#freilachhanukkahnotfascism — Public Fediverse posts

Hanukkah 5784: Flames of Resistance (Night 2)

In setting up the chanukiah, one can’t help but feel parallels—as if the candles extending in the same direction are portals into parallel worlds.

In 168 BCE, an empire was intent on crushing the Jews as a people, and so marched into Jerusalem and desecrated the holy temple, then sent soldiers and other vigilantes to villages throughout Judea. Jewish rebels, seemingly no match for the well-equipped military, fought back with what they had at hand, including rocks. They did so to not let their culture be annihilated—along with their bodies—and in the end, after rebuilding the temple and a miracle with oil lasting eight days, turned this tale into the story of Chanukah.

On December 7-8, 2023, under cover of dark, the state of Israel, intent on crushing the Palestinians, and armed with the aid of the United States and other powers, sent its military into Gaza’s old city and desecrated a holy mosque—the oldest in this strip. While no match for the sadistic weaponry, Palestinians rebelled this morning with the weapon they had at hand: storytelling; tales and images of the mosque and its history so as not to let their culture be annihilated—along with their bodies.

This is far from the only parallel—of various moments when fascistic regimes tried to exterminate Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians and the entirety of their cultures, and people scrappily resisted, including with the weapon of memory. Thus the need for these regimes, as countermove, to burn books and blow up archives. The trauma and heartache of these moments could and should cause our flames of rebellion to converge into conflagrations of solidarity and liberation—and often they do. Witness the millions of people of all cultures, including Jews, around the globe rising up in diverse ways for Palestinians.

But that’s not true for all. Fascists see no parallel in celebrating the rededication of a temple—twisted into a myth of nationalism and power—and destroying the sacredness of a mosque—and life.

May Hanukkah bring a real miracle: “death to fascism.”

#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#UntilAllAreFree

(photos: my candles and an antifascism sticker in four languages by @municipaladhesives; a wheat-pasted solidarity poster seen on a wall on the stolen lands of so-called Asheville, NC)

Hanukkah 5784: Flames of Resistance (Night 1)

So the counting begins. Nights and candles. But which nights? The eight (now seven) evenings ahead? The more than two thousand years past of this celebration of revolt and miracles (some six hundred years before anyone had even heard of Jesus, a Palestinian Jew)? And/or the last seventy-five years of Nakba, itself only three short years after the catastrophe of Nazism.

It’s not just what to count. It’s who counts, or doesn’t, and when.

And how to count at all when our eyes are blurred by tears that won’t seem to dry—perhaps another Chanuka miracle, expanding our hearts enough to keep mourning and raging against the some seventeen thousand dead and over forty-two thousand wounded in Gaza the past sixty-one days of genocide?

We should all count, of course. That seems as clear and bright as even my two small candles can illuminate on this first night of Xanuka.

How many more flames of resistance must we put into this world to finally mend it?

When I lit my candles, I saw ancestors in the glow—innumerable ancestors who held fast to celebrating holidays of lights and moons and gifting each other time-space, even when they knew their days or hours were numbered by not-too-dissimilar fascistic regimes centuries ago, decades ago, now. They made life count, even when they had to practice rituals in secret as their antifascist action. They danced rebelliously in the flames of solidarity, knowing that whether Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, or Arabic, their safety and liberation were and still are inseparably braided together—a force that combined, could smash borders and states into countless pieces, because we’ve felt the same pain, the same trauma, and refuse to weaponize it against each other now.

Our resistance counts, as does our solidarity—particularly when barbarism tries to shred any sense of humanity or light.

#WeWillOutliveThem
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#UntilAllAreFree

(photos: my candles; wheat-pasted Palestinian solidarity posters, fresh torn asunder by those we must keep battling, as seen around so-called Asheville, NC)

On this fourth night of Chanukah, auspiciously falling on solstice, I thought that by now, the increasing candlelight and promise of increasing daylight would have worked their somatic magic. That I would feel as if I’m on the other side of the darkness of these times, even if only a bit.

