Celebrating the Eighth Night and Day of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia!

Tonight/Today is the eighth and last day of Chanukah for this year.  It’s my favorite because I love seeing the menorah all lit at full splendor, but it’s my least favorite because it signals the end of one of my favorite holidays.  Good thing I believe in eating donuts all year round… and I believe that potato kugel should just be one really giant latke.

Last night, I celebrated the end of Chanukah by going to a really big Chanukah party that was held in Double Bay, a neighborhood of Sydney.  I went with a friend of mine and her daughter.  The party was mostly geared toward children and offered lots of diversions for them, including a petting zoo, games, rides, a magician, and even pony rides.  Still, it was fun to walk around, say hi to everyone, and celebrate Chanukah!

After that party, I went to a party at a friend’s house.  She had over many guests and (of course) fed them lots of latkes!  I had a nice time meeting people, some of whom were not Jewish or did not know much about the holiday.  It was fun getting to explain to them the history of Chanukah traditions, such as giving gelt and playing dreidel.   I also got to explain about the different laws and traditions surrounding menorahs.  There are some laws that apply to all menorahs (such as that the candles should be all at the same height and in a straight line, except for the shamash), but other differences (such as whether to light with oil, candles, or a combination) are only traditions.  After lighting the menorah, everyone sat around and sang songs.  One man played a guitar while another played a drum.  It was really fun!  This is the kind of celebration with family and friends that Chanukah is really about.

In honor of the eight day of Chanukah, I have composed a parody song that I hope you will all enjoy.  I will spare you having to listen to me sing it

On the eighth day of Chanukah,
my true love gave to me
Eight dreidels spinning,
Seven children laughing,
Six chocolate gelt,
Five golden latkes,
Four sufganiyot,
Three magen davids,
Two Jewish mothers,
And a menorah with some candles.

You may also enjoy this YouTube video of some of last night’s festive singing.  Please be aware that you may hear some female voices singing in the background:

Tonight/Today (depending on what part of the world you’re in) is the 7th night/day of Chanukah.  The next-to-last.  The eighth night is always my favorite, watching all the candles lit up, but it’s also my least favorite because it means Chanukah is almost over and we have to wait another entire year to celebrate it again.

At this time last Chanukah, Rabbi Ben and I were in Pune, India.  It’s hard to believe it was a whole year ago because to us it feels as if it was only yesterday.  Now that we’re celebrating Chanukah in Australia, the contrast between this year and last year is dramatic.

Celebrating Chanukah in Pune felt more like a family affair because, largely, it was.  All Chanukah events were hosted by Rabbi and Rebbetzin Kupchik at their Chabad House there.  Although there is a large local synagogue in Pune (it’s made of red brick and actually looks like a cathedral), the local Jewish population traditionally never celebrated Chanukah (or Purim for that matter) because they settled in India before these events occurred.  Therefore, there was no local Jewish Chanukah celebration, although a few Indian Jews did join us at the Chabad House to celebrate.

Every night of Chanukah, there was some sort of celebration at the Chabad house, although Rabbi Ben and I only arrived in time to celebrate the last few days there (the other days we celebrated in Jordan and in Bombay).  Still, every night the Kupchiks arranged a little party of sorts, starting with lighting the giant menorah out in front of the Chabad House.  It was a fun atmosphere because the crowd was small and very involved – even the Kupchiks’ two goats! You see, any dairy that the Kupchiks get has to be hand-milked (weekly) by one of them from a local cow.  By getting their own goats, they will have to rely less on that source, and will be able to make goat cheeses and other dairy products from milking their very own goats.  Anyway, even the goats joined in the Chanukah celebration and menorah candle-lighting!

The public candle-lighting was followed by lots of singing, of which I have some videos that perhaps I will post later or tomorrow.  Rabbi Kupchik knew Rabbi Ben from a previous visit and encouraged him to lead some of the singing.  On the seventh night, Rabbi Ben even lit the giant menorah!

