Chanukah 5783/2022
Ari Mark Cartun
At the end of the last day of Chanukah my wife, our twins, and I wanted to eat dinner on the lanai of our timeshare on Maui. We turned on the lanai lights and all the lights in the living room to make it as bright as it could be. However, there was one ceiling light we could not get to go on.
These timeshare apartments are kind of goofy when it comes to light switch placement, and this was one of the goofier ones, inasmuch as it was in a ceiling fan and the fan/light switches are just bizarre. We tried every switch in the room many times over and were still in the dark about how to turn on the ceiling fan light, so we called down to the front desk for tech support to show us how to turn it on.
An engineer came up to look at it and quickly determined that we had pressed the right button, so the bulb must have been out. As he began to replace the bulb, he noticed our chanukiot on the sideboard in the living room. He turned to me and said, "You know, my mom is Jewish, so that makes me Jewish too. Every year, at Christmas, she would bring out a menorah. When I asked her why, she would say she didn't know."
It turned out, later in his story, that she was a Shoah survivor, from age 2, and was separated from her parents, but rescued by non-Jews. (We did not get the whole story about this.) Her adoptive mother, a European Lutheran, married an American Catholic, and this man with a latin surname, was raised Catholic. But somehow in her two year old memory there was a menorah, brought out at this time of year, and as she grew up she attached the concept to Christmas.
He was very positive-minded about his Jewishness and Jews—a generally upbeat bubbly person. I wished him a happy Chanukah, gave him one of the chocolate coins laying among the chanukiot and he said he'd share it with his wife. So I gave him another for her, but then noticed that he had one big one and one small one. So I exchanged the big one for a small one so he'd not have to deal with causing marital strife over which one of them got the bigger one.
His revelation of his mom's Jewish origin and her annual Christmas menorah-ing was very surprising for all of us, and very moving. Both because of the revelation of the non-Jewish light fixer being a Jew by ancestry, and because it represented another sad story of children and grandchildren of Shoah Jews losing their Jewish identity. It is like the stories of Marranos still lighting shabbat candles many generations after the forced conversions of their ancestors. So I decided to write this account of what happened to share with you all.
And then, as I sat down to write it today, I realized that he had come up to find a way for us to turn on our light on the feast of lights! On the last flickering night of Chanukah a small glowing remnant of a Jewish candle's dying moment arrived to light our room from above.
Wow.
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