Toga or Torah - with Rachel Goldberg-Polin

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 1 The majority of the Jews who have a foot in both worlds, they have Hellenized, they have modernized, and they have Shabbat dinner, and they keep a kosher home, and they send their kids to Hebrew school.

Speaker 1 They need to finally take a stand because the people persecuting them, the Seleucids, aren't saying you could do both.

Speaker 1 You actually have to decide, do you take a toga and a scoop of Spani Copita, or do you take a Torah and a scoop of schmaltz? You need to decide who you are.

Speaker 2 It's 4.30 p.m. on Sunday, December 7th here in New York City.
It's 11.30 p.m. on Sunday, December 7th in Israel, where Israelis are winding down their day.

Speaker 2 Today, Sunday, German Chancellor Merce landed in Israel, marking his first official visit to Israel as Chancellor.

Speaker 2 Merce met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem, after which the two leaders gave a joint press conference.

Speaker 2 Speaking beside the Chancellor, Netanyahu told the press that he expects Phase 2 of the Gaza ceasefire to begin soon, adding that he would discuss the matter with President Trump when they meet at the White House later this month.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, there now remains one fallen hostage in Gaza, that is 24-year-old Master Sergeant Ron Gvili, who fought terrorists on October 7th at Kibbutz Al-Umim and was killed in battle.

Speaker 2 The hostage family forum is demanding that the government not transition to Phase 2 of the Gaza ceasefire before we see Ron's return to Israel.

Speaker 2 In the same press conference, Netanyahu also told reporters that he is not willing to retire from politics in exchange for a pardon, which he has requested from President Herzog.

Speaker 2 In other news, in a much anticipated decision on Friday, the European Broadcasting Union voted to allow Israel to compete in Eurovision 2026.

Speaker 2 However, following the announcement, Spain, Ireland, and the Netherlands withdrew from the competition in protest of Israel's participation.

Speaker 2 And this coming week, the head of the Mossad and a senior official from Qatar will be meeting with U.S. officials.
This will be a meeting convened by Steve Witkoff in New York City.

Speaker 2 It is part of the new trilateral mechanism that was set up following Israel's strike at Hamas in Doha this past September. Now on to today's episode.
On Monday, we will be exactly one week.

Speaker 2 from the beginning of Hanukkah. In keeping with the call-me-back tradition around many Jewish holidays, we turn to to Jewish educator and longtime friend, Rachel Goldberg-Poland.

Speaker 2 Rachel and I, in this conversation, discuss the timeless meaning of the Hanukkah story and how its lessons apply to the uncertainty, the promise, and the peril of Jewish life today.

Speaker 2 Rachel Goldberg-Poland on Toga or Torah.

Speaker 2 But before our conversation with Rachel, a word from our sponsor.

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Speaker 2 Your support can make a real difference. Please visit UJA.org or follow the link in the show notes to stand with UJA.

Speaker 2 And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my short-term nemesis, Rachel Goldberg-Poland.

Speaker 2 The reason listeners may be wondering why I'm calling Rachel my short-term nemesis is not because we're in a fight. Why did you suggest earlier that I call you my short-term nemesis?

Speaker 1 Only because we joke with each other that I unfortunately had joked with you the very first time that we met that every time I would listen to one of your podcasts, you always were introducing people as your long-time friend.

Speaker 1 And I thought, my gosh, this guy only has long-time friends, which is actually a real blessing that that's the case.

Speaker 2 But you also thought I was cheapening the term.

Speaker 1 I thought it diluted it, but I was sort of joking. You took it seriously.
And then every time we started, we had banter about that.

Speaker 1 So today I said to you, why don't you introduce me as your short-time nemesis instead of your long-time friend?

Speaker 2 So Rachel, let's jump into it.

Speaker 1 We are doing today's episode and having this conversation in the merit of Ron Ben Tali Veitzik, Ron Gvili, whose body we are anxiously praying for constantly.

Speaker 2 And just for our listeners who haven't heard one of our conversations before, yours in mind, when we do holidays around the chage, around the holidays, the origin of having conversations in the merit of living hostages, deceased hostages is what, in a nutshell?

Speaker 1 There's a tradition in Judaism that sometimes we do different acts in the hope and prayer that it will manifest, the goodness from it will manifest in something that we state very clearly.

Speaker 1 And so you and I, going over a year ago already, have learned together in the merit of the hostages returning.

Speaker 1 And when we started, it was in the merit of the live hostages and the dead hostages returning. And we have seen the manifestation of that happening.

Speaker 1 We saw the final remaining live hostages returned in October. And now we've had 26 deceased hostages returned.
I know what it is like to get your child back in a bag, and it is critically important.

Speaker 2 And as you often reminded me, that history or miracles or salvation can happen.

Speaker 1 In the blink of an eye.

Speaker 2 In the blink of an eye. John often made that point too, that it just could be like that.
We could be recording this episode and something by the time we're done recording something incredible.

Speaker 1 And people thought we were crazy. Right.
And then that morning, when those 20 came out, we had thousands of people write to us. Holy cow, in a blink of an eye.
Right.

Speaker 1 So, yes, it should be in a blink of an eye, carrifying.

Speaker 2 All right, Rachel, Rachel, you said to me when we spoke the other day that Hanukkah is the luckiest holiday. I associate Hanukkah with many words, but luck is not one of them.

Speaker 2 Why is Hanukkah the luckiest holiday?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think simply it is popular by association. Both Jews and non-Jews know about Hanukkah

Speaker 1 because it is sort of like that very cool boy who everyone knows the boy who sits next to him.

Speaker 1 So, because of Christmas being such a central holiday, certainly in North America and most parts of the world, and then you have Hanukkah, that the date changes on the Gregorian calendar each year, but it's always right around Christmas.