After the singing, we all sat down together and had a nice meal.  Every night it was something different, but it was usually Israeli-style.  The Kupchiks make their own pita bread fresh daily.  They also make Israeli salad and hummus from scratch.  In fact, almost everything they make is from scratch because there is no way for them to just go to the shops and buy kosher pre-packaged food.  Everything tastes better and fresher, and I’m sure it’s also much healthier!  So every night we had a delicious festive meal to celebrate the holiday with the other Jews in Pune, some who were travelers like ourselves, some there on business, some expats living there for work, and even some Indian Jews as well.  It was a great mix and a great way to celebrate the victory of Jewish observance over the forces of assimilation!

It has been a tradition of mine every year to host a Chanukah party.  Chanukah has always been one of my favorite holidays and it was the only Jewish holiday I remember celebrating faithfully every single year as I was growing up.  The warmth of those glowing lights has stuck with me ever since.

When I moved to Miami, I decided I wanted to host a Chanukah party, but I didn’t want it to be just like every other person or organization’s Chanukah party.  I wanted something informal and fun to celebrate the holiday.  So I decided to do a cookie swap.  In a cookie swap, every person bakes a different type of cookie and brings it. Then everyone swaps, so that while you may have shown up with a plate of chocolate chip cookies, you’re leaving with a plate piled high with a wide variety of cookies! Yum!

The first two years I held my cookie swap, 2008 and 2009, I held it in Miami.  Last year, I wasn’t able to hold one because we were traveling in Jordan and India during Chanukah.  This year, although I haven’t been in Australia long, I decided to hold it here in Sydney.

The party was a stunning success! So many people showed up with cookies, sufganiyot, and even latkes!  Everyone mingled and chatted about different things, their lives, growth in Judaism, and the miracle of Chanukah.  When some close friends showed up with their week-old baby, we celebrated the miracle of life as we celebrated the miracle of the oil.  I think I speak for everyone when I say that we all had a fantastic time!

It was even more special because it was held on the holiday of X-mas.  We were able to celebrate our ability to be Jews and none of us felt even remotely that we were missing out on anything!  If you have kids clamoring to celebrate X-mas because their friends do, maybe you should consider having a fun Chanukah party instead!

Happy Chanukah, everyone!

During a Chabad Chanukah party in the park in Paraguay, dozens of Jews showed up. I really enjoyed watching all the children play on the playground, especially these two boys who showed their good middos by playing with a little boy much younger than them.

Paraguay is a little, landlocked country in south-central South America, just above Argentina and hemmed in by Brazil and Bolivia.  In 2007, while I was living in Argentina, I packed a small bag and spontaneously flew there, without plans as to what to eat, where to sleep, or how I would celebrate the holiday. Holiday?! Yes, Chanukah!  It was December and I went to Paraguay during Chanukah.

Fortunately, as soon as I arrived, I gave the Chabad rabbi a call.  After taking a taxi to the Chabad, we all piled into his car and drove to a nearby park, usually driving on the wrong side of the road and just barely avoiding head-on collisions with the oncoming traffic.  The rabbi told me they were going to be having a Chanukah party in the park.

When we arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  A larger-than-life Chanukah menorah towered above us.  I don’t think I’ve ever see one so big before!  And I certainly wouldn’t have expected to see it in a park in Asunción, Paraguay!

More and more members of the community began to arrive. The children played on the playground while teenage girls blew up balloons for them. The adults stood around, chatting.  Then, the sun began to set.  The men quickly formed a minyan and began to pray.  When they were done, it was showtime!

The menorah was so enormous that the rabbi had hired a cherry-picker truck to come lift people to the top to light it!  I was amazed.  It was incredible to celebrate the miracles of Chanukah by lighting the largest menorah I’ve ever seen, with many other Jews, in the center of a small country in South America.

At a Chanukah party in the park in Asuncion, Paraguay, the Chabad rabbi even let me ride up in the cherry-picker to light the menorah!

