HIghlight the Night!
by Amichai Lau-Lavie
December 15, 2003
Winter Highlight: Unwrap the reason for the season
This essay is your ticket to ritual magic, Semitic style. Read and be inspired to Light Up and Heat Up the darkest nights of the year. User friendly and thoroughly researched, Winter Highlight brings you a complex 3,000 years old pyrotechnical procedure in a compact contemporary and eclectic format. Two parts Jewish history, one part Pagan mythology, two spoons of Babylonia, A bit of Astronomy and sprinkling of re appropriated mystique, this is a radical ritual fusion for the contemporary seeker.
Unwrap the cultural layers of a familiar Jewish holiday and find the gift: an inclusive, ancient, and radically relevant ritual, transcending cultural boundaries, yours to reclaim, with a twist.
1. Nittel (why Chassidim play cards on Christmas Eve)
The starting point for rumination on the multi-layered meanings of this ritual is obviously personal… for me that would be my parent’s dinner table, Israel, circa 1975.
Growing up as an Orthodox boy in Israel meant that Christmas really wasn’t a big deal, except that my father would sit at the dinner table and play cards with us, especially the game that he only knew in Yiddish, ‘Red King’. His father used to play that with him back in Poland, only on this night, which he called ‘Nittel’, when the men would sit at home and play cards and purposefully not study torah. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, my father said, would play chess once a year only, on ‘Nittel’, and drink vodka. We were of a different Chasidic sect and drank scotch. Later in life, my path leading me away from home to the pastures of Polydoxy, I became intrigued about this weird custom and researched its folk origins. My search for ‘Nittel’’s surprising history led to the oldest human celebrations of time. Nittel – Yiddish for ‘Natalis’ – Latin for ‘Birth’, is an oddly evolved descendent of an ancient pagan mid winter holiday. I don’t think that my Judeo-Polish ancestors who observed ‘Nittel’ knew that they were participating in an obscure tradition that predated the Christian observance of Christmas by a thousand years. Natalis is a name given to the 25 of December long before Jesus was born, marking the night on which the people of the east celebrated the birth of the sun. As odd as it may seem, Nittel, along with Christmas and Chanuka, may be a mutated relic from humanity’s early days of ritual existence – a celebration of the winter solstice – the longest night of the year. This recurrent natural phenomenon has been a magnet for people worldwide, and one of humanity’s oldest recorded holidays - an excuse to conjure a little ritual, add light to darkness, and beat the winter blues. Nittel, as little customs tend to do, opens a portal into an ancient and radically current possibility of shared multi cultural celebration of life.
2. Solstice: longest night, oldest celebration
The Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year, when the sun reaches its lowest point on the horizon. In ancient times, pagans celebrated this day and its preceding night as a "rebirth" of the sun, or a solar deity, and the beginning of a new year. In some cultures, the Winter Solstice was also a time to celebrate the birth or rebirth of a savior man-god who was often connected with the sun. He was usually believed to be the offspring of a god father and a goddess or human mother, who was often a virgin. Tammuz of Babylon, Attis of Phrygia, Horus of Egypt, Mithra of Persia, Krishna of India, Heracles of Greece and, last of all, Jesus of Nazareth are just some of the ancient man-gods whose births were celebrated on the Winter Solstice.
In 46 B.C.E., Julius Caesar adopted the Julian calendar. The Winter Solstice and the beginning of the New Year fell on December 25th. Caesar declared this date the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun."
The ancient Roman festival of the Saturnalia (honoring Saturn, the God of agriculture) lasted for eight nights, from December 17th to December 24th. The event concluded with a great feast, the Brumalia, held on December 25th. These celebrations of the Winter Solstice included social gatherings, lighting of candles, pageantry and performance, exchange of gifts, feasts, and decorated trees.