Speaker 1 And therefore, it is lucky by association. It is a holiday that otherwise might not be known.

Speaker 1 And there are plenty of other Jewish holidays that are just as, if not more, central to Judaism that people have never heard of.

Speaker 2 So I know

Speaker 2 that most Jews, certainly in the diaspora and definitely in Israel, fast on Yom Kippur. They do a Seder on Pesach,

Speaker 2 and they light Hanukkah, menorah candles on Hanukkah.

Speaker 2 And that may be a layer or two deeper what they know about Hanukkah, which is the lighting of the candles, and also in the diaspora, the giving of gifts.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe they'll know a bit more, but not much.

Speaker 2 So I want actually today, everyone to come out of this conversation, understanding where this holiday sits in Jewish history, like where this story happened and why.

Speaker 2 And then I want to get into what it's become over time. Set us up.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, I think that you're absolutely right that the most essential and relevant lessons from this holiday get lost if we don't understand the context in history of what was going on.

Speaker 1 So the first thing that you and I have to do is to get into my time machine and, you know, let me adjust the knobs so that we go back and meet my longtime friend, Alexander the Great.

Speaker 2 I thought only I had longtime friends. Okay.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh. I have so many.

Speaker 1 So the thing about Alexander the Great is we're going back to the year 332 BCE before the Common Era.

Speaker 1 Alexander the Great was a Greek king of Macedonia who was widely considered to be history's greatest, most successful military commander. He was actually undefeated in battle in his entire career.

Speaker 1 He never lost a battle. And in the year 332 BCE, he's making his way across the Persian Empire, conquering everything in his way.

Speaker 1 And he's getting closer and closer going eastward toward what is, you know, modern day Israel. And as he's getting closer to Jerusalem, the head of the Jewish

Speaker 1 is hearing, oh my gosh, this guy who can't lose is coming and he's destroying everything in his way.

Speaker 1 And that person who was the head of the Jewish community, who was the high priest of the temple at the time in Jerusalem, was Shimon Hatzadik, Simon the Righteous, who was the high priest, the Kohen Gadol.

Speaker 1 And he was also a member of the great assembly of, you know, they had this Anche Knesset Hagdolah that was 120 rabbinic, spiritual halachic legal sages.

Speaker 1 And he wants to avert a kerfuffle. He does not want another destruction of the temple.

Speaker 1 Remember, in 586 BCE, you know, about 200 years earlier, we had the Babylonians come into Jerusalem, destroy the temple with the Buchad Netzer, who was in charge, and exile most of the Jewish community to Babylonia.

Speaker 1 We have now a new second temple. We have leaders and a whole community and a sovereign nation state happening here, and we don't want this destroyed.

Speaker 1 So Shimon Hatzadik, Simon the Righteous, goes out in his beautiful garb of the high priest in this white turban.

Speaker 1 And I'll tell you, I know this because there is actually a passage in the Gemara, in the Talmud, that describes what happens.

Speaker 1 Simon the Righteous goes out with a few other elderly sages, and they go out and they stop the forces that are coming forward, led by Alexander the Great.

Speaker 1 And Alexander the Great, this is recanted in the Talmud, gets down off of his gorgeous chariot. He takes one look at Simon the Righteous, and he bows to him.
He bows to him, Alexander the Great.

Speaker 1 And his generals say to him, What are you doing? And he says, Every single time that I have had a conquest, I have had a moment before the conquest, before I win, with a vision of this man.

Speaker 1 And so Simon the Righteous and Alexander the Great end up having a conversation. Everything gets calmed down.
They have this DMC, deep meaningful conversation.

Speaker 1 And out of deference and gratitude to Simon the Righteous, Alexander the Great agrees that he is not going to conquer Jerusalem in a military way. He's not going to destroy the temple.

Speaker 1 And as a sign of thank you, Simon the Righteous says, you know what I'm going to do for you? For the next year, every single Jewish baby boy who is born will have the name Alexander.

Speaker 1 And Alexander says, I like it. Thank you.
From that moment on, in 332 BCE, the name Alexander becomes a Jewish boy's name.

Speaker 2 But there's nothing Jewish about it. I mean, it's not a biblical name.
He's not a biblical character. And we hear the name Alex, it's very common to assume it's Jewish.

Speaker 2 And that's the origin of it, which I did not know.

Speaker 1 And that's important because if you're on Jeopardy and that's one of the categories, you might actually be able to do a daily double.

Speaker 1 Now, Alex, what's interesting was not conquering just for the sake of conquering, which I guess, like, I'm not a conqueror personally, but that's a thing.

Speaker 1 Sometimes people are conquering just for the sake of conquering. Alexander the Great was an intellectual.

Speaker 1 He was actually a student of Aristotle's, and he felt this mission that he was bringing the superior, civilized, savvy ways of Greece to the supposed backward Levant. Okay.

Speaker 1 And he is incredibly successful in this entire region.

Speaker 1 And we see this over the next 150 years, that this entire Fertile Crescent area takes on the Greek language, architecture, philosophy, art, math, science, dress, poetry.

Speaker 2 I want to be clear.

Speaker 2 Basically, the region that's, you know, in the Eastern Mediterranean that includes what we now think is Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian areas, parts of Turkey, like the Levant is this much broader area.

Speaker 1 Yes. And what's unfortunate or interesting, depending on where you're looking at it from, Alexander the Great actually dies at a young age 32.

Speaker 1 He's sick for a few days, and I think suddenly he realizes, holy cow, I'm not actually sick. I'm actually dying.

Speaker 1 And so he calls together his top generals and he starts to divide up his empire that he has conquered up to this point. And that is how we end up in the north of modern day Israel.

