Christmas: the light and the dark

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Simon Schama, the British historian, wrote a nice piece in last weekend’s Financial Times about Christmas and Hanukkah.  Some years back, he took heat for daring to comment that the emphasis on lights in Christmas (all those twinkly bulbs on the tree!) and Hanukkah (all those candles!) was just a holdover from the very traditional celebration of light at the Solstice. 

 

 

Hm.  Is there really any doubt about this?

 

 

Anyway: he repeated a very nice Mishnah story I’d never heard.   In it, Adam was very grieved by the onset of the first winter, realizing that he’d caused it himself, and fasted for eight days, right before the Solstice.  When he realized that the days were getting longer again, he rejoiced for eight days.

 

 

Partner asked me about the timings of sunset and sunrise around the Solstice the other day, so I resorted to Wikipedia.  Do you know how many cultures observe the Solstice?  Pretty much all of them.  And it’s always about light, one way or another. 

 

 

Okay. Now let’s talk about Christmas tragedies.

 

 

This year alone:

 

 

-        A house burned down in Stamford, Connecticut, killing five people.

-        A man – dressed as Santa, yet – came into an Grapevine, Texas house and shot six family members, and then shot himself.

 

 

Remember the Banda Aceh tidal wave in 2004?

 

 

Remember the 2003 earthquake in Iran?

 

 

Well – what of it?  Bad things happen all the time.  There’s no reason that they shouldn’t happen now.

 

 

Except that they seem especially painful now, this time of year.

 

 

It’s the darkest time of year.  The darkness is winning, and we desperately want to see the light triumphant. When we see bad things happen, it’s as if we can actually feel the struggle between light and darkness.  And we do not want the darkness to win.

 

 

The only exceptional event that I’ve listed above is the man in the Santa suit who killed his family members on Xmas.  It makes you think about the expectations of families on Christmas – the desperate effort to believe that everything will be all right – and that these unrealistic expectations might be enough for make someone snap and kill his family.

 

 

That’s a special kind of madness, especially horrible.  I tried to think about what it would be like to see a family member in a Santa suit come into the room toting a shotgun, and –

 

 

Enough.

 

 

Let the darkness go.  The days are getting longer again.

 

 

As I’ve said once before in this space: hail the Unconquered Sun!

 

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For Hanukkah: Jewish superheroes

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Speaking as a Gentile, of all the Jewish holidays, I like Hanukkah best.

 

 

Fine, it’s not a High Holiday, it’s an observance.  The gifts are bush-league: chocolate coins, colorful pencils.  Maybe, if you’re lucky, you get a shirt and pants.  But the candles are pretty.  And it’s eight days long.  And who doesn’t like potato pancakes?  Or playing dreidel?

 

 

But I was especially amused to find the above image on Tumblr recently.

 

 

Evidently Ben Grimm – the everlovin’ blue-eyed Thing from Marvel Comics – is Jewish!  

 

 

I love the yarmulke, and the prayer shawl, and most especially the big smile, and most most most especially the fact that this was drawn by classic Marvel artist Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg).

 

I like the idea of Jewish superheroes.  They’re fictional characters right alongside Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Artur Sammler and Genji, so why not?  I looked online, and found that Doc Samson (who’s a sort of semi-Hulk in the Marvel universe) and Volcana (a heroine/villainess in the Marvel world) are both Jewish, as are a few others.  (Evidently the DC universe is non-denominational.  Although I would not be surprised to discover that the Kents brought up Clark as a Methodist.)

 

 

A Kuwaiti Muslim writer named Naif al-Mutawa has, for the past few years, been developing a line of Muslim comics called “The 99.”  The backstory is that a group of Medieval Muslim thinkers / philosophers / clerics harnessed the energy of the 99 names of Allah, but a villain tried to absorb all the power himself; he mostly failed, but the energy of the 99 names went out into the world, and has been absorbed by 99 other people.  One by one they come forward: The Light, The Powerful, The Listener, the Healer, the Destroyer.

 

 

I like this too.

 

 

We still love mythology, don’t we?  And superheroes are the playactors in our modern versions of those miracle stories and myths.  Did you notice, in last summer’s “Thor,” that the title character died to save his friends, and came back to life?   And I seem to recall the very same thing happening in 2006’s “Superman Returns.”  And think of all the angst and cosmic love triangles in the various X-Men stories –

 

 

Enough.

 

 

Cosmic drama and resurrection are terrific things, but sometimes it's nicer to have candles and potato pancakes and chocolate money.

 

 

Gut yontif, Ben Grimm, wherever you are.

 

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