Yet I’ve noticed that my body isn’t responding, like it always has before, to the candles. I feel frozen, stuck, not able to offer or take in light.

It’s not just the accumulated trauma of loss and isolation, from and during the pandemic, though it is that too. It’s the shift that seems to have happened from a protofascist USA into, increasingly, everyday fascism. The fascistic horrors didn’t—and still don’t—come at once, but get added one at a time, strategically, like the methodical addition of a Chanukah candle daily, acclimatizing people little by little—until it’s too late to turn back from the conflagration.

So instead of journeying toward the growing light, I can’t stop thinking of anarchistic author Daniel Guérin (1904-88) traveling into what he called “the brown plague”—Nazism—in 1932 and 1933. For those two years, as a young closeted gay man, he wandered around Germany—just prior to and, a year later, just after the seizure of National Socialist power. What he noticed was not geopolitics but rather the minutiae of cultural politics, the stuff of everyday life. He wrote of the little things that added up to the “tragedy unfolding” and people’s “inability to recognize danger,” including because of the “seductive rituals” Nazis employed to win over the populace.

One year he’s staying at youth hostels, likely acting on his sexual desires in a place, Weimar Germany, that was the hub of gay life. The next, many of the same youths he might have comingled with are burning books by the tens of thousands across thirty-four cities, including trashing, looting, and burning the extensive library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s (in)famous, and (in)famously gay, Institute of Sexology.

Those books, once lit, grew quickly into flames that consumed people.

I want to see light this Chanukah. But all I see are ashes.

(photos: my night four candles in my menorah; a sign and me reflected in it at the Tucson Jewish Museum, 2019)

#RitualAsResistance
#MourningOurDead #FightingLikeHellForTheLiving #FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful

Hannuqah is gay! Maybe Chanuka is even “be gay, do crime,” because back in the day, we got to steal seven extra days out of a one-day supply of oil.

But its queerness shines on many levels.

For instance, you get to pick your own name, or at least its spelling and pronunciation, and be fluid about shaking it up when the Xanikah spirit moves you. You can play with the candles, creating fabulous or sensual combinations of colors, or lighting them in all sorts of transgressive orders—left to right or reverse, few to many or reverse, or pure chaos. You can dress up your menorah(s) for each night out, or self-determine what to top (or bottom) a latke with.

More than anything, though, Channuqa urges us to resist assimilation in the queerest of ways, smashing binaries. It blesses the light and dark, but especially the liminal spaces that let us see all the myriad possibilities between light and dark, such as when the radiant light of a candle flirtatiously embraces the now-radiant darkness.

Yet a shadow has been cast on that fabulousness this 5783 year—a shadow that isn’t new, but has gotten more ominous.

We see in Hanuka’s flame what US Christian fascism 2022 is trying to extinguish, and in heartbreaking moments, succeeds at extinguishing: drag shows, queer books, gender-affirming surgery, trans and queer life, and so much more. We see Club Q, and mourn our dead there. We surround our menorahs with DIY altars to our many other dead, who too often are Black trans women and queer youths—murdered, directly or indirectly, by fascism, which demands rigid binaries and heteropatriarchal bodies.

We see our fire too. The ways we bash back with, say, community self-defense, vigils, wound-care trainings, and huge dance-party-antifascist-demos in the streets—gay fucking pride versus proud boys and their ilk.

This Xanukah, may we rededicate ourselves to queer joy, and all the nonbinary ways that gender, sex, and sexuality light up the world, even as we know we’ll need many miracles to outlast the fascists.

(photos: my night three rainbow-colored candles in front of @elijahjanka’s art depicting early 1900s’ queer+trans joy via a drawing of five people borrowed from an ethnographic photo for the @radicaljewishcalendar; “queer or nothing” wheatpaste, drawn as a black+white heart with a splash of pink, seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 5782)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful

One way we diasporic people survive is by telling and retelling stories. Stories that carry culture and meaning; bind community; make us laugh and cry, or cry via humor, to get through trauma; warn as well as inspire, but nearly always, stories that make us proud of who we are, quirks and all.