Speaker 1 In Syria, you end up with the Seleucid kingdom from his general Seleucid. And in the south, in Egypt, you end up with the Ptolemaic kingdom.
And in the middle, both geographically and politically, is

Speaker 1 the land of Judea,

Speaker 1 Jerusalem, modern-day Israel. And what's interesting is for those following 150 or so years, the Jews really don't care who they're paying their taxes to, right? Sometimes it's the Seleucids.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's the Ptolemaic kingdom, that dynasty. We don't really care who we're writing our IRS checks to.
We just want autonomy.

Speaker 1 And the majority of the Jews during this chunk of 150 years end up feeling that this Greekification, which is known as Hellenization, is a positive, progressive, modernizing influence.

Speaker 2 So Jews welcomed it in that sense?

Speaker 1 The majority did.

Speaker 1 This is where it's interesting because we know that the Greek culture does start taking a toll on Jewish life internally.

Speaker 1 And there are rifts in the community because there's a slow corrosion of Jewish traditions. Because I think of it as you have three different buckets of who falls.

Speaker 1 And there were more, but I'm going to say three, that you have, first of all, the Jews who choose to assimilate and to really take on a Greek Hellenized way of life.

Speaker 1 And then you have sort of the Jews who recommit ardently to religious practices and sort of completely reject that and say, we are going to be extremely rigorous and intense and dedicated to our Judaism and we're not letting any outside influences make their way into our lifestyle.

Speaker 1 And then you have the third bucket, which are Jews who have a foot in both worlds. And this should sound extremely familiar today.
Welcome to my world. There is nothing new under the sun.

Speaker 2 I just want to underline the point. When you say it's very familiar to Jews today, especially Jews in the diaspora, it's this constant balancing act.

Speaker 2 Every single day, am I living a Jewish life or an assimilated life, an assimilated in the West life? That is the tension.

Speaker 1 So what ends up happening is we've had about 150 years pass and suddenly enter crazy, erratic Antiochus IV,

Speaker 1 who is from the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. He has some ego issues to the point where he even adds to his name the name Epiphanes.
So he's Antiochus Epiphanes, which means God manifest.

Speaker 1 And he demands that people address him as such. He feels that Zeus is somewhat manifest in him.
He attacks Jerusalem in the year 167 BCE.

Speaker 1 Remember, this is 150-something years after Alexander the Great, but that Hellenistic Greekification has really taken seed and taken hold in this area. And Antiochus enters.

Speaker 1 He puts a altar to Zeus in the temple, the temple that Simon the righteous had fought so hard to make sure that it didn't get destroyed, that it didn't get defiled in any way. He brings in this altar.

Speaker 1 He has sacrifices of pigs take place, which is obviously very symbolically very painful. It's ouch and it's oink.

Speaker 1 Okay. He outlaws Jewish observance.
There's no Brit Milah. You can't have circumcisions.
You can't have Torah study. You can't have Shabbat observance.
You can't have adherence to the Jewish calendar.

Speaker 1 You can't have Kashrut be observed. And he demands that Jews pay homage to Olympian gods.

Speaker 1 And he's having not just in Jerusalem in the temple, but Antiochus sends his troops around to all the small hamlets in Judea.

Speaker 1 And he has those temples defiled as as well. And by the way, this is the first time in Jewish history that we end up with religious persecution.

Speaker 2 Okay, you said this to me the other day.

Speaker 1 And you didn't believe me.

Speaker 2 I didn't believe you because I sit here and I think so many Jewish holidays are about religious persecution.

Speaker 1 Example.

Speaker 2 Religious persecution is part of the story in some way.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 And you said, yes, but this was the first time. So explain that.

Speaker 1 Well, we obviously had had territorial territorial wars and conflict before, but this was unusual in that the

Speaker 1 person doing the persecution or the entity doing the persecution was saying, look, if you do what we're asking you to do, sacrifice this pig on the altar and everything's honky-dory.

Speaker 2 Okay. They weren't sending us to concentration camps.
No. They weren't trying to kill us.
They were saying just stop being Jewish.

Speaker 1 They were saying be Hellenized, be modernized.

Speaker 2 That's my point.

Speaker 1 Be enlightened.

Speaker 2 And that is the purest form, I think, is the point you're making of religious persecution is to say, we're not trying to eliminate you as people.

Speaker 1 No, just religion. We want to get rid of your religion.
You can live. Just don't do those things you're doing that make you you.
And so we also, as a result, we get the first religious martyrdom.

Speaker 1 We have Jews who say, when these troops come and they say, wait a minute, did you give your child a Jewish circumcision, a breit milah? And the answer is yes. And they kill you for doing that.

Speaker 1 That is religious martyrdom. And we have examples of Jews who choose death over defying Jewish law.
And we have the opposite. We have Jews who defy Jewish law instead of dying.

Speaker 1 And of course, we have in the halacha, in Jewish law, we have certain things are permitted to transgress in order to live. And there are some things that you're supposed to say.

Speaker 1 No, that, you know, I do draw the line.

Speaker 1 But what I think is really important for our purposes of this discussion is that what happens at that time is that those Jews in that third bucket, the Jews who are the majority of the Jews, who have a foot in both worlds, they have Hellenized, they have modernized, and they have Shabbat dinner, and they keep a kosher home, and they send their kids to Hebrew school.

Speaker 1 They need to finally take a stand because the people persecuting them, the Seleucids, aren't saying you could do both.

Speaker 1 You actually have to decide, do you take a toga and a scoop of Spanikopita, or do you take a Torah and a scoop of schmaltz? You need to decide who you are.

Speaker 1 And at one point while all this is unfolding, A unit of the Seleucid army goes to this small town in Modein, which you know, Dan, when you visit here, is between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Speaker 1 And they meet the elderly priest, Matitiyahu, who is from the priestly family known as the Hashmonaim, the Hasmonean family.

