Shalom Congregants and Friends.....
 
Weekly Message from your Rabbi...... 
  
The last day of Hanukkah is this Shabbat! Enjoy lighting all eight candles on your hanukkiot Friday evening -- ideally before sunset. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah comes when the days are shortest -- and the light of the hanukkiah can really make a difference in our lives. I have enjoyed each day seeing our outdoor hanukkiah that stands proudly outside our synagogue main door.
 
This Friday evening several congregants and I will report on the recent  United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism biennial convention. As I wrote in the last e-shul, we were awarded three national Solomon Schechter Awards.
 
 Shabbat morning we have our monthly Learning Service as well as Tot Shabbat and Junior Congregation. It's also my "birthday weekend," so Iris and I are helping to sponsor the kiddush and the oneg. We already had our December Simcha Shabbat -- but you can still wish me a "Yom Huldedet Sameach" in person. I will chant the special Hankkah haftorah Shabbat morning. Saturday night we put our hanukkiot away for another year. 
 
On Sunday morning, the Beth Hillel Religious School joins with Beth Ahm of Windsor in a special joint learning program. The coming week will be a short one, with the office closed Friday for the "national" Christmas holiday. It will also be closed a week from Friday, January 1.
 
Please note the special early service and adjusted minyan times below.
  
Shabbat Shalom....come to shul and be with your "synagogue family" here at Beth Hillel Synagogue!
 
 Rabbi Gary and Iris Atkins
"No one should leave services unmoved or unchanged..."
 Shabbat Services & Candle Lighting
 
CANDLE LIGHTING 
FRIDAY EVENING, DEC. 25,  4:06pm 
FRIDAY EVENING, JAN.1, 4:11pm
 
Note: You may see a few minutes difference between different times given in different sources. It all depends how many minutes before actual sunset the source feels candles should be lit. You  may use any source you choose!
 
SHABBAT  SERVICE TIMES:                               
Friday, Dec. 18  8pm
Saturday, Dec 19 Shaharit 9:30am, Mincha/ Ma'ariv/ Havdalah 4:00pm.... 
 
Friday, Dec. 25  6:00pm - EARLY SERVICE
Saturday, Dec 26 Shaharit 9:30am, Mincha/ Ma'ariv/ Havdalah 4:00pm.... 
 
Friday, Jan. 1  6:00pm - EARLY SERVICE
Saturday, Jan. 2 Shaharit 9:30am, Mincha/ Ma'ariv/ Havdalah 4:15pm.... 
 
Come enjoy the beautiful Havdalah ceremony that ends Shabbat! 
Special Minyan times
 
THURSDAY EVENING, DEC. 24,  5:00pm 
FRIDAY MORNING, DEC. 25, 9:00pm
 
 
THURSDAY EVENING, DEC. 31,  5:00pm 
FRIDAY MORNING, JAN 1, 9:00pm
 
How Senator Orrin Hatch came to write a Hanukkah song for Tablet Magazine...... byJeffrey Goldberg

Only in America!!!!

 Ten years ago, I visited Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Utah and a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on Capitol Hill. I was writing for The New York Times Magazine and Hatch was thinking of running for president. We talked about politics for a few minutes, and then he said, "Have you heard my love songs?"

No senator had asked me that question before. It turned out that Hatch was a prolific songwriter, not only of love songs, but of Christian spirituals as well. We spent an hour in his office listening to some of his music, a regular Mormon platter party. After five or six Christmas songs, I asked, him, "What about Hanukkah songs? You have any of those?"

I have always felt that the song canon for Hanukkah, a particularly interesting historical holiday, is sparse and uninspiring, in part because Jewish songwriters spend so much time writing Christmas music. Several years earlier, as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, I sponsored a Write-a-New-Song-for-Hanukkah contest. I received more than 200 entries. Most were dreck. The songs I liked best were the ones uninfected by self-distancing Jewish irony, songs that actually wrestled with the complicated themes of Hanukkah-religious freedom, political extremism, the existence, or non-existence, of an interventionist God-in a more earnest way.

Hatch lit up at my suggestion. He asked me to jot down some possible themes, which I did. Then he got sidetracked by his presidential campaign. (He didn't win.) Still, time went on, and no song.

I never forgot about it, though. My interest in the Hanukkah story has stayed with me. I'm even writing a biography of Judah Maccabee for Nextbook Press. Last December, while reading From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees, by Elias Bickerman, my mind wandered back to Orrin Hatch's promise, and so I reminisced on my Atlantic blog about the time Hatch nearly wrote a Hanukkah song for me. A couple of days later, I received an email that read, "Dear Jeff, I know it's nine years too late, but I hope you will like some of the following ideas." What followed were five verses of a sincerely felt Hanukkah song.

I didn't quite believe it was Hatch writing me, so I wrote back, asking this alleged Hatch to call.

The next night was Christmas Eve, and my family and I were wandering the aisles of the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Wal-Mart. (Don't ask.) My children had just discovered something miraculous-a display case filled with kosher products. We had never seen this before. I began to deliver a lecture in the kosher food aisle, explaining that what we were seeing was further proof indeed that America is a Promised Land for our people, a place where even the Wal-Mart in Martinsburg, West Virginia, carries Manischewitz matzo-ball mix. It was at this moment that my cell phone rang.

