{"id":790,"date":"2007-12-05T03:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-05T07:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/12\/05\/tuesday-night-1st-night-of-chanukah\/"},"modified":"2007-12-05T03:10:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-05T07:10:00","slug":"tuesday-night-1st-night-of-chanukah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/12\/05\/tuesday-night-1st-night-of-chanukah\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday night – 1st night of Chanukah"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Home again after a very good trip to NY. It’s so nice coming back to Vermont.. and back to my family. I still feel it hard to walk in the house after being gone. Sam’s absesne is more concrete when I step in that door. That feeling passes once I’m inside and with my family. <\/p>\n

As soon as I walked in, Diane started converteing the potatoes I’d brought in into Latkes for tonight is the first night of Chanukah. Gabe and I sat around smelling them cooking with our mouths watering.. It was torture. Once they were made, we sat down and lit the first lights of Chanukah. I suspect most folks know the drill.. You start wuth one candle and add one every night foreach of the eight nights.. There’s also and extra one,. the Shamus… who looks after (and light’s) the others.  It’s names after the guy who looked after the synagogue.Shamus is also the Yiddish word for ‘detective’ or ‘private eye’ .. I always thought that was cool,<\/p>\n

Chanukah commenmorates the uprising of the Maccabees against the Greek ruler Antiouchus IV in 167 BC (or BCE as we say).  The deal is when they drove the Greeks out of the temple, they found that there was only a tiny bit of the oil needed to keep the everlasting light of the temple (Ner Tamid) lit.. in fact there was ony enough left to run it for one day.. somehow the small amount ended up lasting 8 days… not much of a miracle.. but  enoguht to make a holiday. (I’ve had that sort of thing happen on my cell phone.. only one bar of battery.. and it lasts a whole conference call. )   Anyway.. the theme of the oil goes throughout Chanukah .  You’re supposed ot eat oily fried things like donuts and fired potatot pankaes called Latkes.  Note the bubling oil around these delicious latkes…<\/div>\n

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Gabe lights the first chandles
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Note the reflection of the ligths on the latke plate.. now that’s oil !<\/p>\n

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We said the blessing over the candles… <\/p>\n

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Blessed are You,
our God, Creator of time and space,
who enriches our lives with holiness,
commanding us to kindle the Channukah lights. <\/p>\n

On the first night of a holiday, it’s  also traditional to say the Shehecheyanu, the prayer that celibrates the safe arrival at the holiday. I couldn’t bring myslef to say it this yoear.. we’re not all here safe…    I remember choking up on that last year. at the wonderful Skate benefit that our firends Hannah and Dave had in Sam’s memory last Chanukah just 2 weeks after his passing.
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Oy !<\/p>\n

After dinner we got down to some good old traditional gambling with a Dreidel.. <\/p>\n
‘Nun’ – nothing<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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‘Gimel’ – wins all

‘Shin’ – put one in
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‘Hey’ – take half<\/p>\n

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Gabe ‘poned’ us… We didn’t even have  a chance..   <\/p>\n

OK.. I’ve been up and driving since 5:30 AM .. time for me to get some sleep..
Chanukah Sameach (Happy Chanukah) everyone.. Gnite all.. gnite Sam.. <\/p>\n

-me<\/p>\n

ps. Our firned Gary sent us a picture of the SamStone he put on the bell in the tower of the Round Church where Diane and I were married. .. Pretty cool. Thanks Gary !<\/div>\n

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Home again after a very good trip to NY. It’s so nice coming back to Vermont.. and back to my family. I still feel it hard to walk in the house after being gone. Sam’s absesne is more concrete when I step in that door. That feeling passes once I’m inside and with my family. … Continue reading Tuesday night – 1st night of Chanukah<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}