CHAG URIM SAME'ACH!

BS"D


I spent late tonight cathing up on e-mail & blogging while listening to some of my fave Chanukah cds...Festival of Lights Vol 1 & 2, Happy Hannukah My Friend, & of course, the quintessential Chanukah album: Alan Eder's Reggae Chanukah! The best track on the disc, altho' I hate to single one out, is The Latke Song, a samba/mambo influenced tune sung by the lovely & talented Chava Mirel that somehow smacks of dramatic 80's Rastafarianism. It's so West African, yet so Barry Manilow...

After we lit I was making cocoa for Joel & me to enjoy in front of the chanukiah when I was struck by something quite disturbing. I had grabbed some Land-O-Lakes cocoa because it was late at night & nothing else at our little corner store had a heksher. We normally buy organic, but this was a cocoa *emergency*. You're familiar with the Land-O-Lakes "mascot"? She's a submissive buckskin-clothed First Nations maiden. You know the sort. The "Noble Savage" of yore, when once our governments had succeded in completely dispossessing the Aboriginal Peoples, suddenly it was all en vogue to further debase them by making charicatures of vaguely-exotic-yet-almost-still-white-looking product logos. I suppose once they were no longer a threat to the future of Canada & the US it was safe to romanticise them. Anyway, I'm surprised this kneeling Native girl still exists on the front of the box & each envelope of chocolately goodness. So as I was about to tear open the packet & pour the crystals into our mugs, I realised that the notch in the envelope was perpendicular to the girl's *throat*! I tore straight across & sure enough, I decapitated her. You'd think the artwork would be insulting enough, but apparently we need to tear the head off this innocent as well. So the second packet I purposefully ripped *around* her head. Blah.

What has all this to do with Chanukah? Well, as Red Wolf says, "If you have one drop of Indian Blood in you, you are Indian, & must walk the Indian Path." Red Wolf has got something there. What he's saying is "don't assimilate". & that's what Chanukah is all about. Being true to yourself, your G@d & your people.

Jews have sometimes been exotified, most often by Chrisitan authors & artists & the 1800s. But more often than not, we have been demonised. But regardless of whether others see us as the romantic prophet-warrior-kings of the Bible or as the hook-nosed money-grubbers of Hitler, we must always remember that those views come from the OUTSIDE. What others project on us is in fact *not* what we are. We must stand in our truth & Be who we Are.
It's a great mitzvah.
The Mitzvah Meyuchedet.

Leylah tov.