"Jeff, it's Orrin," I heard over the phone. "What do you think of the song?" It was, indeed, Hatch. The second miracle of the night.

"Senator Hatch," I said. "It's Christmas Eve."

"Yes, it is!" Hatch replied. "What about the song?"

"Senator," I said, "I love the song."

And I do. It's a delightful thing to have Orrin Hatch write a song for Hanukkah. Of course I appreciate the absurdist quality to this project, but I also deeply appreciate Hatch's earnestness. His lyrics are not postmodern or cynical, which is a blessing, because I for one have tired of the Adam Sandlerization of Judaism in America. Yes, we are, as a people, funny (at least when compared to other people, such as Croatians) but our neuroses, well-earned though they may be, have caused us to lacerate our own traditions, which are in fact (to borrow from Barack Obama) awesome. The story of Hanukkah is a good case in point-maybe the perfect one.

I also appreciate the song because Hatch's collaborator, Madeline Stone, has written music that, to borrow this time from Felix Unger, is happy and peppy and bursting with love. And I love the fact that the song's producer, Peter Bliss, hired a delightful singer named Rasheeda Azar, who was not only a back-up vocalist for Paula Abdul (Jew) and Janet Jackson (not a Jew) but is a Syrian-American from Terre Haute, Indiana. Rasheeda's participation closes a circle of sorts, since the Syrian King Antiochus was, of course, the antagonist in the story of the Maccabean revolt.

And so it was a very American day in a recording studio on West 54th Street in Manhattan when we gathered to hear Rasheeda sing. In one small room were Bliss; Madeline Stone, a Jewish songwriter who writes contemporary Christian music in Nashville; a crew of downtown Jews from Tablet Magazine; Hatch's chief of staff, Jace Johnson, who didn't seem to know exactly what he was doing there, but was very nice about the whole episode; and Hatch himself, who sang background vocals and even showed us the mezuzah he wears under his shirt. Hatch, like many Mormons, is something of a philo-Semite, and though he is under no illusions about Jewish political leanings in America-he told me that though he likes Barbra Streisand very much, he's fairly sure she doesn't like him-he possesses a heartfelt desire to reach out to Jews.

Hatch said he hoped his song would be understood not only as a gift to the Jewish people but that it would help bring secular Jews to a better understanding of their own holiday. "I know a lot of Jewish people that don't know what Hanukkah means," he said. Jewish people, he said, should "take a look at it and realize the miracle that's being commemorated here. It's more than a miracle; it's the solidification of the Jewish people."

He's right. Without Judah Maccabee's militant intervention in 167 BCE, the Syrian program of forced Hellenization might have brought about a premature end to the Jewish story. But, for such a pivotal figure, Judah Maccabee is one of the more misunderstood leaders in Jewish history. He was not, for one thing, a paragon of tolerance. One of contradictions of Hanukkah-an unexplored contradiction in our culture's anodyne understanding of the holiday-is that the Maccabee brothers were fighting not for the principle of religious freedom but only for their own particular religion's freedom. Their understanding of liberty did not extend even-or especially-to the Hellenized Jews of Israel's coastal plains. The Maccabees were rough Jews from the hill country of Judea. They would be amused, if they were capable of amusement, to learn that their revolt would one day be remembered as a struggle for a universal civil right.

But Hanukkah doesn't belong simply to Judah Maccabee. Each generation finds new meanings in this holiday. The Zionist revolution, for instance, led to a revolution in the way the story of the Maccabees-previously a source of ambivalence in the Diaspora-was interpreted. And of course, the Hanukkah story doesn't belong merely to Jews. Judah Maccabee is a hero to many Christians: If there had been no Judah, Judaism might have disappeared; no Judah and no Judaism would have meant no Jesus.

And no Judah would have meant no Mormon senator in a studio with an Arab singer and a bunch of New York Jewish background vocalists recording a Hanukkah song of his own making. To my mind, at least, this counts as a minor American miracle. 

Weekly Torah  Commentary...  
written by Rabbi David Hoffman of the Jewish Theological Seminary
 From Darkness Into Light: The Untold Story of Hanukkah Revealed

We Jews know that stories are not simple things. As a people, we tell tales that place us in the drama of world history and connect us with a common past and a shared future. Our national stories challenge us as individuals and as a community; they provide us with contexts to work out moral dilemmas, and help us reflect collectively on what it means to live life well.

We also tell stories about our personal histories. Each of us has a story that narrates the important events and experiences that we believe explain who we are in the world. Sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves expand our opportunities and at times these same stories create self-imposed obstacles.

Stories are never just stories. We know that narratives-both personal and national-are not only about the past. We Jews know that the stories we tell help create our future. Our stories explain who we are and how we want to be in the world.

It is in this context that I would like to reflect upon the stories of Hanukkah.

Which story do we tell and how do we use these accounts to create meaning in our lives?

