails.
Grateful for small miracles, we rejoice
in the wonder of light and darkness
and the daring of hope.
As we gather here for worship,
we pledge ourselves to the endless search for truth;
to the right of each to believe ans mind, heart, and conscience dictate,
to accpet the responsibility this freedom commands;
and to emplement our belief
in the essential worth and dignity of every human being.
-- from the Preamble of our Constitution
Song of Exaltation
Come strive for all that we may know
And welcome life with each new dawn,
That we in every age may grow
And seek the truth that stretches on.
-- collected by Jan Rugh
Welcome and Announcements
Lighting the Menorah
Holy One of Blessing
Your Presence
fills creation.
You made us holy with your
commandments and called us to kindle the
Hanukkah lights.
Holy One of Blessing
Your presence
fills creation.
You performed miracles for our ancestors
in days of old at this season.
Holy One of Blessing
Your Presence
fills creation.
You have kept us alive
You have sustained us
You have brought us
to this moment.
-- Beth El Congregation Sudbury, MA
A Conversation with the Children
Kerry Mueller
Parting Song for Children #413
Offertory
Let there be an offering to strengthen and sustain this place which is sacred
to so many of us, a community of memory and hope, for we are now the keepers
of the dream.
Sharing of Joys and Sorrows
At this time in our service we take a few moments to share what is in our
hearts and on our minds. If there is an event in your life, or the life of
the world, which moves you this morning to joy or sorrow hope or gratitude,
I invite you to come forward and share a few words with us and move a stone
into the water, letting the ripples remind us that everything that touches
one of us touches all of us. If it is better for you, we will bring the microphone
to you.
[Sharing]
Let us remember to hold in our hearts the joys and sorrows of the whole company
of humanity, whether they are spoken and shared or silent and solitary.
Meditation with Silence and With Music
Let us share now a few moments of silence. And in the silence may we listen
for the deepest, stillest voice of holiness within.
[1 full minute]
Amen
Anthem
Sermon
Latkes or Hamentaschen
by the Rev. Kerry Mueller
A debate is held every year at the University
of Chicago: Which is better, Latkes or Hamantaschen? Perfectly serious and
respectable scholars take impassioned stands on the virtues of Haman's Hats
-- triangular cookie dough pastries filled with poppy seeds, the quintessential
food of the Jewish festival of Purim -- vs. the delights of potato pancakes,
the symbolic food of Hanukkah. And let me tell you, I'll come out for latkes
any day myself. Although I am not Jewish in origin, I grew up eating potato
pancakes out of my Germanic heritage. With applesauce, please, not sour cream.
And for heaven's sake, not with brown sugar as one friend insisted.
Despite the rowdy nature of the debate and the silly arguments put forth,
latkes and hamenstaschen together embody a great religious tradition. Just
how did latkes come to mean Hanukkah? There's a story in that question.
Once upon a time, the Hebrew city of Bethulia
was besieged by an army of Assyrians, led by the fierce General Holofernes.
Without even risking his soldiers in battle, Holofernes brought the people
of Bethulia to their knees simply by taking possession of the spring of water
that supplied the whole town. The people quickly became desperate. Their children
were listless, and their women and young men fainted from thirst. Better to
be slaves than to die, they said, and watch their children die. They decided
to wait five days more -- perhaps God would send rain to replenish the cisterns
-- and then they would surrender.
Enter Judith. She is a young widow, beautiful and modest, wise and wealthy.
She is so pious that she fasts every day, except on days when fasting is forbidden,
wearing sackcloth and ashes, still mourning her husband. She is a well respected
person. When Judith summons the town elders, they come and they listen to her.
She does not present them with the gentle wisdom they might have expected.
Instead, Judith rails at them for planning to surrender. God won't let them
down. Just leave it in her hands. She has a plan.
