Page 14 of His for Hanukkah

“You can’t stay in the house all the time, Little Star. We’ll need to get groceries and things. Plus, I want to take you out.”

“So, you really meant it about Hanukkah? Like, the whole thing?”

“The whole thing, baby. Starting tonight. We need to light candles, right?”

Thank God. That was the assurance that he needed. Eight nights was something that he could plan around.

Now he needed to try and make it look like he wasn’t completely crazy. Time to change the subject. “Yeah. We don’t have a hanukkiah, though.”

“Is that a menorah?”

“Yeah, same thing. Well, a menorah can be any lamp and a hanukkiah is just for Hanukkah, but most people use them interchangeably.”

Tate made that little chuckling sound again, and Adam felt the vibrations through his soft shirt. “I can see I have a lot of catching up to do. Will you teach me?”

“Sure, Da–” Oops. That wasn’t supposed to slip out. Not at all.

“If you want to call me Daddy, Little Star, I would be honored. But only if you want it.”

He did. He really did. But someone who took care of you for eight nights wasn’t a Daddy, and he couldn’t afford to let himself get mixed up. He knew he’d never be able to let himself think of Tate that way and then stop.

But before his mind could escape down that tangled pathway, Tate distracted him. “So, I was looking it up online, and my understanding is that you can make a menorah out of anything.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen some cool ones made out of, like, old bolts or wires or stuff. Kate and Susie have a menorasaurus. Like, a dinosaur with little holes for candles. Hang on… when did you go online?”

That chuckle again. “You were in the bath for almost an hour. I took out my phone to order dinner, but you were so relaxed that I decided to use the time to learn more about Hanukkah while I was sitting with you.”

Wow. That meant a lot. But he felt too vulnerable to say that yet.

Of course, his mouth opened anyway, and words started spilling out. “It’s a stupid holiday, anyway. Like, it’s not even in the Torah. I mean, the whole Torah is basically a justification for taking over other people’s land in the name of this wrathful God, and then whining about it when we got conquered.”

“Wow. I don’t think I’d ever thought of it that way.”

Tate seemed interested, so he decided to let a little bit of his inner history geek out. It really irked him that no one seemed to know the actual history of this weird holiday.

“Yeah, and Hanukkah’s like an extension of that. It’s a celebration of warfare, and the Jews don’t really come out looking good. Like, there were these rich Jewish priests, and they were bribing the Greeks to put them into power using money from the temple treasury.

“Then the Greek king, Antiochus the fourth, was taking their money because he was trying to take over Egypt. He put a statue of Zeus in a Jewish temple, which of course is idol worship. So the poor, rural Jews, led by a few of the rich ones like Judas Maccabeus, hid in the hills and started this guerilla warfare against the Greeks. Like, they were basically terrorists.

“Judas Maccabeus, who’s like, the hero of the story, gathered a bunch of rebels together and beat back the invading army. Which, OK, seems reasonable so far. Self-defense. But he didn’t stop there. He started attacking all the nearby Greek towns and killing their citizens to basically take their stuff and build his own power base.

“A few years later the Greeks put his army under siege, and basically wiped them out. Then, like, a decade later, Judas Maccabeus’s little brother became a high priest and things were pretty peaceful for a while because he opted into the Hellenic system.”

“Wow,” Tate nodded. “I had no idea.”

“Yeah, nobody does. That’s not the story that the Jews want to tell, but the Greeks were really good record keepers. The Jews just have one little story about it in the Talmud. Er, that’s like this set of legal decisions based on the Torah with a few stories mixed in to illustrate them. At any rate, that’s where the oil burning for eight nights comes from, but it was written centuries later.”

“Huh. So, what does that have to do with the modern holiday?”

Adam shrugged. “I mean, it’s religion. Judaism evolved in an area that only had resources around a few good waterways, so everyone was fighting for them. Our stories basically take that situation and make all of it about faith in God. Or, like, reasons that it’s OK to conquer people because God didn’t like them, or God promised us their land. I’d say that’s about eighty percent of the Torah.

“This story says that because Judas Maccabeus and his heroic followers took the idols out of the temple, God blessed them with enough oil to light a lamp for eight nights when they should have only had enough oil for one night.”

“So, you don’t believe that?”

“I mean, he had hundreds of followers who’d been living in a defensible location for years. It seems unlikely that between all of them they didn’t have a few cups of oil or the ability to buy some. Oil lamps are pretty efficient, and if you use a small wick you could stretch out two or three cups of oil over eight days.”

“Little Star, I think you’re taking all of the mystery out of it.”