11 MIN READ

As a companion piece to her story about the Christian tradition of preparing food for Christmas, cross-cultural author Yang-May Ooi was going to write a light piece about Jewish traditional food during Hanukkah, which is also celebrated during December. Then the Bondi Beach shooting happened, an attack on unarmed and peaceful Jewish friends and family celebrating this religious festival at the seaside in Australia. She took a pause out of respect for the victims and the Jewish community – and also to take in the historical and global context of antisemitism through the eyes of a good friend. 

Hanukkah – Resilience and Human Connection after Bondi 

In late November last year, I dropped round for lunch with my friend Josh* and we talked about the significance of food in the Jewish community to which he belongs. I was planning to write a light piece about the Hanukkah festival as a companion to my story about preparing Christmas food. 

As Josh prepared a light lunch of smoked salmon omelette for us, he talked to me about the idea behind many Jewish food traditions, including Hanukkah. He is a lively and kind man and in his enthusiasm to share his community’s tradition with me, he forgot the omelette in the frying pan for a moment and an eggy mess overflowed onto the stove. 

Laughing, he mopped it up as he said, “Throughout the Jewish year, there are various things we do, and different foods are associated with each event. Foods, or the order in which you eat them, tell a story. Each story is a way of understanding important things about life and food gives us something you can hold and touch – and eat. So the story is literally part of us.”

The Hanukkah Story

We sat at the kitchen table, tucking into the omelette and tearing pitta bread with our hands. He went on, “Hanukkah takes place in the winter. The story is about resilience and hope.”

An avaricious enemy king sent soldiers to Jerusalem to sack the sacred Jewish temple and to take its gold and many treasures. The objective was not just to rob and pillage but also to humiliate the Jewish people.  The king’s army desecrated the temple and outlawed Jewish practices such as the weekly Shabbat and other festivals. 

Jewish resistance rose up and there was a war. The king was defeated but ransacked and trashed.

In the remains of the temple was a jar of oil, which would normally last only a day. When the Jewish leaders lit the oil and according to legend, the oil miraculously lasted 8 days. Hanukkah is a commemoration of that miracle and is also called The Festival of Lights. 

“It’s a celebration of survival.” Josh said, ”Oil becomes a key physical reminder for Hanukkah, so we have donuts and latkes—shredded potatoes, anything deep-fried. When we eat this oily food, we remember the ruination of the temple and also the miracle of the oil in the jar. We remember that whatever suffering we have been through, we are still here, and so are the deep principles of ethical monotheism.”

“I love this celebration… ” I laughed, “Permission to eat donuts and all kinds of naughty deep-fried food!”

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Terror on Bondi Beach

I was starting to write up this story when the Bondi Beach shooting happened.

Like many people around the world, whether we have a faith tradition or not, I was shocked and horrified. 

It emerged that the gunmen were inspired by Islamic State terror group and had specifically targeted Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah. The incident was being treated as a terrorist attack. 

I did not want to disrespect the people killed and injured on Bondi Beach – nor the Jewish community who would be deeply affected by what happened. I put aside my draft. 

I thought of those friends and families tucking into delicious fried donuts and other fried foods, laughing together on the beach. It might have been friends and families enjoying Christmas foods together – perhaps barbecuing turkey pieces and baking potatoes. Or others gathering for Eid al-Fitr at the end of the Ramadan fasting period, feasting on biryani, samosas and kebabs. 

These Jewish friends and families were attacked, during a meaningful celebration in their religious calendar, not because of who these ordinary people actually are – but because of an Idea about them that has been fostered for millenia by people who feel that these ordinary folk do not and should not belong amidst them. 

Scapegoating

Antisemitism has been with us since the early years of the Christian church and has seeped into many cultures and  faith traditions. and the secular world. It has been institutionalised in many epochs of history, with some leaders and governments in different eras endorsing as well as encouraging hatred and violence against the Jewish community. Antisemitism, which is rarely completely absent, increases  in horrific and violent ways during periods of economic instability. These are times when people feel themselves to be victims of social injustice and are looking for a scapegoat to vent their fear and anger on. 

In such times, it seems to me that some people feel a greater sense of power and agency by focusing on an Idea that someone is to blame. All their current Problems are not because of macro-economics or the currency exchange mechanism or government social policy or something complicated and intangible – or anything to do with their own actions or way of being. In their minds, or they are repeatedly told by antisemitic leaders: It’s someone else’s fault, it’s “the Jews’” fault. The Idea gives some people a target for all their hate, fury, fears and prejudices. The Idea gives them a scapegoat, who according to the false myth of antisemitic hatred, deserves to be abused and sometimes, even killed. The Idea gives them something they can do that they feel makes them powerful and which they believe is for the greater good – so they justify it to themselves that it’s not criminal violence or murder. The Idea gives them a sense of belonging – they are part of a warrior cause, killing for a higher purpose.