The next night, the party in the park continued.  Once again the children came out to play, the adults came out to chat, and the cherry-picker arrived for the menorah lighting.  This time, the rabbi even let me ride up and light the menorah! I will never forget how excited I was to perform this beautiful mitzvah, or how beautiful the city of Asunción looked from up so high.

When I descended to the ground again, the surprises weren’t over.  The Chabad house had cooked up a huge batch of homemade sufganiot (jelly donuts) to celebrate the miracle of the oil!  I must have eaten two or three – they were so good – and still there were many left after the party.

That Chanukah I spent in Paraguay will always be in my mind as one of my favorite celebrations of Chanukah.  It just goes to show that no matter where we live, we are still Jews and we still cling to our traditions, our beliefs, and our way of life.

Chanukah sameach!

As Rabbi Ben and I travel, we meet many new people, everywhere we go.  For most people, meeting someone new is a novel thing.  You move around in the same circles, see more or less the same people day in and day out.  When you meet someone new, it’s interesting, maybe even exciting.  But for us, it happens all the time because we are always the ones moving.

Now, when you meet a new person, the first thing you do is to get to know them.  How do you do this? By asking questions, of course! And people ask Rabbi Ben and I a lot of questions, which is great. But there is some questions we really dislike, like “What kind of job do you do?” or the very worst one, “Where do you live?”

It’s frustrating because we don’t really live anywhere.  In our entire marriage, we have never stayed anywhere for more than a month.  We are just always on the move.  “No fixed address.”

So it’s interesting when we read this week’s parsha and Yaakov approaches his brother Esav for the first time in over 28 years.  Yaakov then tells Esav where he’s been for such a long time, saying, “I lived with Laban.” (“Im Laban garti.”) Laban was a wicked fellow and so we’d expect Yaakov to say something different, perhaps that he sojourned there.  This leads us to ask, why does Yaakov choose to say he lived (garti) with Laban?

Rashi answers this somewhat by pointing out that “garti” (“lived”) has the same letters as “tar yag,” the Hebrew abbreviation for 613.  What Rashi seems to be saying is that Yaakov wanted to make sure Esav understood that although he lived with Laban (who was wicked), he still kept the 613 mitzvot.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested another interesting association with the word “garti” – that it is related to the word “ger,” or “foreigner.” (Remember that the original Torah doesn’t include any vowel letters!)  The Rebbe then asks, “How does this relate to Rashi’s explanation of the reason for the word garti?

Simply put, in order to keep the 613 mitzvot while living with Laban, Yaakov had to make himself a foreigner in Laban’s home.  Laban was too wicked for Yaakov to truly immerse himself in the lifestyle there and still keep the mitzvot.  So Yaakov made boundaries for himself.  He made the physical things and wealth foreign to him and focused instead on the spiritual.  He and his family would live in a nice, protected home, but he would put all of his physical belongings and wealth into a rickety makeshift tent outside, something that barely protected it.  The physical just wasn’t important to him.

This is the lesson we have to take with us as we go through our lives and as we travel.  We live in each place we visit, but everywhere we go, we must strive to keep the 613 mitzvot.  In order to do this, we have to put the physical and superficial to the side, ignore it, and focus on the spiritual.

This week will be the Chabad holiday of Yud Tes Kislev, which is followed by Chanukkah.  How fitting that we should be celebrating these two holidays after just learning this lesson from the weekly parsha.  After all, Yud Tes Kislev celebrates the birth of chassidus in the world, as the Maggid of Mezrich told the Baal Shem Tov that moshiach will come when his teachings are disseminated throughout the world, and on Yud Tes Kislev the Alter Rebbe, whose Tanya made these teachings accessible to all Jews (educated or not) was released from prison, free to spread chassidus throughout the world.  Similarly, Chanukah celebrates freedom to be Jewish.  And as we learn from the concept of gelt (coins or money) given on Chanukah, we are free now to spend our money on spiritual pursuits.  Unlike being under Greek rule, when we were free to own plenty of physical possessions, but were not free to spend them on spiritual pursuits, now we are free to follow in Yaakov’s footsteps.

So as we travel, a much pleasanter question to be asked by people we meet is, “Why are you traveling?”  Well, we’re traveling for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is simply that there are a lot of sparks of holiness out there in the world and we are out collecting them. How? By keeping the mitzvot and observing the Torah, everywhere we go.  And how do we do that? By distancing ourselves from the physical temptations of the world around us and focusing on the spiritual.  It is something every one of us can work on every single day.

Shabbat Shalom!

As we travel, Rabbi Ben and I are constantly moving.  Sometimes, we get the timing just right: we leave at the perfect moment, just when we are tired enough of a place to want to leave, but early enough that we still hold it fondly in our memories and wish to return one day.  But more often than not, and especially because we travel as a couple (and even though we became ‘one person’ under the chuppah, we do still have different feelings about things from time to time), we can rarely strike that perfect balance.  Either we leave too early and depart wishing desperately that we didn’t have to go, missing the place even before we’ve left it… Or we stay too long and we can’t get out of there fast enough, wishing never to see that place again.

Either way, we are leaving one place behind and entering a new one.  To leave one place necessarily means that we are entering another.  There is no alternative.  We leave Israel and enter Jordan, we leave India and enter Nepal, we leave Fiji and enter Australia.  No matter what our feelings about the place left behind, there is always something fresh and new and exciting in entering another place, even if it is one we have visited before.

This week on Simchas Torah we will read Parshas Vezos Haberachah, the last parsha in the Torah.  It is a powerful parsha, a description of Moses’s last day, where he gives his final blessings to all the tribes, gets one last, good, long look at the land of Israel he will never enter, and then dies.  It’s a heavy parsha and could even be understood to be a bit depressing.  After all, as we are reminded in the very last line of the Torah, never again has there been a prophet like Moses.  Yet, we read it on Simchas Torah, a day of joy and celebration of the Torah.  How can this be?

A hint can be found in the tradition that, at the end of the parsha, everyone in the congregation shouts, “Chazak! Chazak! Venischazeik!” (“Be strong! Be strong! And may we be strangthened!”)  We have reached the end and we need to ask Hashem to strengthen us.  And He does: by giving us the Torah and giving us a day to focus on celebrating it.  And so we spend the night of Simchas Torah dancing with the Torah, drinking l’chaims, and being joyful.  The Torah has ended, but yet it endures forever.

This year, Simchas Torah is followed immediately by Shabbat Parshas Bereishis and this too can teach us a lesson or two. First, we see that the Torah, which we “ended” the previous day, has not ended at all! Instead, we have simply started it again. We can learn from that that everything in life that seems to be an ending is not an ending after all… instead it is the start of a new opportunity, a new experience. We go from the death of the greatest prophet of all time to, the very next day celebration the beginning of G-d’s creation of the heavens and the earth.  It’s an amazing transformation!

Second, we see that the yearly Torah readings are cyclical, like our festivals and our holidays.  Indeed, all life events can, through the lens of Judaism, be viewed as cycles. In fact, in Judaism we even have the concept of gilgulim, or reincarnations, where a soul that still needs refinement can begin again as a new life in this world, seeking throughout generation after generation of life spans, to purify and perfect itself.  Even death, in Judaism, is not the end… it is just an opportunity to have a new beginning.

This is the reality of life.  Every end is a new beginning.  We may be leaving behind one place, one city, one relationship, one job or school, one stage of our lives… but we are always entering a new one.  Judaism teaches us that yes, the past is important, it shapes who we are and teaches us important lessons, but we are not to cry over something when it ends.  Rather, we are to look forward to the new beginning that is already starting.

Chag sameach and Shabbat shalom!

Chazak! Chazak! Venischazeik!