Judith comes down from the rooftop tent where she has been mourning. She
takes off the sackcloth to bathe and washes the ashes out of her hair. She
puts on her best clothes, all her jewelry, and anoints herself with precious
ointment. She prays to God that her deceitful words will be effective. Then
she takes her maid, a flask of oil, a wineskin and a large sack of prepared
food -- roasted grain and dried fig cakes and fine bread -- and marches off
to the valley where the Assyrians are camped. The soldiers on guard are so
awed by her beauty they forget to whistle and make lewd comments. And when
she asks to see Holofernes, they quickly take her to their leader.
Holofernes is also taken by her beauty and charm. She flatters him up and
down, speaking to him as if he is already king of the world, and hinting that
she can help in his campaign. Holofernes invites her to a romantic little banquet
for just his intimates. He imagines a scene a little more exciting than just
taking her report on conditions in Bethulia. Judith declines to eat his food
-- it is not Kosher after all -- but she contributes her sack of gourmet items
to share with him. Not to mention the wineskin. Holofernes is greatly pleased
with her, and dismisses his cronies. He drinks a great quantity of wine, much
more than he had ever drunk in any one day since he was born.
By the time the servants leave them alone for the seduction scene, Holofernes
is dead drunk, not up to seducing anyone, much less the formidable Judith.
She prays once more, takes down his sword from the rack on the wall, pulls
back his head by the hair, and with two great whacks, cuts off his head. She
wraps his body in the mosquito netting, pops the head in the food bag and casually
takes her usual evening stroll with her maid to the spring to bathe and pray.
But once there, she sprints back to Bethulia, where they hang the head on the
wall.
Surprise! When the Assyrians find Holofernes' body, they are so demoralized
to realize that he has been slain by a woman, that they all flee in a panic.
Bethulia is saved along with all of Israel. Judith, refusing all offers of
marriage, lives happily ever after.
[Adapted from the Book of Judith in the Apocrypha]
It's quite a story. But this grisly folk tale, filled
with violence and lust and deceit, is only a small part of the sprawling and
complex history of Hanukkah, a holiday celebrated today with innocent latkes
and menorahs and dreidels. The story of Judith's heroism isn't even strictly
part of the historic events that form the basis of Hanukkah.
Those events come much later, in 167 BCE, when it is not Assyrians, but Greeks
who threaten Israel's integrity. King Antiochus Epiphanes, successor to Alexander
the Great in that part of the world, decides to force the Israelites to hellenize
-- that is, to become more like Greeks, especially in matters of worship. They
are to give up their sacred Sabbath practices, eat pork and other non-Kosher
foods, even sacrifice pigs to Zeus. As you can imagine, the Jews resist.
At least many of them do. It is a sad fact of human nature that oppressed
peoples will often identify with their oppressors. Those who are able, suck
up to the overlords, taking their standards of beauty and sophistication from
the dominant culture. This happened even in Jerusalem. Many of the elite took
Greek names, changing Joshua to Jason for instance, and adopting Greek language
and dress. A group of rich men founded a Greek-style gymnasium to educate their
sons. Some even underwent a painful and risky operation to reverse their circumcision,
the very symbol of their covenant with God. But in the countryside, people
stuck with the old ways, despite the threat of prosecution and even death.
Finally, after many years of oppression, the spark of rebellion was struck
by one Mattathias, an old priest in the village of Modin, when he killed a
Greek officer and pulled down the altar to Zeus. Mattathias and his five sons,
the Maccabees, fled to the hills and commenced a guerrilla war on the Antiochan
puppet government. With a courage and daring born of their zealotry, the Maccabees
won the war, entering Jerusalem in triumph in 166 BCE. The immediately set
out to cleanse and refurbish and rededicate the temple which had been defiled
by the Greeks.
And there the miracle of Hannukah occurs. Although the Maccabees find only
one small jar of ritually pure olive oil for relighting the menorah, nevertheless,
the flame lasts for all eight days prescribed for the rededication.
