Chanukah Message for Everyone

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FL — Hanukkah isn’t the biggest holiday of the year for the Banks family in Mandarin.

“Hanukkah is not in the Torah,” mom Debbie Banks said, referring to holiday’s origin in Jewish tradition instead of Scripture. “It’s not a very important holiday for us.”

Even so, Banks said she, her husband and three children observe the eight-day festival beginning today at sundown by lighting “at least 10 to 15” menorahs, she said.

And that tradition of lighting a candle each night of the holiday – representing the triumph of light over darkness – may be a particularly meaningful ritual in such an economically gruesome year.

“I think it’s a good story for these times, when things seem hopeless and dark and grim,” Banks said.

A good story and a healing story, said Rabbi Nochum Kurinsky, spiritual leader of Chabad at the Beaches, a Jewish center in Ponte Vedra Beach.

Kurinsky’s and three other Northeast Florida Chabad centers will host a memorial service today for the victims of the November terror attacks in Mumbai, India. One of the attackers’ targets was a Chabad house in that city.

The attacks were “a dark day” with the “cosmic collision of opposing forces” of darkness and light, Kurinsky wrote in an e-mail announcing the memorial service.

Hanukkah is the ideal holiday to heal the pain because one of its major themes is the triumph of good over evil, Kurinsky told the Times-Union.

The festival commemorates the victory of a vastly outnumbered band of Jewish rebels who defeat a super power and recaptures the Temple in ancient Jerusalem. The Temple’s sacred candelabra then burns for eight days on a one-day supply of oil.

It’s a theme that can appeal to people no matter what their faith, said Rabbi Levi Vogel, spiritual leader of the Chabad Center of St. Augustine.

“It’s not only a Jewish message but a universal message of hope in the face of tyranny and darkness,” Vogel said.

“More people can relate to [Hanukkah] because more people are facing hardships.”

Jewish holidays, in general, are teaching moments in which the essentials of Judaism are conveyed, said Rabbi Meir Cohen, principal of the Torah Academy of Jacksonville, a Jewish day school in Mandarin.

Passover, for example, commemorates the transition from slavery in Egypt to receiving the Torah and becoming servants of God, Cohen said. In part. that theme is remembered through the Seder.

“Experience is much better than just telling someone,” Cohen said.

Lighting the menorah during Hanukkah calls participants to be grateful for life’s smaller miracles that often go overlooked, Cohen said, such as the fact “that we breathe without thinking about it and our hearts beat without thinking about it.”

It’s also a reminder that humanity is not alone and all things, including poor economies, happen for a reason, Cohen said.

“As Jews we always believe someone is watching over us and that . . . there is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

It’s also a good teaching moment for children, said Banks, who has two sons, 14 and 9, and a daughter, 12.

All three have attended Jewish day school to ensure they are up to speed on the language and culture of Judaism, Banks said.

Holidays help because they come with stories, and the Hanukkah story is good for relaying that the divine pervades everything, even darkness.

“It’s a very simple holiday when, for a time, light is the most important thing and life isn’t always about material stuff.”