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I am not throwing away my menorah1/7/2023 My mother was Jewish, but non-practicing and certainly not Orthodox. My mother and brother and I would trim the Christmas tree, place our presents underneath, and then gather around the kitchen table to light the menorah. So do seasons, and so do lives.Santi Elijah Holley | Longreads | December 2017 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)Įvery year it was the same thing. In a quiet way, we are raging against the dying of the light.īut as I have encountered life’s passages in particularly vivid relief this year, I also find a blessing in acquiescence. The resistance is human - like the urge to preserve and share moments of solitary evanescence. These acts, though, seem to be acts of resistance, like the kindling of light (Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali) itself, to the reality of winter and the passage of time it connotes. We give gifts that hopefully will not be thrown away. We are encouraged to make the miracle known to others. Hanukkah observance itself pushes against the value of the transitory. The moment itself cannot be retrieved or recreated. Already, I am recounting it to you from incomplete memories. Like a sacred season, like many works of art, like our lives themselves, it was real because it was transitory. It was, perhaps, what Virginia Woolf called a “moment of being” at which the various conceptions and contexts in which we all live paused for an instant, and the bare experience of life could be felt. This moment would not be shared it is mine alone - except for whoever else on board was paying attention, of course. Fortunately, that realization allowed me to put down the device and sink into the visual experience itself. I reached for my phone, already frustrated that I probably couldn’t get the shot in time. Suddenly, we were gliding ghost-like through a mysterious landscape of greys and whites. At the point in Maryland where the train tracks cross the upper reaches of the Chesapeake, a fog enveloped us. Just recently, I was on a train heading back to New York through a light rainstorm. The photos themselves are a kind of evidence. Incidentally, the truth behind the stereotype is that showing off one’s photographs, in some Japanese cultures, is indeed a form of conspicuous consumption. We become like the stereotypical Japanese tourists, seemingly more interested in documenting an event than experiencing it. It’s as if a moment isn’t real unless it is shared. Is it not sufficient that I experience this moment, perhaps by myself, and then it is gone? What gaps, exactly, am I trying to fill? Many of us have been with people (often teens or millennials) who constantly, even addictively, text, Vine, and Tweet every meal, sunset and night on the town. Here, I’ve noticed, the desire to share turns into compulsion. Especially for friends and family scattered across the country, social media bridges the gap, even if it doesn’t fill it. If I share my sacred moment with you, I am not alone. There’s also a social element to the culture of snapshots and selfies - as the term “social media” itself implies. Of course, I can remember those Hanukkahs without visual prompts as well, but it’s nice to have the images in my computer’s Pictures folder, I suppose. I have photographs of Hanukkah past, and although the menorah may be the same, there are usually enough details that I can remember where I was in 2004, 2007. We know this is futile, but we do it anyway. It is the quintessentially Jewish fusion of linear time and cyclical time: in the recurring cycle of holidays, the progress of linear time is experienced.Īt the same time, to grab on to these fleeting moments and preserve them is to fight the passage of time they reflect. The lighting of the Hanukkah menorah is often a sweet, transitory occasion, marking the season, the solstice and the passage of another year of our lives. There is something moving, really, about the human desire to share moments in our lives with those who are dear but not near. Unlike others of my generation and those older than me, I come here not to bash selfie culture, but to query it.
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