The Blue Candles of Chanukah

Wandering through Whole Foods in mid-December, dodging displays of gingerbread house kits and boxes of Clementines, obsessing over the disquieting reality that I had not begun my Christmas shopping, or sent cards or baked cookies, let alone put up a wreath or tree (I wasn’t a total Scrooge, as I had baked a fruit cake and hung a few ceramic Santas from the windows, as well as gotten out the red tablecloth with white angels that had belonged to my mother-in-law, she who made ten varieties of Christmas cookies every year and generally knocked herself out until she was comatose on Christmas morning), in this pre-Christmas funk, I noticed a small Menorah in the window beyond the checkout. Peering closer, I saw, Oh Hosanna in the Highest, that its candles were blue!

It was the first night of Chanukah, but having celebrated Christmas all my life, I was not mindful of Chanukah. (Christian Scientists don’t celebrate Christmas, or Easter, since they believe Jesus is as immutable as Jupiter and can neither be born, crucified, nor resurrected, but such theological hair-splitting wasn’t my mother’s style and so we put up a tree and hung our stockings like most other folks in our New England town). True, my best friend was Jewish, and she was always singing the praises of latkes and Chanukah gelt. I had admired the large silver Menorah on the dining table at her home (polished to a flawless shine by her mother), and sometimes envied that she got presents every night for eight nights, while Christmas lasted only one day…even so, I couldn’t have answered one serious question about her holiday.

Why, for instance, did Chanukah last eight nights instead of twelve, like the twelve days of Christmas, which we performed at our school every December? (One year, we got to wear starched pinafores, carry shiny pails and parade about among the eight-maids-a-milking; another year, we wore red tights and cavorted with the boys as the ten lords-a-leaping. But neither of us ever got to be Queen. That honor went to Cathy Dykeman, who was also Jewish, but this didn’t diminish her delight at appearing in a white pouffy dress fit for a Tudor princess and perching smugly beside her king, fifth-grade heartthrob Andy MacGruer.) In seventh grade, my best buddy, who always made the high honor roll and who was so smart she could dissect fetal frogs with her eyes closed, tried to teach me a few basic facts about Chanukah. She explained that it commemorated the victory of the Maccabeans over the Greek-Syrians. The Maccabees eventually became as oppressive as the Syrians, and so “The Festival of Lights,” focused more upon the miracle of the oil, which burned for eight nights after the temple was rededicated. Chanukah predates Christmas by 164 years; in fact, if there had been no Judas Maccabee there would be no Jesus.

The information stayed in my hippocampus about as long as a burning Chanukah candle (one half-hour, for all you ignoramus Christmas mavens). Christmas was just so much simpler. A baby. A stable. Shepherds watching their flocks by night. Wise men carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I had no idea what frankincense and myrrh were, but I liked the sounds of the words and I figured the stuff was pretty fantastic, the equivalent for me of opening the biggest present under the tree and finding, nestled in layers of creamy tissue paper, a Chatty Cathy doll. There was the nagging problem of Jesus’ mother and her supposed virginity, but in the dark, unenlightened 1960s, no one thought kids needed to know about bleeding hymens. I could put the problem of Jesus’ conception aside, and simply stare blissfully at the doll-like, painted creatures inside the little wooden crèche that my mother put out on the hall table, and leave the metaphysics to the Redeemer’s Dad.

I am ashamed to admit that my goyisha incuriosity about Chanukah continued into adulthood. Yes, my first husband was a Jew, and he was as smart as my best buddy, possibly smarter, but he wasn’t about to instruct me in the history of the dreidel; he didn’t even own a Menorah, for Heaven’s sakes. For one thing, he had grown up in a non-observant family in Philadelphia which was neither fish nor fowl, which is to say they lit a Menorah AND put up a Christmas tree, much to the head-shaking of their Jewish neighbors. Even more shocking: this grandson of a pious, long-bearded Jew who had escaped the pogroms in Russia and who had studied the Talmud every day while his wife ran a dry goods store in the slums of Philadelphia, this Jew, Leonard Feldstein, my husband, was a baptized Catholic! What’s more, and I guess this goes with the territory, he got high on everything Christmas, from drinking eggnog to hanging mistletoe to listening to all fifty-two movements of Handel’s Messiah.

Len’s conversion to Catholicism, which puzzled, if not outraged, many of his Jewish friends, did not occur on my marital watch, or I would surely have put a stop to it. Leonard Feldstein became a Catholic two years before I met him, when he was between wives, between girlfriends and generally so low that he even flirted with suicide. (My blue hours of middle life are a stroll through the Bronx Zoo compared to his unhappiness.) He was rescued by the Jesuits of Fordham University, with whom he spent long, drunken evenings speculating about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. These wily Fathers, most of them raging alcoholics, convinced him not only that Christianity was superior to Judaism, but that he should save his soul straight away by getting baptized. Len once confided that the Jewish view of death with no afterlife was depressing, and that the promise of heaven was more appealing. Moreover, he felt that some of the greatest artists of Western civilization—from Dante to El Greco to Bach—were inspired by the iconographies of Catholicism.