Speaker 1 He and his five sons, who become known as the Maccabees, they make it very clear to these outsiders who are coming from Antiochus's army, and they take a stand and they say, no way, you are not going into our temple.

Speaker 1 You are not defying our temple. We are not making sacrifices to Zeus.
We are not dissolving our Jewish practice. We are not becoming like you.
It's not happening.

Speaker 1 And they take to the hills and they make attacks on the Greek Syrian troops.

Speaker 1 And the long story short is that this small amount of people who band together and at its heyday, the Maccabees were either 6,000 troops or maybe, maybe, maybe 20,000 troops, but the Seleucids were at least 50,000 troops.

Speaker 1 So they were wildly outnumbered. And somehow this tiny amount wins over the large amount.
And they go to the temple and they go to rededicate the temple and repurify the temple.

Speaker 1 And the big miracle that happens is they take the candelabra that used to always be lit, which was called a menorah.

Speaker 1 And they want to light the menorah. Now, that menorah, you should know, is not the menorah that most of us think of when we're outside of Israel.

Speaker 1 The menorah that was in the temple was a seven-branched menorah, three branches on each side and one branch in the middle.

Speaker 1 And it was lit with specially purified olive oil that was prepared by the priests, by the Koanim.

Speaker 1 So they're searching around, the Maccabees, who are now, you know, it happened on the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislave.

Speaker 1 And they're searching around and they find one tiny little, it can't even be called a jar. It's so small.
It's a little cruise of oil with the seal on top.

Speaker 1 You know how it says if the seal is open, this is not okay to eat. So if the seal is opened, it's not okay to use.

Speaker 1 And the only teeny tiny cruise of oil that was still sealed with the proper seal of the priests was enough to last for one day of lighting. But they said, you know what? Let's light it.

Speaker 1 And it takes eight days to purify and create new oil. And lo and behold, that one little cruise kept lit for the next eight days.

Speaker 2 Or for the next seven days, meaning the seven days after the first day.

Speaker 1 Correct. So the whole thing was an eight day, you know, oh my gosh, that we won and we found this and it's lasting.
So that is the backdrop behind the Hanukkah story.

Speaker 2 And that is why we light each night for eight nights. Correct.
So that's the story.

Speaker 2 That's the the significance of the symbol and the ritual that I think most Jews are familiar with around this holiday.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, it's like in Hollywood, they say that, you know, when someone's pitching a movie, that's the story. And then let me tell you the real story.
So what's the real story?

Speaker 1 Okay. What's the duck? That's what they say in marketing.
There you go.

Speaker 1 So first of all, I think that the easiest way to find out what is it that we're celebrating is let's look at the two sources that talk about it, which one is we can look back in the liturgy.

Speaker 1 We can look at our prayer book. We can see because during the eight days of Hanukkah, there's a paragraph that we insert into the daily prayers and into the grace after meals that we say when we eat.

Speaker 1 And by the way, we also read Torah every single day of the eight days of Hanukkah. And we also say Hallel, which is a collection of praise-filled psalms.

Speaker 1 But the paragraph about Hanukkah is really talking about

Speaker 1 God

Speaker 1 helping us win the tiny against the many, the weak against the mighty. And it's really nodding to that dynamic where it doesn't really mention this crazy thing that happened with the oil.

Speaker 1 But if you look in the Talmud, in the oral law that was written down in the Mishnah, which became the Talmud, the Talmud has a passing mention of the military feat and really dominant emphasis on the fact that this oil lasted for so long and that the temple was rededicated.

Speaker 1 And so taken together, we see that we're celebrating two different facets of miracle.

Speaker 1 We're celebrating this military feat and we're celebrating this miraculous endurance of the light continuing for those eight days.

Speaker 2 This episode is presented by UJA Federation of New York. Many of us grew up thinking anti-Semitism was a ghost from the past, something our parents and grandparents faced, but that we did not.

Speaker 2 The past two years have been a shocking wake-up call.

Speaker 2 Anti-Semitism hasn't just reared its head, it has become a driving force in parts of academia, in politics, in the media, and in mainstream culture.

Speaker 2 As Jews become targets once again, one of the questions that loom large is who's taking care of the people impacted?

Speaker 2 UJA Federation of New York is showing up to fight back, committed to keeping Jewish communities safe and responding to crisis calls from around the world.

Speaker 2 Because one of our greatest strengths has always been community, gathering for holidays, traditions, and moments of connection that remind us of who we are.

Speaker 2 That's why UJA is also supporting Holocaust survivors, victims of October 7th, and anyone really in need across our community. Your support can make a real difference.

Speaker 2 Visit UJA or visit the link in the show notes to stand with UJA.

Speaker 2 In terms of what Hanukkah has become over time, has it evolved or devolved in terms of how we think about the holiday or what the holiday has become in terms of its symbolism?

Speaker 2 This is separate from it being the quote-unquote Jewish Christmas, but is the way we think about Hanukkah today different than 15 years ago, 50 years ago, hundreds of years ago?

Speaker 1 Well, I think something really important that I love about, let's go back a thousand years ago. Let's go back to Maimonides, right? Rabbi Moses ben Maimon.

Speaker 2 The Rambam.

Speaker 1 The Rambam, who talks about, you know, and he's one of our most prolific commentators who was born in Spain and moved.

Speaker 2 Philosopher, scholar, just for listeners who don't understand, this is like doctor. Right.
He was a physician.

Speaker 1 That guy was like a total Renaissance man. Right.

Speaker 2 11, like it's 1200. Like, this is a long time ago.