And then the ironies begin. Hanukkah is the only one of the Jewish holidays
based on contemporary records of a real historical event. It is also the only
one not rooted in Torah -- the two books of the Maccabees are preserved
only in Greek texts, not Hebrew, and they are not included in the canon of
the Hebrew Bible, but only in the Apocrypha. These books make no mention of
the miracle of the oil. That comes later, from rabbinical source. And in the
generations following the rededication, the Maccabees themselves, who begin
as liberators, soon become oppressors. "Once mobilized" as Everett Gendler
says, "fanaticism is not easily checked." [Strassfeld, p. 163] The dynasty
of the Maccabees itself became hellenized, and took to persecuting the more
conservative rabbis. Worse, they eventually invited the Romans in to come in
and offer protection to their tiny country, a move which ultimately was disastrous
to the Jews.
Out of this confused and tumultuous history -- which I have greatly oversimplified
here -- grew the celebration of Hannukah. A happy fact of human nature is that
people need celebrations, holidays and rituals. Ritual is how we embody and
preserve memory and hope. Hannukah remembers the events surrounding the rededication
of the Temple, and inspires hope in every generation.
A children's book on Hannukah [A World of
Holidays: Hanukkah, by Anne Clark, David Rose, Gill Rose, p. 19] tells
the story of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, from when he was a teenager in a concentration
camp, in the bitter cold winter of 1944. Gryn writes how his father took
him and some friends one night to a corner of the barrack, told them it was
Hannukah, ....
produced a curious-shaped bowl, and began to light a wick immersed
in his precious, now melted, margarine ration. Before he could recite the
blessing, I protested at the waste of food. He looked at me -- then at the
lamp -- and finally said: "You and I have seen that it is possible to live
up to three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water,
but you cannot live properly for three minutes without hope."
In burning that little bit of margarine, Gryn's father struck the spark of
hope in the boys, perhaps as the ancient Mattathias had struck the spark of
rebellion in his sons. And what memory did this ritual evoke?
The tangled history of Hannukah has many strands. The Maccabean strand, the
courageous battle for religious freedom, is one value embedded in Hanukkah
-- one that Unitarian Universalists are always ready to embrace. But the later
rabbinic tradition, in shaping the celebration of the holiday, downplayed the
military victory. After all, the rabbis themselves had reason to be skeptical
of the ultimately tyrannical Maccabees. And Unitarian Universalists would do
well to remember that our own more recent forebears, the Puritans, also withstood
persecution and tremendous hardship to make the world safe for religious freedom
-- for Puritans. They were quick enough to persecute Quakers and Baptists.
It's hard to find a hero who will reliably fight for pluralism and tolerance.
The rabbis, rather, looked to Jewish fidelity to God and God's faithful loving
kindness to Israel for the meaning of Hanukkah. They emphasized, not the courage
and determination of the freedom fighters, but God's work in the miracle of
the oil. The Biblical reading for Hanukkah reminds people of the angel who
showed the prophet Zechariah the menorah, saying, "not by strength, nor by
power, but through My spirit -- says the Lord." [Strassfeld, 174] The Maccabees
prevailed, the rabbis insist, because their faith lent them courage. [Waskow,
98]. The spiritual meaning of the eight days of light from one day's worth
of oil led to a celebration centered on lighting the menorah, not on reenacting
a battle. That single
bottle of oil [says scholar and rabbi Art Waskow] symbolized
the last irreducible minimum of spiritual light and creativity within the
Jewish people -- still there even in its worst moments of apathy and idolatry.
The ability of that single jar of oil to stay lit for eight days symbolized
how with God's help that tiny amount could unfold into an infinite supply
of spiritual riches.
[Waskow 91f]
And yet another strand running through Hanukkah may
the deep human impulse felt at the time of the solstice to use light to encourage
the sun to return. Festivals of light are found in many human religions, beacons
of hope in the winter darkness. Waskow believes it is no coincidence that Hanukkah
takes place at the darkest phase of the moon in the darkest month of the year
[p. 93]. The menorah candles are a reminder and a plea to God to renew the
sun and the moon, the source of light and warmth for human beings and all the
earth. Perhaps the ancient Israelites needed a solstice festival to compete
with the pagan solstice, just as many parents now use Hanukkah gelt and 8 days
worth of presents to satisfy their children surrounded by a culture gone Christmas
mad.