My second husband also happens to be a Catholic, albeit of the lapsed variety, and he too, loves Christmas, but he comes by his passion more honestly, as it were, since his mother, my mother-in-law, she of the knock-yourself-out-brand of Christmasdom to which I must always fall short, made a religion of Christmas. Not only did she bake all those Gingerbread Men, Rum Balls, and Russian Tea Cookies, she also hauled out an attic full of Christmas lights, decorations and flashing knicky-knackies, most of which still survive in their original tissue paper and lie in wait for my husband to unpack for another round of Christmas merriment.

All of which is prelude and prolegomena to the Christmas tableaux of me, your sorry blogger, wandering among the bright aisles of Whole Foods five hours after sundown on Chanukah’s first night, whispering Alleluia to the blue candles of that toy-sized Menorah.

So why are Chanukah candles blue? Or mostly blue with hints of white and silver? No special reason, according to Chabad.org. Chanukah candles can actually be any color, but most are blue-and-white to distinguish them from the reds and greens of Christmas (there are very few blue staples of Christmas, save for “Blue Christmas,” crooned by Elvis Presley). Blue and white also summon up the colors of the Israeli flag. And blue, according to one online Jewish scholar, has a hallowed significance, as it was the designated color of the fringes of the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. The book of Numbers specifies that there must be at least one blue thread, or techelet, woven into the fringes of the tallit; in this manner, each man, when he prays, will be king. Blue was so rare and expensive in ancient times that the Greeks and the Romans didn’t even have words for it. The blue of tekeleth, which is dark with hints of purple, was procured from sea snails. The snail’s hand had to be drilled and the dye extracted from its pulsing innards; 8500 snails had to be dismembered to produce one gram of blue dye.

Which makes the creation of frankincense and myrrh, which involves extracting the resin from a boswellia and commiphora tree, respectively, seem like a dreidel game. But I digress. Here’s to you, dear multicultural reader: Merry Chanukah! Happy Christmas! Bright Solstice! Joyful Kwanzaa!

The Serendipity of Blue

Depression, psychologists tell us, is not merely a neurological impairment; it is also a cognitive deficiency, a stubborn insistence upon seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. The sun rarely shines in the dust-bunny-ridden halls of the melancholic mind; the depressive goes about his business mechanically, grumpily, a veritable Scrooge, begrudging others their joy, asserting with the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, (without doubt the bleakest book in the Bible, so depressing that it should have its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Imagine, then, my shock, my delight, my childlike wonder, when I read about the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue! Full disclosure here: having been raised as a Scientist (i.e. Christian Scientist), my acquaintance with chemistry, and indeed all forms of lower case science, is minimal. I can safely assure my reader that I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to matters scientific. So I had to reread the article in the Science section of the New York Times at least five times before it stuck in my feeble hippocampus: in the course of an experiment in the chemistry lab at Oregon State University, which had to do with testing the properties of manganese oxides to determine whether they were both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time (you get a gold star if you know the difference), a graduate student happened to remove one of the pieces of manganese from a furnace—heated to a temperature so hot (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) it would scald the devil himself—and discovered that the material had turned bright blue. The student (not mentioned by name and not likely to get credit in the scientific journals) summoned his professor, and both were struck dumb as Paul on the road to Damascus: Lo and behold, the universe had made a whole new shade of blue!

But wait, it gets better: This new manganese blue was a better, safer, and more durable blue. Ever since the early Egyptians developed the first synthetic blue by grinding copper shavings with sand and potassium, the color has been difficult to create. Indeed blue was so rare in ancient times that the Greeks did not have a word for it. (Homer never refers to the sea as blue, only as “wine-dark.”) The Celts and Germans used woad, an herb of the mustard family, to create blue (and indeed the word blue is Germanic in origin); Indian peoples, since Neolithic times, have dyed with indigo; but both these blues tend to fade with time. The semi-precious stones of lapis lazuli, mined from mountains in the Far East, were often ground down to create a blue paste used in fine arts painting, but this brighter blue is costly. Cobalt blue, developed in France in the 1800s, was often carcinogenic. And Prussian blue, developed about the same time in Germany, releases the deadly chemical of cyanide. But this new manganese blue—featuring ions patterned in a trigonal bipyramidal coordination worthy of a Cubist painting—releases no evil carcinogens and will not fade with time. The new improved blue is expected to turn up in everything from inkjet printers to house paints.

And to think that the entire business was an accident, just as so many of the great scientific discoveries were accidents: Isaac Newton grasping the theory of gravity after being struck on the head by a falling apple; Henri Becquerel discovering X-rays after leaving his equipment in a drawer and noticing that a uranium rock had imprinted itself upon a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after failing to clean up his work area before going on vacation and noticing, when he returned, that a culture plate containing bacteria had developed a layer of mold which killed the bacteria around it.

Such serendipity is almost enough to make you believe in the prime mover, the author of all holy books, the maker of the periodic table himself.

Of course, if She exists, She’s got to be wearing blue!