guide to the jewplexed


THE NEW CHANUKAH
Spilling Out of the Window and Into the Yard

How does one get lit on the Festival of Lights?

You could crack open an ice cold "He'Brew," raise a shot of schnapps for a holiday "L'chayim," or in the state of Washington, legally smoke a holiday joint.

But for most of us, more prosaically, we simply open a box of candles and light the menorah.chanukah gangam house

However, the holiday air this year is charged with change, and gone, it seems, are the days when you can just buy a box of dripless and smokeless candles and call it a holiday. Jews are finding new ways to light up Chanukah; to represent and show the miracle.

For example, The Jewish Museum has a new app called "Light My Fire" that lets the user choose a menorah from the museum's collection and virtually light it up.

But it's the gigawatt glow of Christmas lighting technology that is really lighting the way to change. Costs have come down, availability is as close as a Target, and it is that technology that is now being repurposed to illuminate a Jewish theme.

A generation more comfortable than ever with publicly identifying as Jewish is buying online giant glowing inflatable menorahs and Chanukah bears, and flashing LED window and lawn decorations.

Growing even more adventuresome, some are buying thousands of lights, linking and synchronizing them to music to make their front yards pulse, dance and glow to the beat of their inner Maccabee.

A "Gangnam Style" Hanukah House, in Culver City, California, home to Brad and Karen Herman and their family, with flashing major menorah planted in the front yard, and giant Star of David on the roof is that kind of new celebratory display.




"This year I am at 7000 plus lights and 42 animation channels, a 20 foot Menorah, a spinning dreidel, and an 11 foot bear," said Brad Herman on his website.

Here in Los Angeles, the week before Chanukah, the Herman's house was featured on the "Fritz's Holiday Lights" segment on the local NBC TV news show, apparently the first time a Chanukah house had been shown.

The reporter, Fritz Coleman, adding poignancy to the lightshow, related that one of the Herman's sons, Elijah, two year before, had been diagnosed with cancer. According to the report, the lights help to keep up his spirits while he continues to undergo chemotherapy treatments. Helping to put on the show, Elijah picked the songs to which the lights dance, "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style."

Brad Herman, explaining the original inspiration for lighting up his house for Chanukah, told a reporter for the Culver City Patch in 2011:

"I started seeing mega churches, epic Christmas light displays and was bombarded by 'Merry Christmas' at every store I went to in December," said Herman.
"After a lot of soul searching I decided that I no longer had any issue with Christians' exuberant outward showcasing of their religion," Herman said. "I also decided that it was up to me to decide what being Jewish meant to me. I can be as bold and out there with my religion as I want to," he explained.

But how bold? I got in the car to go see for myself.

In a city where homes, floats, even boats are decked out each year with Christmas lights, I had already felt the urge to proclaim the miracle by doing some Chanukah lighting of my own.

Even though my own modest efforts prepared me conceptually for the "Gangnam Style" Chanukah house, when I finally stood on the sidewalk before the 7000 light pulsing glow of the Herman's Festival of Lights show, I was visually surprised and instantly and lit up by its creativity.

Here on an otherwise unassuming Southern California residential street, the Festival of Lights had been transformed into a feast for the eyes and ears. Synchronized to the music, the dreidel spun, the Star of David on the garage roof changed colors, the snow flakes strobed, the giant white bear flashed on and off, the giant menorah blazed; all as the outline of the house was revealed in bursts of blue and white.

Over the music of one song, I could hear the words, "Ness Gadol Haya Sham,"  "A Great Miracle Happened There." Unless the 7000 thousand lights were running off a flashlight battery, this was no miracle--but a breakthrough, just the same, in showing the miracle of Chanukah.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."