Light is born from darkness, hope from despair. The genius of Judaism lies
in part in its ability to make memory and hope real in the celebrations of
holidays. At Passover we eat matzoh, the bread of affliction. At Purim we shake
noisemakers to stand up to those who would commit genocide. At Hanukkah we
candles rather than curse the darkness.
But the meanings of these concrete metaphors are not necessarily fixed in
literal concrete. They change as human experience and needs change. In the
nineteenth century, Zionists believed that it was up to them to create a state
of Israel, on their own, not waiting for God to do it for them. And so they
sang at Hannukah, "A miracle did not happen to us, we found no cruse of oil." [Waskow,
277] Others see Hanukkah as the festival of religious tolerance pluralism.
Just as the Unitarian Universalist flaming chalice means freedom and reason,
martyrdom and hope, so the festival of Hannukah embraces all these strands.
Scholar Arnold Eisen writes that:
Some symbols are so primary that purported "meanings" can only
prove inadequate. Light in the dead of winter, victory when it had seemed
improbable, more than enough when there had been far too little, few against
many, the freedom to be -- these are the essence, and the stories built around
them only so much adornment -- and therefore alterable.
Arnold Eisen, in The Jewish Holidays by Michael Strassfeld,
p. 166
Edward Greenstein adds:
The fact that different Jewish communities have found various
meanings in Hanukkah drives home the truth about all religious rituals: They
thrive only when they mean something to the people, when they externalize
deeply felt concerns. Often, when we are attached to a ritual, we will infuse
it with a special meaning or manifest some latent significance in it. In
other cases a ritual may fall out of use for lack of contemporary impact.
Yet, the Jews have had the wisdom to keep even underutilized rituals on the
books. As circumstances change, we may rediscover their power at some time
later on.
[Edward Greenstein, in The Jewish Holidays by Michael
Strassfeld, p. 165.]
Oh, and Judith. Where does she come in? Just how and when the story of Judith
got separated from the Assyrian invasion and attached to the uprising against
Antiochus, none of my sources tells me. Strassfeld suggests it was simply that
the writing of the book of Judith came at the time of the events of Hanukkah.
But she has become part of the celebration. Thanks to Judith of the time of
the Assyrians, and to Hannah in the Antiochan oppression -- who stood by and
watched all seven of her sons die rather than surrender and eat unkosher food
-- women have a special place in the Hanukkah celebration. In honor of these
brave women, modern women are expected to light menorahs and do no work for
at least the half hour that the Hanukkah candles are aflame.
But more than Judith's courage or piety, more than her clever scheme, more
than her beauty even, what is remembered about Judith is the contents of her
picnic basket -- a little detail not even mentioned in the Book of Judith,
but handed down somehow in the oral tradition. Perhaps she was inspired by
the dreadful thirst of her people when Holofernes cut them off from their water
source. Judith plied him not only with wine, but with a great quantity of cheese.
Delicious salty Mediterranean feta cheese, perhaps. Cheese to make him thirsty.
Thirsty enough to drink up that goat skin full of wine. Thirsty enough to fall
asleep, dead drunk. That cheese is commemorated at Hannukah. For many generations,
Jews celebrated Hanukkah by cooking and eating cheese pancakes. Fried in oil,
to be sure, to recall the sacred olive oil, but cheese for Judith. It was only
in Europe, after the discovery of the New World, with its cheap and abundant
new foods, that cheese gave way to potatoes. And so now we celebrate Hanukkah
with latkes, potato pancakes fried in oil.
So, is it courage and military strength? Is it faith that God's goodness
will prevail? Is it light in the solstice dark? Is it latkes or hamentaschen?
The answer can only be, "Yes." Yes to memory. Yes to faith and courage. Yes
to hope. Yes to the light in the darkness. So may it be. Amen, shalom, blessed
be.
Hymn #222 "Mi Y'Malel"
Closing Words
We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity,
brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the
precious gifts that they are and, renewed by their grace,
move boldly into the unknown.
-- Sara Moores Campbell
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth,
the warmth of community,
or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts until we are together again.
-- Elizabeth Selle Jones
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