We Are All Connected

I spoke to Josh in the new year to see how he and his family and friends were doing. We talked about that pivotal moment in Jewish history when the king, like many kings before him and leaders since, set out to wipe out Judaism. 

“If the king had succeeded,” Josh mused, “he would have wiped out the only monotheistic religion in the world at that time. We would not have had Christianity. Or Islam. These two world faiths which emerged from Judaism. All three are ethical monotheist religions from one root.”

We are all connected. 

We, who are part of these three faiths, are the “People of the Book”, a term which originally came from the Quran (Ahl al-Kitāb). We belong together. And yet, so much tears us apart.

Josh, who is usually cautious about wearing anything in public identifying him as Jewish, put on his kippah (a small skull cap) on that tragic day of Hannukah this last December. He went into Central Oxford to Broad Street where a giant menorah (nine pronged candelabra) was lit as it has been every year, led by Rabbi Eli Brackman . The Oxford Jewish community gathered there, as always every year. And many non-Jewish friends and supporters joined us, as always. There was a strong police presence. 

“I had to go there. It was important for us all to be seen that day and to be with each other. And I greatly valued all those not of the Jewish faith who were there. I imagine we all did.”

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Dark Times

After a pause, he went on. “It’s a horrible feeling we all have. The news cycle has moved on but we are still living it, you know. All over the world, it feels like it’s getting worse – synagogues attacked and Jewish people targeted on our special days. A friend said to me, ‘It’s like we are back in Germany in the days before the Second World War.’”

He roused himself. “You know, the Jewish global population is so tiny (only 0.2%). Jewish people are all connected by very few degrees of separation. We all know someone who is directly affected by an atrocity against a Jewish person or community wherever it happens in the world. It affects each of us personally, and can threaten our sense of ‘belonging’ to anywhere other than just in the Jewish community. We reach out to each other, to check in, to offer moral support and connection. We feel ‘closer’ but that’s not necessarily a positive experience – because what is bringing us closer is this atrocity and it feels like a threat to all of us as Jewish people wherever we are in the world.”

I nodded. I could not imagine what that sense of threat and danger must be like.

A Glimmer of Light 

Josh went on. “I also know it’s not everyone out there. I really value the support of our non-Jewish friends. Just someone reaching out with a Whatsapp message. Or asking how I’m doing, especially when something awful happens in the news.”

We sipped our tea in silence for a moment. Then Josh said, “I’ve just remembered this incident the other day that really moved me.”

His emotion was evident in his eyes and voice. “It was just after 7th October on the Manchester synagogue. I popped into M&S Food to pick up some bits and pieces. I was wearing my kippah. Stupidly, I hadn’t picked up a basket and I was trying to juggle too many items…”

He mimed holding a pile of unwieldy groceries to his chest, things threatening to fall.

“This woman saw me and went over to the baskets. She came back and handed one to me. She looked straight at me for a moment. And I looked back at her. I was so grateful… and it still touches me now as think about her.”

His voice caught a little in his throat.

“She was wearing a hijab.’

It was a tiny kindness between two ordinary people. Two strangers. But she was wearing a hijab and he was wearing a kippah. Josh said quietly, “We looked into each other’s eyes. She knew what she was doing. And exactly what it meant.”

We All Have a Choice

There are those who choose to see another person as an evil who deserves to be killed. There are also those who choose to see them as their neighbour, an ordinary human being. 

There are those who choose to destroy. And there are those who choose kindness. 

I cannot fully know or imagine what it is like to be Jewish and to live under the threat of antisemitism. This article is only a tiny approach towards acknowledging what my Jewish friends and their community have been – and are – experiencing. 

I would like to think that despite all those who choose to snuff out the light, there are many more of us who will get up, and help others back up, who will stand alongside each other – whether we believe in a religion or not  – and share the match that will light the oil again, and beyond that moment, with that single, resilient flame light yet another and another candle and more and more still… 

And also to come together to share fried foods and eat donuts.

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*Name and personal details changed for privacy

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Sources:

Hanukkah: What is it? How is it celebrated? What do you eat and why? – https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/35030671

History: The Hanukkah Story – https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-holidays/hanukkah/history-hanukkah-story 

BBC News reports re Bondi Beach shooting – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckgk391yzm7t 

Photos:

Candles – https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-wax-candles-on-candlestick-19688081/

Donuts – https://pixabay.com/photos/pastry-donut-food-sweets-7048857/

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