Hanukkah 5786: Liberation

Sitting in the James Earl Jones Theatre on a frigid December evening, two women walked down the aisle to praise the gentleman sitting next to me. “We loved your show,” they gushed, and I witnessed in anonymity (aka cultural cluelessness) the fanfare of the uncommon man. When they left, I asked the man who he was (I am not shy); he told me about a show that he had on Broadway last year. I asked about who he was as a person — are you a father? He cordially responded (with generous detail) about his life, his domestic situation and more. 

All of this would not have happened had the staff of the James Earl Jones not ordered all of our cellphones into secure bags (that could not be unlocked until we left the theatre). The feeling in the theater was positively 1987 — people chatting, strangers meeting and fans fawning. Perhaps the accessibility of Instagram gave the woman and her daughter the courage to walk up to the (anonymous to me) celebrity? It was moving to see how, when we put our phones down, an ingrained and immediate familiarly arises by those whose miles of finger-swiping the glass up, down, left and right, grants a superpower of recognition to those with well-muscled pointer fingers. 

The play itself, “Liberation,” is yet another feminist sensation on Broadway (following “Suffs” and “John Proctor is the Villain,” among others). Fresh from its off-Broadway run at the Roundabout, “Liberation” plays in a much larger house — one with even a balcony, as the actress portraying the protagonist breaks the fourth wall from the beginning of the play, reminds us. Brechtian barriers fall throughout the theater during the show, with the protagonist speaking directly to the audience, even inviting us up to “play her mother.” “Liberation” focuses on one woman’s journey (written by Bess Wohl), and spotlights several Jewish characters as Wohl notes that “Jewish women played a crucial role in second wave feminism – from Gloria Steinem to Bella Abzug to Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone to Letty Cottin Pogrebin — so it felt important to include Jewish characters.” 

As I sat in the audience (a real, live, Jewish woman), I kept thinking about the theme of the show: “Are we any better off today than we were at the height of this movement in the 1970s?”, and how, like a Hanukkah menorah, the message was cloaked in shadow and light. 

Hanukkah and its counter-holiday, Purim, form a container like a womb for the winter holidays (with the New Year of the Trees, Tu b’Shevat, germinating in-between them). In Hillel and Shammai’s famous Machloket (dispute) from the 1st Century BCE, rabbinic passions and reason clash over God, light and ritual (Shabbat 21b) over how to light the Hanukkah Menorah. And the Hanukkah Menorah itself, bearing its luminescent “fruits” of light, like the Or HaGanuz — the primordial light of creation from Gan Eden, is a dualistic shadow of Hashem, as her nine lights extend like a Tree of Life — a luminous vision of Hashem’s likeness illuminated by an Ancient Near-Eastern Goddess named Asherah. Hanukkah is our holiday of the forces of light and darkness, a prelude or counterpoint to Esther, who completes this puzzle with an unmasking in her early springtime folly. 

The holiday of Hanukkah originates through a (problematic) apocryphal text (Maccabee I and II, both written centuries after the “historic battles” and whose emphasis on war troubled the rabbis), and the narrative endures only through the alchemy of exegesis and cultural evolution. Hanukkah illuminates that Judaism is not (contrary to the rabbinic assertion) a purist religion, but a spiritual dynamic that breeds evolution of mind, spirit and history. Hanukkah distinguishes itself from other holidays, as it is not d’orita (originating in the Tanach), but defies singularity of origin (whose story, as we know it, requires hundreds of years of texts as extensive as Josephus, the Talmud and Apocrypha as well as rabbinic disagreement to alchemize it into being). 

It is as if the menorah, like a hidden feminine warrior (Judith, perhaps, whose name we all bear as “Yehudim”), flexes her muscles as if to tell us in the black night of winter: “You are here because I am carrying you.” Hanukkah is Davka, the holiday of Jewish Reconstruction L’Dor V’Dor (from one generation to another), and reminds us that we can always find a way; if only we have the courage and chutzpah to recognize what is wrong, and make it right — from cleaning up a Temple that has been desecrated to realizing that destroying someone I disagree with will only make me a murderer. Hanukkah is the true enlightenment, something that the bite from that “Apple” from Tree of the Knowledge between good and evil gave us — wisdom (and should not be confused with “knowing data points,” which that apple on the back of this phone you are probably reading this on gives you). To possess the wisdom of Hanukkah, one must engage, activate, ideate and just, well, create. 

Which brings us back to “Liberation,” that play so heartfully offered on the night that Broadway dimmed its lights in memory of Tom Stoppard (a Jew who reclaimed his Judaism toward the end of his life, and illuminated it through the magnificent “Leopoldstadt” — like the name Hanukkah reminds us, it is never too late to dedicate ourselves to our Jewish Path). As the play reached its denouement, I noticed a refraction of light streaming through a tear drop running from the eye of the man sitting next to me, that famous guy whose name I don’t remember and notoriety to me remains being a (Jew-ish) dad. 

It was a stunning moment, when the light was diffuse like that of a solar eclipse, and the protagonist and her deceased mother reunited in a posthumous embrace. The protagonist raises an impossible question to her mother, asking, essentially, why she left her feminist journey, becoming a mother and wife. And in the broken hairsbreath of a moment when the maternal response was delivered, I slipped into today, and heard a voice coming from that teardrop next to me, saying “No. It’s not that women have gone backwards. It’s that all of us have.” 

The dialogue now lost to me, my inner monologue took over, as another tear dropped from the man’s eye … The dad in a divorce situation, I thought, the dad who said his boys were 5 and 7, the dad who shed a tear when the specter of the mother embraced the daughter in divine compassion for all that has been lost, or at least, confused. I couldn’t stop feeling this man, and thinking “no, it’s not that women have gone backwards to 55 years ago. It’s that all of us have — every man, woman and nonbinary amongst us.” 

He is like me — I am like him. We are all the mother and the father. The Jew and the Palestinian. The Saudi and the Iranian. The Shia and the Sunni. None of us are better off today than in the 1970s, when women in Iran boogied to “Saturday Night Fever” and were MDs and lawyers and ascended in government. Every mom and every dad. We are all suffering equally, the mothers and the fathers among us. 

“Liberation” is a Hanukkah story because it demands that we see the patterns of creation in our midst – the cycles of growth and the cycles of death, the light and its expansiveness and the darkness and its contraction. But, through this dynamic, like the life force itself, these contractions and fractal tumblings through time and space, are like Braxton Hicks birthing contortions unto themselves. And as the Hanukkah menorah illuminates these dark nights, it reminds us that all movements — the forces of disagreement and reversion, conflict and confusion — are all a part of something new being born.

This Hanukkah, may all of us find liberation. And may those who do not understand that it is within the deep confusion of these times that we must find one another, finally see the light. 

Rabbi Lori Shapiro is the founder and artistic director of The Open Temple in Venice.