So much of Jewish holidays involves storytelling (and food)—on repeat. Yet like all good stories, those tales are constantly reinterpreted and repurposed for specific times and contexts. When you think that we Jews are at 5783 on our calendar and are dispersed around the globe, spanning all races, genders, etc., that’s a whole lot of embellishment on each and every story (and we have a lot of stories)!

Yet it really is crucial to be compelled each holiday to spin new yarns from old stories. We’re being asked to reflect on the dilemmas we find ourselves in, and what we’re willing to do to struggle toward freedom in the here and now.

One Hanukkah story that’s gotten repeated over the past several years is captured in the second photo: Rachel Posner, a rabbi’s wife, put a menorah in their window in Kiel, Germany, in 1931, visible to the Nazi headquarters across the street. We share this photo each year as prompt to, say, retell family tales or wider histories of that era, revisit our values in relation to the past, or affirm that “never again” applies to all peoples.

This year, I saw it in a new light: 2022 Christian fascism. The Nazi flag morphed into a US one, and counterintuitively, I only want to be more loud, proud, and out as a Jew as today’s fascism takes hold.

It also reminded me of visiting Theresienstadt years ago—a city turned into a death camp in the Czech Republic in Nazi times. A guide, knowing I was Jewish, showed me a small room, dark and dusty, saying it was a space back then where each week, a few Jews would gather secretly to light Shabbes candles for all.

They risked death to light candles. They lit candles to show they were still alive.

What stories do we want to keep alive via our retelling—as the light of our defiance, resistance, and aspirations—to keep more of us alive and even thriving?

(photo #1: my #AllChanukahsAreBeautiful candles on night two of Xanika, in orange, yellow, and purple colors, set in a metal menorah with an #ACAB sign in the background)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#WeMustOutliveThem
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

There’s nary a Jewish holiday or ritual that isn’t about sorrow as well as joy. They are as inseparable as the braids in a challah loaf or havdallah candle, or during Hanukkah, the shredded potatoes in latkes.

It is this interwoven quality that makes Jewish rituals so life-giving, because to live a whole life means embracing the sorrows and joys that are part of the human condition, yet in ways that aid us in journeying side by side with others through the darkness and light.

In this third pandemic Chanuka, 5783, in the deepening fascism, Christian supremacy 2022, it is difficult to see that balance, to see blessed light. Tonight’s menorah is so far from even “a cup half full” of lightness in this world, in these bleak times. There is more emptiness, more darkness, than feels possible to hold.

There are the small, blessed darknesses still—like seasonal cycles, which even if they steal away the daylight now, are essential for life, or this menorah, which my parents used from my earliest memories, and was the only object, as material remembrance, that I wanted when they died, yet when the candles flicker out each night, I miss my folks all over again.

Those are easy, even comforting to bear.

It is the big, cursed darknesses that are making it feel, well, dark—as if the gray skies blotting out sun and moon daily this winter are mirroring all the fascistic, wholly unnecessary sorrows—violences—swirling around us.

It feels impossible that the light of promise, much less hope, will return. We must sit with that uncertainty.

And while we do, Hanukkah will somatically exercise our capacity to notice—and maybe reweave—blessed dark and blessed light, to rededicate our fighting spirit for them, by easing our bodies over the next eight nights into “fuller cups” of sparks, of flames. Literally, with our hands, we will bring more light to life each evening—light that’s only visible because of the darkness; an inseparable illumination of what, by the eighth day, gestures at the worlds we dream of, the worlds we conjure via rituals of resistance so as to inhabit them now, if only for the length of candles burning brightly over this Kanika.

(photos: one purple and one orange lit candles set in a metal menorah, with the other seven candleholders empty, against a tan-colored wall; black-and-white art by @wendyelisheva featuring two crows, each holding one candle in its beak, toward a branch/treelike menorah with the words “bless dark” and “bless light.)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife