The PDF of the Script

EIGHT NIGHTS By John Speed © 2013 John Speed. All Rights Reserved. EIGHT NIGHTS 1 I will tell you what to say. And I will tell you when to say it. Lord Meher ●●● We came to believe that only a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Step Two ●●● I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world Mary Oliver EIGHT NIGHTS 2 Night One Nes Gadol Hayah Sham. A Great Miracle Happened There.1 So we’ve lit the first candle of Hanukkah. I like the tradition of sitting beside the flame and watching the candle burn down. I like to pass this time by telling my Story. My Story is the story of Hanukkah. Hanukkah means ‚Dedication,‛ and the story is of the Great Miracle that happened when the Temple in Jerusalem was defiled, restored, and rededicated in 165 BCE.2 The story of Hanukkah is a big-ass story. It takes me eight nights to tell it. It’s tough to squeeze everything in. It’s really a big-ass Story. ●●● The story of Hanukkah is the greatest story I know, and the Great Miracle we celebrate when we light the lights of Hanukkah is the greatest miracle the world has known. When I finally understood the Great Miracle, I wept. And ever since I understood it, even though I’m not a Jew, or even a Christian for that matter, now every year I light the lights of Hanukkah, and sing the blessings, and almost every night I weep. Because when you know the Story, and understand the Miracle, it’s such a joyous moment, you almost have to weep. And now I tell the Story to anyone who will listen. And if I tell it right, and sometimes I do, they weep too. ●●● I don’t know if you are a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew and I don’t care. Because whichever you are, we worship the same One Lord of Heaven. We are a kind of family, Children of that Same Father. And the Great Story of Hanukkah is the Miracle of how our family came to be. This is what the Jews of Israel understood. This is why they created this celebration, almost twenty- two hundred years ago. The only celebration of its kind. Eight whole days of remembrance. Eight whole days! Now all the other celebrations of the Jews had been set out by the Lord – with Dire Consequences if the Jews failed to follow through. The Lord of the Jews was big on Dire Consequences. But Hanukkah was different. The Jews themselves created Hanukkah, so they faced no Dire Consequences for not observing it. They observed it because they decided to, because they wanted to, not because they were scared not to. 1 This phrase is used in the dreidel game children are encouraged to play at Hanukkah. I love that phrase. It’s a perfect four-word description of Hanukkah. But I won’t be talking about dreidels, or gelt, or any of that other drivel. This is not a book for children. 2 This story is about the Jews, so I’m going to use the terms ‚Before Common Era,‛ abbreviated ‚BCE,‛ and ‚Common Era‛, abbreviated ‚CE‛, for dates that are often marked AD and BC. It would be one thing to say ‚After Jesus‛ or ‚Before Jesus‛ but to say ‚AD‛ (or ‚Anno Dommini – in the Year of Our Lord‛) or ‚BC‛ (Before the coming of the Christ) – that’s really a thumb in the collective Jewish eye to start with, and has no place at all in book that is telling a history of the Jews. I’ve also become unexpectedly sensitive to another Jewish tradition. Many observant Jews are concerned that a copy of the typical three-letter name for the deity might get disrespectfully tossed in the trash. Those Jews therefore write that name as ‚G-D‛, leaving out the ‚O‛. I find myself feeling oddly sympathetic with this notion, but I don’t like typing G-D. There are other respectful names for the deity, however, so I will use those instead. EIGHT NIGHTS 3 The Jews themselves decided that the Great Miracle was of such importance that they wanted always to remember. They decided on their own forever to dedicate eight entire days of every year to remembering. They swore of their own free will that they would forever gather their families together, and forever sing blessings, and forever recall that moment when the world changed for them -- and in truth for all mankind. They lit lights for eight nights, outdoors or in windows, very visibly, so everyone could see. Everyone should see; everyone should know – because this Miracle was not just about Jews, it was about everyone. The Jews created this celebration and this method of celebrating because they wanted everyone to know about the Miracle. They promised to keep this celebration as important as their most sacred ancient rituals. And they have kept that promise for twenty-two hundred years. They have kept that promise to this day. It is because of their faithfulness to that promise that I have come to know of the Great Miracle, whose wonder touches my heart. I bow to them in gratitude. Thank you faithful Jews!3 ●●● Now, you may have heard Hanukkah called the miracle of the lights or the miracle of the oil or some such thing. And this, you see, is because over the course of time, something got a little confused. When the Great Miracle occurred, it arrived with a miraculous sign: A bottle of consecrated oil that should have burned for a single day burned for eight days. But, come on, who are we kidding? You call that a miracle? It’s certainly not worth spending eight full days remembering. The Tanakh -- the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament -- has a ton of far more impressive miracles that aren’t celebrated at all: Men raised from the dead, hundreds fed with a single loaf of bread, men living unburned in a furnace, the sun going backwards, water flowing from a rock: those are some big honking miracles, but the Jews didn’t feel that any of them rated even a single day’s celebration. But Hanukkah has been celebrated, not for one day, but for eight full days, for twenty-two hundred years.4 Faithful Jews passed the lights of Hanukkah from hand to hand – thousands of pairs of hands have passed those lights to us. Do you really think a bottle of Miracle Oil would merit such faithfulness?5 No. Only a Great Miracle would merit it. What seems to me to be the Greatest of Miracles. But at some point over the last twenty-two centuries, the Great Miracle, sadly, came to be confused with its miraculous sign, the oil. That’s a shame, I think. But maybe, when you hear the Story, you won’t confuse the Miracle and the sign. Maybe you’ll understand the Miracle. Maybe you’ll understand why I light the Hanukkah lights. Maybe you too will light the lights with me and weep. 3 It would be nice for you to say ‚thank you‛ too, at this point, even you don’t know enough to mean it yet. 4 That’s more than 18,400 nights. 5 Also I’ve had some people explain to me that Hanukkah is meant to celebrate some sort of miraculous Israeli victory. Puh-lease. If you want to celebrate a miraculous victory, celebrate the Six-Day War. Judas Macabbee’s victory over a minor, tired Seleucid general who really just wanted to go home to Antioch doesn’t hold a candle to Moishe Dayan’s. So to speak. EIGHT NIGHTS 4 ●●● Now, how odd is it that I’m the one telling this story and weeping? I’m not a Jew. I’m not a Christian. And yet here I am, tears in my eyes, the one telling you the Story. Why me? Why isn’t a Jew or a Christian telling this story? Well, Jews don’t know it. Sorry, Jews, but you really don’t. The story of Hanukkah is told in a couple of Bible books, Macabbees I and Maccabbees II, and neither of these Bible books is in the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible. See, the canon of the Tanakh got frozen a few years before those books were written. The only place you can find those two books now is in Catholic Bibles. How weird is that? In the Catholic Bible, those two books have been squeezed between the Old Testament and the New Testament, along with a five other books written by the Jews in the 165 years between the first Hanukkah and the birth of Jesus. So if you’re a Jew, and want to read the story of the Macabbees and the re-dedication of the Temple, the basis for one of the most important celebrations in Judaism, that’s what you need to find: a Catholic Bible. I personally guarantee that no Jew you know has ever read either of those books. No Jews have them in their libraries, except for a few rabbis maybe, and not many of those. Of course no Christian has ever read them either.6 ●●● Nobody knows this story. And anyone who starts looking into it, frankly, starts getting bewildered. Really fast. His (or her) mind starts doing pinwheels. People today just don’t have the Background for it anymore.

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