by Geoff Vasil

There’s a bit of mystery as to what Hanukkah is among non-Jews. I grew up in America and went to an “alternative” grade school in the 1970s, where they attempted to teach us about different cultures. One winter, when I was in the first grade, some nice ladies came and told us the Hanukkah story. I think even then they stressed it was NOT the Jewish Christmas, and they told us the traditional gift for children was a simple orange, which were scarce in Northern Europe and reminded Jews of their true homeland.

That’s the good news about Hanukkah, if you’re worried about what gifts to buy. Hanukkah isn’t a big gift-giving holiday. Children may expect an orange or Hanukkah gelt, foil-wrapped chocolate coins. It’s traditional for children to spin the dreidl on Hanukkah, and foods fried in oil—doughnuts and potato pancakes or latkes—are traditional, for reasons to be explained below.

Of course in Western society, in majority-Christian cultures, Hanukkah must compete in the mind of the child with that grand finale of all holidays, Christmas. Christmas is so pervasive it has been adopted even by the non-Christian Japanese. In the Soviet Union they could never quite get rid of it, despite determined efforts to create a universal Winter Holiday with all sorts of fairytale and cartoon characters (including Disney characters towards the end-times for the USSR). Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu only really met his fate after he outlawed Christmas. Santa Claus seems to have some very powerful friends, and as the saying goes, you can’t fight city hall, in this case, you can’t fight the pull of the North Pole and Santa’s workshop. Of course Jews aren’t fighting, or joining, just maintaining what is called the minor holiday of Hanukkah in parallel with the Christian festival.

by Andres Spokoiny

We’re more affected by architecture than we might want to believe. The built environment conditions our thoughts and behaviors. Every building sends a message.

Totalitarian regimes know this well; they often have explicit architectural doctrines. Stalinist architecture favored monstrous, colorless buildings, exalting the collective over the individual. Creating monumental structures for Nazi rallies, Albert Speer evoked submission, aligning the crowd toward a single leader, rather than fostering talk among the people.

I have personal experience with totalitarian architecture. Argentinean juntas didn’t build huge buildings (mostly because they embezzled the money allocated for that), but they did renovate many Buenos Aires squares and parks. One of the most emblematic is Plaza Bernardo Houssay, tucked amid University of Buenos Aires buildings. The junta redesigned this space to make it impossible for students to stage demonstrations. The square was filled with irregular steps and levels. A water basin and a new church were built to leave no room for large crowds on the lawn. Beautiful art nouveau benches were replaced by uncomfortable concrete seats, placed so as not to face each other. Ancient jacaranda trees were uprooted, making it unappealing for students like me to fraternize under the baking sun. The traditional Spanish square, which serves as a focal point for diverse people to meet, chat, play dominoes, and philosophize, was no more.

The Jewish people is not particularly known for its architectural exploits. Our most important building in the world is a patched-up, badly eroded wall. Yes, there are great individual Jewish architects, but as a people, words are our forte — not bricks. As we celebrate Sukkot, however, suddenly Jews are forced to become architects. And it’s worth asking: if a building always sends a message, what does the sukkah tell us?

Happy New Year to all members of the Community, young and old! We are ushering out what was a successful year, and we have reason to be happy and proud of it, and now we look forward to an even better year. I wish everyone strong health and a sweet and successful year ahead for you and your families. I invite everyone to do at least on good deed for the community over the coming year, and I especially invite those to do this who believe there are things that aren’t right within the community. Do what you think is right, don’t be afraid to do good deeds and let’s not fear the consequences. I wish you love of the country in which you live, to love Israel, and to raise your children as Jews, the future members of our community.

שנה טובה ומתוקה

by Andrés Spokoiny

In 2007, at Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, scientists conducted a troubling experiment. They put people into an MRI machine and asked them to press one of two buttons in front of them. The subjects were told to do this several times, and to choose freely which button to press.

One part of the results was nothing new: around a second before the button was pressed, the parts of the brain associated with conscious decision-making lit up. But looking more carefully, the scientists noted that there was a pattern of neural activities around six or seven seconds before the decision was actually taken. That pattern predicted with great accuracy the decision that the person ended up taking.

The researchers were shocked, because these findings suggest that decisions are not really conscious. Rather, they are subconscious neural processes that are complete before our “command and control” functions ever activate. We may think that we’re about to consciously decide something, but in fact, our subconscious has already (and irrevocably) decided.

by David Harris

Surveys reveal a disturbingly large number of American Jews who feel disconnected from their Jewish identity. How painfully sad! In response, and with the High Holy Days just around the corner, let me share, as I have on occasion in the past, what being Jewish means to me.

1. It means championing what is arguably the single most revolutionary concept in the annals of human civilization—monotheism—introduced to the world by the Jews, and its corollary, the inherent belief that we are all created in the image of God (in Hebrew, B’tzelem Elohim).

2. It means embracing the deep symbolic meaning the rabbis gave to the story of Adam and Eve. Since all of humanity descend from the “original” couple, each of us, whatever our race, religion, or ethnicity, shares the same family tree. No one can claim superiority over anyone else.

3. It means entering into a partnership with the Divine for the repair of our broken world (in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam), and recognizing that this work is not to be outsourced to a higher authority, or to “fate,” or to other people, but that it’s my responsibility during my lifetime.

4. It means affirming life – “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Hebrew Bible) – and the moral choice that lies in the hands of each of us to bring a little closer the Jewish prophetic vision of a world at peace and in harmony.

5. It means celebrating the fact that Jews were early dissidents, among the very first to challenge the status quo and insist on the right to worship differently than the majority. Today, we call this pluralism, and it is a bedrock principle of democratic societies. It also ought to be an essential component of Jewish communities everywhere.

6. It means welcoming the pioneering Jewish effort to establish a universal moral code of conduct and seeking to act as if that code of conduct were my daily GPS—to pursue justice, to treat my neighbor as I would wish to be treated, to welcome the stranger in our midst (and, I might add, the newcomer to the Jewish people), to be sensitive to the environment, and to seek peace. It’s not by accident that America’s Founding Fathers chose words from the Hebrew Bible for our nation’s Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Or that the Ten Commandments continue to be an ethical guidepost for so many around the world.