Speaker 1 And he explains that the purpose of Hanukkah is Pirsume Nisa, which means advertising the miracle. So even going back a thousand years, we understand

Speaker 1 that the point of this holiday and what's the only ritual, really, the really only ritual, is we have to light these lights.

Speaker 1 And we have a very methodical instruction of where those lights should be lit and what time they should be lit. And people can look this up.
You know, this is not supposed to be prescriptive.

Speaker 1 I'm just being descriptive. The whole entire point, according to the Rambaum, is we are trying to do what I like to think of as a PDA about our Jewishness.

Speaker 1 We are trying to do a public display of affection. And therefore, the Rambaum explains you light them in the evening.
Because if I light a candle right now, you're not really going to see it.

Speaker 1 We notice that lights are lit when there's darkness around them.

Speaker 1 And so Rambaum said, make sure that you light it, you know, shortly after nightfall and that it should be lit either in a window or in a, you know, in a doorway.

Speaker 1 In Israel, I'm sure you've seen a lot, we have these things that look like fish tanks that are outside of our buildings, outside of our homes that we light outside because we're trying to have people see that we are saying we're here.

Speaker 1 We're Jews, get used to it. That's what I think this holiday is about.

Speaker 2 You described it to me as Jewish Pride Day or Jewish Pride Week.

Speaker 1 Yes, I think so. And I'm not making that up myself.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that that's what everyone is extrapolating from what we are learning over the years from our sages, you know, at different times in history.

Speaker 1 And I worry and wonder if now we are adjacent or very close to one of those times now, but Jews have been forced to hide.

Speaker 1 We've been forced to hide our practices, our lifestyle, or we have practiced them, but we've felt a little bit uncomfortable, or we've had to do things secretly.

Speaker 1 Other times we could practice, but only behind closed doors.

Speaker 1 And part of the traditional way of lighting this chanukia, we call it in Israel, a chanukia, this candelabra that is specifically for Hanukkah, which in when I was growing up, we always called it the menorah.

Speaker 1 It's really, again,

Speaker 1 the menorah was the candelabra that had seven branches.

Speaker 1 Achanukia, Hanukkah has nine because you have the eight arms, and then you have the center one that's called the shamash, the one that you use to light the other ones, because we're actually not supposed to be using these lights for anything except to reveal and show that they're beautiful, something amazing happened to us, and we want to acknowledge it.

Speaker 2 It's interesting because it's in that sense, it is different from every Jewish holiday because most Jewish holidays are, it's honoring the holiday, I don't want to say quietly and separately, because in many cases, not quietly, but definitely separately.

Speaker 2 We're in synagogue. We're having, you know, meals just with Jewish family, friends, people from in the community.
We're separating ourselves from our daily routines. We're not at work.

Speaker 2 We're not at school. Hanukkah is none of those things.
Hanukkah is saying, no, no, no, live your life. Don't spend Hanukkah in synagogue.
Live your life. Go to work.

Speaker 2 You know, deal with the secularized modern world, but be prideful. Be in the civic square.
We're telling the world we're here.

Speaker 1 Yes. And in fact, I remember teaching our non-Jewish neighbors about this holiday when we were living in Virginia.

Speaker 1 And I was saying to them, you actually get to participate in us fulfilling our mitzvah of doing this holiday because we would light our chanukia in the front window.

Speaker 1 And our non-Jewish neighbors who lived across the street, I said, by you seeing them,

Speaker 1 we are performing our obligation of pirsume nisa, of publicizing this miracle that happened to us.

Speaker 1 And I remember a rabbi teaching me once that he said, you know, if you live at a dead end street and you get home very late at night and you live alone, you should light the chanukia, the chanuka menorah in your window, say the blessings, and then walk outside and you look at your chanukia so that you can fulfill the mitzvah of having seen the advertisement of this amazing thing that happened.

Speaker 1 thousands of years ago. And by the way, another very interesting tidbit, I think, again, especially if if you're going to be on Jeopardy, is how traditionally were we supposed to light these candles?

Speaker 1 How did this come about?

Speaker 1 And so you should know that in the Talmud, it explains the original, like the OG way of lighting the most basic way to light Hanukkah candles is it said for every household, there should be one candle lit each night.

Speaker 1 And then we have the next level of fancy. Okay.
And the next level of fancy is you light one candle per person in the household.

Speaker 1 So for example, for you and Campbell and your two boys, you're a home of four. So on the first night you light four, on the second night you light four.
On the third night you light four and so on.

Speaker 1 But then we got to the super duper deluxe way of lighting. And that's when we said we're going to light in collaboration with whatever night it is.

Speaker 1 And of course, because we're Jews, we had a debate over what does that mean then? Do you start with eight and work your way down? Saying on the first day, wow, we had eight.

Speaker 1 And then the next day there were seven days left. And the next day, there were six.
So each day you're lighting fewer and fewer candles.

Speaker 1 Or do you light one on the first day and then two on the next day and three on the third day and four on the fourth day?

Speaker 1 And this was a debate between the schools of thought of Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, who were, you know, the big Whigs in 100 BCE.

Speaker 2 And we just got, for our listeners, in the Talmud, which is basically a series of debates over interpretations of Jewish law, these two figures loom large, Hillel and Shammai.

Speaker 2 And these two guys are hashing it out.

Speaker 1 Yes. And I think it also shows very much how each of them philosophically approached the world.

Speaker 1 It's interesting, by the way, especially in this time of like terrible challenges in civil discourse, that Hillel and Shammai almost never, ever, ever agreed.

Speaker 1 And yet there was a real banter between them that was respectful.

Speaker 2 And I think one of them, Hillel, would always present Shammai's argument before presenting his own.

Speaker 1 Yes. And he would present it so convincingly that his students often would say, this must be what we're going to do.

Speaker 2 It's so persuasive, right?

