Celebration of Oil

What I knew about Hanukkah before today: "Hanukkah is...the festival of lights;" it is around Christmas; there is a game with a dreidel; they only had enough oil for one day but the candle stayed lit for 8 days.
Today is the second day of Hanukkah and I am in Jerusalem for work. What this means is: I know now infinitely more about Hanukkah than I did three days ago. You see, I am here for work (sans Paul). My two Canadian/Israeli co-workers are here with me and spending all day with them...eating every meal with them for 4 days...you learn a lot!
Tonight we happened to be sitting at an outdoor cafe between the Old City and Zion Square (in a young, popular, Jewish part of town). Just before sunset a couple hundred people can down the street with music and lights on a stick. Apparently they had walked around the Old City and were on their way to the Square to light the manora at sunset. About half of this group was new soldiers (in uniform, with guns). There was a stage and lots of happy Hebrew music which I didn't understand, but my co-worker sang along and said it was all traditional holiday music.

As the sun set a soldier said two prayers (I understood only the word Adoni, Lord) and they lit their second candle. More interesting than this was the 2nd floor balcony of someone's apartment in a very old beautiful building where a young man came out a sunset and lit a two small candles. He went back inside and sat at the dinner table. The dark night made his lit up dining room look like a stage. He sat down to dinner with his family and in the background fireworks began to go off. "One of the rules of Hanukkah is that you have to show your lights." This made infinitely more sense as we walked back to the hotel and saw manora lightings and singing on the sidewalks and balconies.
Apparently, Hanukkah also has a slightly political undertone to it. You see, the rest of the story of the candle that stayed lit for 8 days is this. Jerusalem was occupied by the Greeks and was a secular (like Tel Aviv today). The Macabees (either a rebel group that wanted to restore the right to practice Judaism or a conservative sect that wanted to restore strict Jewish law, depending on your interpretation of it) after a series of battles retook Jerusalem and went about cleaning out all of the pagan symbols and altars - some of which were in the Second Temple. They wanted to work through the night to restore the purity of the temple but only had.....(enter the story you know)...enough oil for one day of work. The oil lasted 8 days.
This is interesting to me because it happened here in Jerusalem. I am here. Though I didn't bring my camera, I hope to go to the Western Wall tomorrow, ie. to the only remaining part of the Second Temple. While I'd love to see them light the third candle - I think work will get in the way of that.
More than the festival of lights, I'm told it is a festival of oil. Most of the foods associated with Hanukkah include lots of oil. And I saw several altar-like manoras on the streets where the candles were actually oil! It was pretty cool.

Ramadan in the Holy Land

The ninth month of the Muslim calendar is Ramadan.  Like many of our months, there are 30 days. What is different about their calendar is that it is a lunar calendar - and thus 11 days earlier than ours every year (so you would really be older in calendar years!) and the ninth month is a month of fasting.

There are many different types of fasting, so I'll explain.  During Ramadan (which this year was from Aug. 10th to Sept 8th) observant Muslims can not put anything in their mouths from sunrise to sunset.  Nothing.  No food, no drinks, no water, no cigarettes, no gum....no tooth brushes (blah).  Nothing.  The purpose is to learn and understand patience and spirituality.

Wow! A month of fasting! Think how much weight they would lose! Not really.  You start your morning early with a large breakfast, then have absolutely nothing (no water.....think about it... we are in a desert!) and then exactly at sunset you can eat! So you pig out in a meal that is called an iftar dinner.  It usually starts with  a fresh date (the fruit, you're pretty grumpy at this point so a romantic date wouldn't go too well), the date is super sweet after hours of nothing.  Your meal has soup, followed by hummus and salads, followed by lots and lots of rice and sides and meats, and you top it all off with rot-your-teeth-off super-sweet desserts.  Baklava is just one of many small desserts set out to enjoy.  After dinner you smoke nargila (a flavored tobacco smoked out of a large water pipe in social settings) and then quickly go home to your family (if you didn't have this meal at home).  The next morning, you wake up super early for your breakfast, but you are still stuffed from the night before - so you can't eat much and begin another day of fasting.  Repeat this 30 times and you have the month of Ramadan.  Every night you pig out like it is Thanksgiving - you definitely don't lose weight.

Though it sounds as if it could be a pleasant spiritual experience, to us it seemed like a difficult time to plan social events, a month of late dinners (when Ramadan falls in summer), and a month of grumpy counterparts.  (I would say colleagues but honestly most of our Muslim colleagues didn't fast and our colleagues who did fast did so for only a day or so).  One friend did fast every day and I very awkwardly apologized when I offered her my strawberry guava.

It was an interesting month.  And maybe you heard of the tense time in which Eid (the end of Ramadan) and Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) all aligned in one weekend? It wasn't tense here - we just had a lot of time off of work!