True Friends in a Time of Crisis

For the talmudically trained, there was a terrible and obvious irony in the attack on a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, by a machete-wielding assailant as Jews gathered within to celebrate Hanukkah. In the classical period, the rabbis had originally ordained that the Hanukkah lamp, or menorah, be lit outside the door of one’s house, in the street, so that Jewish commemoration of the holiday could be publicized to passersby, both Jew and Gentile alike. To this the Talmud adds a temporary dispensation: that besha’at hasakanah, in times of danger, when the enemies of the Jews are rampant in the streets, the lamp can be brought inside and lit there in privacy.

Over the centuries, what began as an exception became the norm; so persecuted were Jews in the streets that they felt unable to ever kindle lights in public. The menorah was thus moved semipermanently indoors. There, at least, they would find peace; there, at least, they would be unmolested. The world outside was a dark one for Jews, but at least within the Jewish home there would be light. Here, however, even that was not allowed the Jews of Monsey. The marauder came into their very home, turning a time of peace into one of danger and plunging the festival of lights into darkness.

At the same time, the assault on the Monsey menorah-lighters is also profoundly symbolic. The miracle commemorated on Hanukkah—a small flask of oil whose flame lasted much longer than expected—is often mocked as a very minor miracle. But the rabbis chose to remember it because of its poetic power, as the oil embodies Israel itself, mysteriously enduring throughout the passage of time and therefore a proof of God in history. So the attack on the menorah ceremony embodies anti-Semitism itself. In the Bible, the miracles of the Exodus are immediately followed by the attack of the Amalekites; it is as if the Torah is telling us that chosenness and anti-Semitism, the miracle of the Jews and the existence of Jew-hate, go hand in hand.