The first story of Hanukkah appears in the book of Maccabees (circa 100 BCE). The Seleucid King, Antiochus IV, imposed drastic reforms on the Jewish population of Judea, prohibiting the observance of the laws of the Torah. Brazenly, he dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem to the pagan god Zeus. The book of Maccabees dramatically describes the events leading up to the outbreak of the revolt:

Then the king's officers who were enforcing the apostasy came to the city of Modein to make the Jews offer sacrifices. Many from Israel came to them; and Mattathias and his sons were assembled in the crowds . . . A Jew went up before the eyes of all of them to offer a sacrifice on the pagan altar in Modein as the king had commanded. Mattathias saw him and was filled with zeal and his heart was stirred. He was very properly roused to anger and ran up and slaughtered the Jew upon the altar. At the same time he killed the king's officer who was forcing them to sacrifice and he tore down the altar . . . Then Mattathias cried out in a loud voice in the town and said, "Let everyone who is zealous for the Law and stands by the Covenant come out after me!" (I Maccabees 2:15-27)

With this call the insurgency had begun. Mattathias and his sons then

mustered a force and struck down Jewish sinners in their anger and in their wrath those who disobeyed the Law and the rest fled to the Gentiles to save themselves. And Mattathias and his friends went about and tore down the altars, and forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised children that they found within the borders of Israel . . . They rescued the Law from the hands of Gentiles and their kings . . . (I Maccabees 2:44-48)

Judah Maccabee led "these mighty warriors of Israel"-a small, radical group-who fought heroically and ruthlessly to protect Jewish traditions. In their efforts to guard the Torah, the Maccabees were ready to strike Jews and non-Jews alike. In the autumn of 164 BCE, this band of freedom fighters retook Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple exclusively to the God of Israel. This is an exciting story about human agency, zealotry for the law, and nationalism. At various moments in Jewish history, this story has been particularly compelling. It should not come as a great surprise then to learn that Theodor Herzl concluded his book The Jewish State with the words: "the Maccabees shall rise again."

The Rabbis were profoundly aware of the power of stories and they would not tell that story.

The Rabbis of the rabbinic period (the first centuries of the Common Era) present a radically different narrative than the story detailed in the book of Maccabees. Gone are the personalities of Mattathias and Judah the Maccabee. In their stead, we are told of a small vial of pure oil that contained just enough oil to stay lit for one night. The Rabbis tell us of a miracle that occurred, during which the oil burned for eight days (see BT Shabbat 21b). God is the hero of this telling and the violent actions of the Maccabees are gone from Jewish history. This rabbinic story furthers the particular piety that the Rabbis sought now to nourish in the communities they were building. They would not tell stories of religious revolt or Jews slaughtering Jews. The Rabbis would tell a story that emphasized rabbinic values: faith and God's love as manifested in the miracle of the oil.

These are two of the most popular stories of Hanukkah, but I would like to present a third story. The rabbis never explicitly link the following passage with the holiday of Hanukkah, but the connections are intriguing. A story is told about Adam-the first human being-in the talmudic Tractate Avodah Zarah:

Our rabbis taught: when the first man (Adam) saw the daylight hours were becoming shorter and shorter, he said, "Woe is me! Perhaps because I have sinned, the world is becoming dark around me and is returning to chaos (tohu va-vohu). This is the death sentence declared upon me by Heaven!" He sat for eight days in fasting and prayer. After the winter solstice when he saw the days becoming longer and longer, he said, "This is simply the way of the world!" He went and made an eight-day festival . . . He established them for the sake of Heaven and they established them for idolatry. (BT Avodah Zarah 8a)

This talmudic story invites us to imagine what it must have been like to experience the first winter. The nights grew longer, the days grew shorter; it was difficult to stay warm. Adam feared that God was returning the world to the tohu va-vohu of pre-Creation. As it turns out, Adam's fears at this moment were unjustified, but God would destroy the world with the flood. Believing he was the cause of the darkness, Adam prayed and fasted. When he began to see that the days were growing longer and nights were growing shorter, Adam realized that this is simply how the world works. There are seasons, and some periods of the year have more light and others have more darkness. It is because of this realization that Adam made an eight-day festival. Adam established these eight days celebrating the return of the sun as an offering of gratitude to God. However, "they"-the Romans-celebrated this winter solstice holiday with idolatry. (Indeed, the Romans did have a week-long festival called Saturnalia during the same period of the year.)

Here is a rabbinic text explaining the origins of some unknown eight-day festival, smack in the darkest part of winter, celebrating the return of light to the world . . . hmmm . . . curious. I don't think I am going out on a limb to propose the idea that one of the origins of the holiday of Hanukkah has nothing to do with the Maccabees, nor the miracle of oil. These are highly particularistic stories. Rather, Hanukkah has, in its distant past, the most universal of messages. It is a holiday about experiencing fear, vulnerability, and darkness and not being consumed. It is a holiday that reminds us that light and security will return again, as sure as we know darkness will return. These are the cycles of life. The challenge is remembering that the darkness will, in fact, retreat. So this too, like the story of the oil, is a story of profound faith.