Speaker 1 Because think about it. Nowadays, when we disagree with the people, whoever's on our other side, we try to take them down by making their argument sound stupid or little or weak.

Speaker 1 If someone's really confident, in what they believe, they can actually make the opposing side sound completely compelling and then explain with respect why they disagree.

Speaker 1 So, what ended up happening is Hillel very much saw the miraculous in each day, and that each day was building on the day before. If day one, oh my gosh, the candle was lit for, it lasted one day.

Speaker 1 So, on day two, it's even more miraculous because it should be going less, it shouldn't be being stronger. And we actually rule by that opinion.

Speaker 1 And so, we light each day on the first day one, on the second day, two, on the third day, three, and so on.

Speaker 1 By the way, you should know that there are some houses that everyone in the house lights their own hanukka menorah. They light their own hanukiah.

Speaker 1 So when I was in high school, I remember going home that had six children, two parents. So you had eight of these candelabras being lit every single night.

Speaker 1 So I'm thinking by night eight, where you have nine candles. So it's nine times six.
I mean, you had, it was gorgeous. And I was always like nervously looking at the exits.

Speaker 2 As you're speaking, I'm thinking, so my mother, who lives near you in Jerusalem, is a survivor of the Holocaust of the Shoah. And she was a hidden child.
Her and her family were hidden out.

Speaker 2 Her father was killed in Auschwitz, but she and her mother were on the run and several of her siblings. And they had to move around a lot.

Speaker 2 But at one point, they were hidden by non-Jews who were happy to hide them so long as they weren't Jewish, meaning they thought they were just non-Jewish Christian war refugees.

Speaker 2 And the Christian war refugees, they were ready to hide.

Speaker 2 And so my mother and her mother, my grandmother, trained my mother on how to pretend you're a Christian, which is a very interesting thing to teach a six-year-old girl.

Speaker 2 I'm not only going to teach you about Judaism, but now I'm going to teach you how to fake about being a Christian. And then Hanukkah came.

Speaker 2 And my mother, to this day, she's written about it, to this day, she has this vivid, vivid memory of Hanukkah coming and her mother insistent on creating some semblance of a Hanukiya, of a menorah, and then they hid under a sheet and they lit it.

Speaker 2 So on the one hand, my grandmother was so committed to not letting go of this ritual, of this chag.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, as you're talking, I'm thinking, I can't think of the manner in which they did it as being in more

Speaker 2 out of the spirit of the holiday, which is to have to light the candles for this holiday and hide it and not let anyone see is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 1 You know, you tell me that. And what I just hear is that it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
And it's a mother who was so desperate to give her daughter that Persume Nisa.

Speaker 1 And I actually think she completely fulfilled that obligation because if anything, she was giving it to your mother, right?

Speaker 1 And this is what I was talking about, that we've had different times in Jewish history history where we were not allowed to do this. And

Speaker 1 we know that from hostages who have come home that they were trying to light Hanukkah candles when they were in Gaza during this war.

Speaker 1 I mean, there certainly were no windows to put anything in to advertise that miracle that, you know, they were trying to observe. But I feel that, you know, this is the big question now, right?

Speaker 1 Why was I insisting on talking about the history lesson? Like, why is that so important to me?

Speaker 1 Because I think that this extremely powerful message about Hanukkah for the 21st century Jew, whether it's the Jew in Israel or in the diaspora, in my mind, and again, it's just my opinion, is I actually do not think about Hanukkah thinking, oh, is this about the military feat?

Speaker 1 I don't think, is this about the oil lasting for eight days or rededicating the temple? What I get caught up in is what led up to Hanukkah. What led up to it?

Speaker 1 It was the catalyst was the Maccabees saying, listen, we are Jews and we are proud and we are not you.

Speaker 1 And I think the reality today in Hanukkah, in a lot of places, it's morphed into something else.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was never friends with Judah Maccabee, but I kind of feel like he'd be not so happy with sometimes how we are celebrating this holiday because the whole point of what happened was when Antiochus first came and came into the Jewish temple and came into the smaller temples that were all over Judea were these groups of Jews who held fast to their Jewishness and held fast to these rich traditions and said, we don't want this outside influence.

Speaker 1 And I think I sound a little ominous and I don't mean to because I think what we have have to remember truly is that most of us are not extreme Maccabees and most of us are not completely assimilated Hellenists.

Speaker 1 I think most of us, as you were mentioning before, are struggling in the middle.

Speaker 1 And when we say the word struggle, everyone freaks out because it sounds very negative, but actually struggling means you're grappling, you're thinking, you're digesting, you're being alive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're engaged. You're engaged in

Speaker 2 the debates, in the contents, in the dilemmas.

Speaker 1 You know, trying to not go to either extreme, but how do we do it?

Speaker 2 To get it right, you're struggling with how to get it right.

Speaker 1 And so we have to each say to ourselves, I think the message of Chanukah is each of us saying to ourselves, where do we draw the line? And for everyone, it's going to be different, right?

Speaker 1 For each of us, it'll be different. And the truth is, for each of us in different situations, it's going to be different.
But what Hanukkah comes to remind us is we have to draw a line.

Speaker 1 We have to say to ourselves, who am I? What do I stand for? And figure it out. Figure it out.
If we're not sure who we are and what we stand for, figure it out. Now do it.
Don't say it. Do it.

Speaker 2 Okay. I want to stay on this for a moment because you said to me the other day, this question is even more present and urgent today than it has been for a long time.

Speaker 2 And you and I both agreed this is especially the case in the diaspora. Why do you think that?

Speaker 1 I think in the last two years, a lot of Jewish people around the world have had similar feelings to what happened in 167 BCE when suddenly Jews realized, you know, we have to decide who we are. And

Speaker 1 John and I go all over the world still doing hostage advocacy and trying to explain Israel in a lot of places.

Speaker 1 And we hear from the Jewish communities all over the world how they don't recognize the places that they've grown up in and been in for 50, 60 years.

Speaker 1 John talks a lot about he has a lot of friends who he went to university with who just so happen to have Jewish sounding last names, but they're not Jewishly observant.

Speaker 1 And yet in the last two years, they've been held to account for what is happening in a country that they have never visited. A lot of them have never been to Israel.

Speaker 1 And they are being asked, whether they're doctors or lawyers or in the tech world, what is your country doing? And they're thinking, my country is America. My country is Canada.
My country is France.

Speaker 1 I live in London. What are you talking about? And yet we're realizing that the world is very much melding what's happening in Israel with what's happening with Jews around the world.

Speaker 1 And so we kind of have to figure out what does that mean? And we owe it to ourselves to figure out who do I I think I am? Who does the world think I am? And decide where do I draw the line? Who am I?

Speaker 1 It's a real question of, you know, someone's holding up a mirror and you have to say, am I okay with what I'm seeing?

Speaker 2 I would say, though, that the difference between the Jewish Israeli experience and the Jewish diaspora experience is that what Israeli Jews experience over this last two years is, no, no, no, no, they want to kill us.

Speaker 2 It's not that they care whether or not we're Jews or not. They just, they want us dead and they want us gone.
It is war. They want us out of here.
That's what October 7th was.

Speaker 2 That's what Iran building a nuclear program was about. That's what Hezbollah is about.
For Jews in the diaspora, it's different. I don't think they want us dead.
They're fine for us to be around.

Speaker 2 They just don't want us being Jews the way we think of Jews, being part of Jewish peoplehood.

Speaker 2 living back to the spirit of the holiday, being prideful, very public Jews, being Jews who have a deep connection to Israel. As long as we bring all that, they're like, no, no, no, that we don't want.

Speaker 2 But otherwise, you can hang around.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's Alexander the Great brand

Speaker 1 of just saying, you know, we have a different modern enlightened way, and we're happy for you to join us.

Speaker 2 Right. And so in that sense, I think so much of the last two years,

Speaker 2 my friend Rabbi David Ingber, I quote him all the time. Soon after October 7th, he said, what Israelis learned after October 7th was that they were at war.

Speaker 2 He says, but what we learned on October 8th is we were under attack.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 2 Not that we're under attack the way Israelis were at war. We're basically being told, shut it down, shut down this whole Jewish thing you're doing.
And then you're fine. You can join our encampments.

Speaker 2 You can join our

Speaker 2 political movements. You can join our whatever, our college crusades.
In that sense, the Israeli experience and the diasporic experience part ways.

Speaker 1 It's very different. It is different.
And I often say, I don't know. What you're going through is extremely challenging, and it's not what I'm familiar with.

Speaker 1 And what we're going through here, I think it's very hard for the diaspora to understand.

Speaker 1 And yet, what's happened in these past two years is that the 15 million of us, which kind of sounds big, and then you realize, oh, wait, there are 8 billion people in the world.

Speaker 1 15 million is less than 1% of the population. And it's a tiny, it's a 0.2%

Speaker 1 of the world population. This is tricky.

Speaker 2 I want to ask you two other questions. One, the theme of polarization within the Jewish world, Jews being divided.
Can you just reference or explain why that is also relevant to this holiday?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, that was going back to there was a lot of contentious backdrop to before Antiochus entered the land of Israel. I had mentioned that there was already tension, there was friction.

Speaker 1 There were people who felt that Judaism should be observed a certain way. And there were people who said we're choosing to integrate, you know, these other new enlightened ideas.

Speaker 1 And there wasn't a respectful discourse or dialogue between them.

Speaker 1 And again, tragically, we like to think that what's happening right now is

Speaker 1 different

Speaker 1 and strange and unique. And it isn't.
It is very much repetitive of behavior that we've seen in the past.

Speaker 1 And we don't do ourselves any favors by screaming and disregarding and disrespecting each other. And yet, it's something we're very good at.
We're not unique.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that all people, we have this challenge. We have this amazing intellect and insight and wisdom at our fingertips.

Speaker 1 And we often choose to not elevate ourselves and use those capabilities in the most glorious, holy, and hallowed ways.

Speaker 2 Second last question. You're wearing the tape on your shirt, which you still wear.
It says day 789. So 789 days since October 7th.
You've been counting days.

Speaker 2 I take it the idea is you'll take it off when the last hostages are returned. The role of counting in Judaism, you and I have talked a lot about that.
over the last year and a half.

Speaker 2 We intended to talk about it on one of our episodes. I think we were going to talk about counting the Omer, but we never actually did get into it.

Speaker 2 But I want to, therefore, bring it up now because this holiday is also about counting, the significance of the number. Look at how much now we just talked about the number of days and the miracle.

Speaker 2 You know, we had enough oil for one day, and then the real miracle was the seven days, and then you went through all the ways to light each candle.

Speaker 2 And some people, the debates and how to do it, and the debates between Hillel and Shamma. It's all around counting and numbers, which is a big part of Judaism.
Why?

Speaker 1 I think it even in English, it comes down to the root of the word accountability, because there's something about counting that makes it so you cannot be blind.

Speaker 1 You cannot be blind to what is going on if you're counting.

Speaker 1 And that is why we started counting when you're asking about the number.

Speaker 1 And I'll tell you that there is a mother who had spoken to me just a few weeks ago and she had said to me, please don't don't stop counting with us until we have him back.

Speaker 1 And she now has her son back, but not everyone has their son back. And I really believe, and when we started counting, we said, not until everyone's home.
And you know, there's a way to count.

Speaker 1 You know, sometimes you can count like this. One of my daughters, by the way, she is in framework where she is not able to wear the number.
And so she wears it inside.

Speaker 1 And it reminds me of this famous story about A.J. Must, who was an educator during the Vietnam War.
He lived in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 And he used to go in front of the White House with a sign that would say, end this war.

Speaker 1 And the eighth or ninth year into Vietnam, a journalist actually came to him because people knew him by that point. I mean, he's been holding the sign for so long.

Speaker 1 And the journalist said to him, do you really think that you holding that sign is going to change the world? And he said, oh, no, I'm holding the sign so the world doesn't change me.

Speaker 1 And I think that it's so incredibly impactful, the messaging there, because I'm wearing this and there are still, thankfully, people have to do what they're comfortable with.

Speaker 1 Some people still wear a ribbon. Some people wear a necklace.
Some people aren't wearing anything. Some people are still praying about it.

Speaker 1 You know, I am very close to families for whom it was a humongous deal that we continued to count and I will continue to count. But I think it also reminds me who I am

Speaker 1 and that the world's not going to change, that I believe that it matters that there are people who are still there and that it matters in this whole region, that there are people who are still suffering.

Speaker 1 And I think that Judaism really is interesting in its obsession with counting, as you mentioned.

Speaker 1 You know, and even when we count the days of the week, we don't have names of the days of the week in Hebrew.

Speaker 2 In Hebrew.

Speaker 1 We just count the days from Shabbat. We say today is the first day since Shabbat.
Today is the second day since Shabbat. Today is the third.
In Hebrew.

Speaker 2 I mean, for our listeners who don't speak Hebrew, right, it literally is the day. The number is, it doesn't have another word other than the number, other than Shabbat.
Correct. It's now day four.

Speaker 2 It's now day five.

Speaker 1 Correct. And I think that

Speaker 1 there's real power in that because it says whatever it is you're counting from is really the center of your world.

Speaker 2 Just coming back to what we talked about at the beginning about this being the luckiest holiday because it's close to Christmas and there's so much love and kavot and celebrity that comes from being next to Christmas on the one hand.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, everything we talked about just now, I would venture to say most of our listeners did not know. I'm grateful that we're talking about it because

Speaker 2 you and I both think it's important for Jews to know some of the things we talked about today.

Speaker 2 But what's sad is that the holiday, while on the one hand, it's the luckiest Jewish holiday, it's also probably the most watered down. Jewish holiday because it's absorbed by Christmas.

Speaker 2 You know, it's the little brother to Christmas because it doesn't stand on its own.

Speaker 2 It doesn't, at least in the diaspora, it doesn't have its own identity, unlike Rosh Hashanah or Pesach, which has, these are holidays that have their own identities.

Speaker 2 This is like, oh yeah, it's like the Jewish Christmas. I don't mean to end on a negative note and I'll figure out how to end on an upbeat note.
But isn't that tragic in a way?

Speaker 2 Because I can't think of anything that's contrary to the spirit of the holiday than

Speaker 2 here we are. We give gifts like they do on Christmas.
You walk into any hotel lobby or any office building lobby in New York City and you see the Christmas tree and you see the menorah.

Speaker 2 Isn't that violate a lot of what we're talking about?

Speaker 1 You know, I'm always sort of torn about it because when I lived in San Francisco, we both worked in San Francisco, and we had that where we had this beautiful Christmas tree.

Speaker 1 And because there were two Jewish people in the company, they had this electric Hanukkah menorah that we would plug in every morning. And I actually thought it was really nice.

Speaker 1 I thought it was a really kind gesture.

Speaker 1 And I did, of course, try to explain to everybody about, you know, wow, it's Persume Nisa and trying to explain, you know, it's advertising the miracle that happened to us.

Speaker 1 But I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1 And I do think that the originators, as we sort of talked about, that Matitiyahu, who was extremely rigorous in saying, I don't want any part of this outside culture or influence.

Speaker 1 having any sort of effect on Jewish tradition. I think that they would look at my office in San Francisco and be very irritated.

Speaker 1 But I think the reality is what we were talking about, that we do stay in the middle and struggle. Part of staying in the middle and struggling is saying,

Speaker 1 look, they've brought in a cute menorah, Hanukkah menorah, a chanukia, for also to acknowledge that we have Jews here and not everybody keeps Christmas.

Speaker 1 And I try not to be too judgmental in a negative way about it because I think that the origin is from a good place, from our non-Jewish neighbors trying to help us feel more a part of what is clearly a not Jewish majority country.

Speaker 2 I want to end on an upbeat note. So can you give us something to be upbeat or hopeful about as we go into this holiday, as we wrap here?

Speaker 1 What I would love to like leave you with when we're finishing this conversation is also to remember that the essential power of the tiny, because that's a real message.

Speaker 2 Tiny people, tiny light.

Speaker 1 Tiny crews of oil that lasted. The Hasidic masters always talk about this majestic idea of how a tiny light, a tiny group, one tiny soul, one tiny person even

Speaker 1 can actually affect the entire world.

Speaker 1 And we have seen it and we know it. And now go be it.

Speaker 1 So I'm wishing you a happy Hanukkah, Dan.

Speaker 2 Happy Hanukkah, Rachel. Thank you for doing this.
As always, I'll be seeing you soon. And thank you and Chag Semer.
Hag Chanuka Semech. Chag Semer.

Speaker 2 That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Speaker 2 Inside Call Me Back is where Nada Vayal, Amit Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling.

Speaker 2 To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arcmedia.org. That's arkmedia.org.
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar.

Speaker 2 Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Our production manager is Britney Cohn.
Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Our associate producer is Maya Rockoff.

Speaker 2 Community management by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.
Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.

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