What did Daniel's three friends refuse to worship, resulting in their persecution?

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Last updated on: December 22, 2006 at 2:43 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-12-22T14:43:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF:

IT’S A HANUKKAH MIRACLE ON RUSH STREET

Last weekend we hosted a holiday party for a religiously mixed group of friends, most of them Christians (of one flavor or another) like my husband and me. But a few of our guests were Jewish, and we wanted to honor their religious tradition as well as our own as we washed down rumaki and mini quiches with glasses of homemade wassail.

Now, we live in a progressive, multicultural, spiritually engaged community. There are umpteen churches, at least one Buddhist temple and three synagogues within about a mile of our home.

So as I ran around town gathering holiday party accouterments Saturday afternoon, I figured I’d just duck into one of the many artsy-fartsy shops that line our picturesque streets and pick up a menorah along the way.

No dice. There wasn’t a menorah to be had.

“We don’t carry those,” one store proprietor replied when I said I was looking for a menorah. The way she enunciated “those,” you would have thought I’d asked if she had any bongs in stock.

Jeez.

One clerk said, apologetically, “I do have a coffee mug that has a menorah on it.” I thanked her and left empty- handed. “We’re sold out,” another merchant said. The news was briefly heartening until she added, “I had two but they were gone by Thursday.”

Two. M’kay.

I know I could have jetted down to the gift shop at Chicago’s Spertus Institute of Judaica or a number of other speciality stores in the city or elsewhere and found a host of gorgeous menorahs. But here’s the thing: In 2006 I shouldn’t have to go to a “speciality” shop to find a menorah when I can buy a Christmas tree and a creche at the nearest mini-mart.

Our holiday party was, sadly, a menorah-free event. My Jewish friends forgave me. They are a gracious lot.

I spent Sunday shopping along the Gold Coast with my best friend. By the time the sun began to set our feet were throbbing, our moods had turned decidedly maudlin, and we’d both gone silent in reaction to what she likes to call “pedestrian rage.”

Walking north along Rush Street to ransom the motorized toboggan from its pay lot, we saw them. Three of them — two on the west side, one on the east — in their dark suits and black felt fedoras.

“They’re gonna stop me,” my dark-haired, alabaster-skinned, daughter-of-a-Presbyterian-pastor friend said. “I guess I must look Jewish or something. Watch. They always stop me.”

“They” are the young male members of Lubavitch Chabad, the Hasidic Jewish movement perhaps best known for erecting huge menorahs in public places, like Daley Plaza.

I know some of the local Lubavitchers, as they’re called, because they sometimes come to our office on Fridays to daven, or pray, with a colleague of mine. The young men who help him into the phylacteries — two small boxes that contain pieces of Scripture attached to the forehead and left arm by leather straps — before he prays, are polite and smart and kind.

But they make some of my Jewish friends uncomfortable, in much the same way, I suppose, that certain Christians who stand on street corners, handing out tracts and asking, “Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” make some other Christians cringe.

And I say that as someone who once spent a summer as a “mime for the Lord,” performing and proselytizing in white face and red suspenders on the streets of London. I was truly awful at the “cold-contact witnessing.” Walking up to strangers and asking intimate spiritual questions felt about as effective as throwing a Bible at their heads.

Sure enough, as the best friend and I approached the Lubavitcher on the corner of Rush and Walton, he stopped us. “Excuse me, but are you Jewish?” the polite bespectacled fellow said.

“No,” I answered. “But I’ve been looking everywhere for a menorah.”

Reaching into the cardboard box tucked under his arm, the young man smiled and said, “Here, please, take this.” And there, in his hand, was a smaller box containing a gold-toned metal menorah, candles, a blue plastic dreidel and directions.

“Really? But I’m not Jewish,” I said.

“It’s OK,” he said. “It’s for you.” And that was it. He didn’t want anything from me. It wasn’t about that. “Happy Hanukkah,” I said as we walked away.

I could have cried right there in front of Urban Outfitters. So far it’s been the brightest moment of my overcast holiday season.

Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, said the organization will hand out about 5,000 free menorahs throughout the Chicago area this Hanukkah season. It’s a Chabad tradition that goes back more than 30 years.

Hanukkah, which ends tonight, commemorates the victory of the Jewish army over the ruling Greek Syrian forces, which had outlawed the Jewish religion and desecrated its temple, in the year 165. It also marks the “Hanukkah miracle,” when an oil lamp in the temple that had only enough fuel to last one day was lit and, according to tradition, burned for eight days. Hence the menorah and its eight candles.

“Did [Hanukkah] happen years ago? Or is it happening now?” the how-to guide that came with my menorah asked. “Was there ever a time when it was not happening? The story of a little candle pushing away the monster of darkness is ever-alive within each of us — and in the world outside of us.

“The original idea,” behind the free menorahs, “was exactly that of dispelling darkness with light by giving people an opportunity to light a candle,” Moscowitz said. “It’s a universal message: light dispels darkness.”

As darkness fell on Rush Street last Sunday, I walked away with a gift of kindness that flooded my night with light.

Happy Hanukkah.

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