3. Christmas is born (but not in Bethlehem)
The traditional Pagan Sun God celebrations proved too popular for early Christians to overcome. Therefore, they decided to superimpose the legends of Jesus onto the pagan calendar marking birth and rebirth, symbolized by the festivals of the Winter Solstice (Christmas) and the Spring Equinox (Easter).
In 354 CE, Bishop Liberius of Rome decreed that the birth of Jesus should be celebrated on the same day as the birth of the sun gods - December 25th. (Before this, the Christian church had no official observance of the birth of Jesus.)
The Roman Celebration of the ‘sun god's rebirth’ continued to be held on December 25th under a new name and meaning. Due to imperfections in the Julian and later Gregorian calendar, the actual Winter Solstice had drifted and is currently observed on December 21st.
4. Chanukah emerges
Chanukah is the only holiday on the Jewish calendar that appears out of nowhere. The first rabbinic reference to this obscure celebration appears in the Talmud, circa 300 CE: ‘What IS Chanukah’? The Babylonian sages wonder, as they are busy discussing the candles of the Sabbath and digress to other events requiring sacred candle handling. In terse detail, the Talmud proceeds to supply the familiar, yet historically dubious legend: The Maccabees revolt against the Greeks, The desecrated Jerusalem Temple is redeemed on the 25th of the month of Kislev, one small, sealed jar with sacred oil is discovered, and the temple is lit, miraculously, for eight joyful nights.
Eight nights celebrating the birth of miraculous light? On the 25th of the winter month? Some of the symbols in this tale are eerily familiar from the rest of the Greco Roman world. Is Chanukah also based on the Solstice celebrations, its’ origins obscured by time and cultural-literary re-interpretation?
There is one other Talmudic source that attempts to answer this challenge by tracing the origins of Solstice itself to a kosher, Judaic origin:
‘Our Rabbis taught: When Original Adam saw the day getting gradually shorter, he said, ‘Woe to me, perhaps because I have sinned, the world around me is being darkened and returning to its state of chaos and confusion; this then is the kind of death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!’ So he began keeping an eight days’ fast. But as he observed the winter equinox and noted the day getting increasingly longer, he said, ‘This is the world's course’, and he set forth to keep an eight days’ festivity.
In the following year he appointed them as festivals. He fixed them for the sake of Heaven, but the heathens appointed them for the sake of idolatry.’ (Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara 8a)
Although this story is not directly linked to Chanukah, the obvious similarities between the two narratives imply an early and wildly successful rabbinic attempt to impose Jewish context and personal meaning onto a prevailing popular custom. Closely observed as a whole, these fragmented tales suggest a picture that puts Chanukah in a whole new light, adding a different, and globally shared reason for the season.
5. Candles or why Light Up?
So this is what this looks like: once upon a time, the longest night of the year was celebrated by humanity to mark the triumph of life over death, light over darkness, hope over despair. Stories were told to explain the turning of seasons, and the ongoing, natural or miraculous phenomena called the sun. For eight nights candles and fires were lit, gifts were given, friends gathered. The longest night – the highlight of the winter celebration became Yelda in Iran, Christmas in Rome, Chanukah –in Judea, and Nittel – somewhere in Eastern Europe. The mythic clues: eight nights, candles, celebration of super/natural light, obscure origins. How is one to celebrate this multi-layered holiday with intention, depth and poise? Focus on the simple and heavily bagged act of simply, slowly, lighting a candle.
Reveal: Savor the thought of being part of a network lighting up together – in your city, across the country, globally – a connection to something bigger, like holding up a lighter at a Manilow concert.
Relax: Have the intention of what you are doing – both the match that you strike, and the candle you light will never be lit again. Take a breath. The moment is irreplaceable. Make whatever invocation you deem appropriate, incorporating traditional or untraditional blessings to deity of choice.
Light the candle, make a wish – let the wish linger, and unlike a birthday candle you blow out to get to the cake, let the flame linger as you add light to the world. Delight, Lighten up, and
