Queering Hanukkah 

As we come to the beginning of Hanukkah, Brian invites us to reimagine the Festival of Lights as a celebration of resistance, resilience, and the sacred spark within every queer body. When queering Hanukkah, we can explore how the Hanukkah story itself is rooted in defiance against erasure, and how its rituals can be reclaimed as affirming practices that honor queer joy, creativity, and survival.

Resources:

• Learn more about Rituals for Resistance & Resilience here
• Join us and be part of Queering Advent! Find more info here.

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.

1 (9s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G. Murphy,

2 (13s):
And I’m Father Shannon TL Kerns. We’re the co-founders of queer theology.com and your hosts from Genesis,

1 (18s):
Revelation. The Bible declares good news, LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how

2 (23s):
Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here.

1 (33s):
A few days ago, I texted one of my friends who was also Jewish and asked if he wanted to come over for a lot ’cause and food and candles on the first native Hanukkah with some other friends. Wait, when does Hanukkah start? He asked, yes, I’m terrible for not knowing. He added, but you know what? Not knowing when Hanukkah starts is also a quintessentially Jewish experience for many Jews. It, it starts tonight, by the way, now if you know me, you know that I’m a big fan of counting holidays. I like to count the days of land count, the days of the Ooma count, the days of Advent, and of course, count the Knights of Hanukkah. It might be that that soothes some part of my A DHD brain, but for me, there’s also something deeply grounding about the practice of paying attention to the passing of time.

1 (1m 13s):
Maybe you count the days since a partner or friend or a family members passing. Maybe you count the days of your sobriety. Maybe you count the days until your gender affirming surgery. I’m a bit obsessed with the idea that everything can be spiritual, that the divine is already at your fingertips. In our rituals for resistance and resilience workshop, I outline seven steps to transform a routine into ritual. Sure, you can pray the rosary or go to Shabbat services, but if that’s, but if those don’t resonate with you, perhaps you could take some inspiration from counting the days of Advent or Hanukkah and create your own sacred countdown or other type of spiritual practice. In Hanukkah, we remember two things. The more feel good story that we remember is that after the temple in Jerusalem was taken back by the Jews from occupation under this lucid empire in the second century, b, c, E, there was hardly any oil left that could be used to light the menorah, which is a seven branched candelabra that burned daily in the temple.

1 (2m 9s):
Out of all the oil that was left, there was only enough for one night, but it would take seven more days to make and sanctify more oil. Still, they lit the menorah anyway, and somehow miraculously it burned for eight nights long enough to replenish the oil and keep it burning. A few years ago, my rabbi gave a talk on Hanukah. She shared how she started her rabbinet in the midst of the AIDS crisis and as a lesbian rabbi, she was one of the few clergy who would visit many gay men, sick or dying of aids. While we lost a devastating number of L-G-B-T-Q people to the AIDS epidemic, many survived against incredible odds. There’s a clip that I can’t get out of my head of Peter Staley organizing with Act Up in the 1990s where he says, I’m going to die from this, and yet over 30 years later, he’s still here.

1 (2m 59s):
The world has tried over and over and over again to snuff out queer people, neglect our healthcare conversion therapy, shame us into silence. Burn books about us in the 1930s in Germany, rewrite history about us in the 2020s in the United States of America, legislate our rights away, deny our genders, pretend our relationships didn’t exist or don’t count. And yet here we are. Here you are still burning just as bright. Each night of Hanukkah, we light one additional candle, starting with a mish that help our candle and one regular candle on the first night, and then all the way up to the mish and eight regular candles on the final night.

1 (3m 40s):
Each night, the light grows and grows and grows from a faint flicker in the beginning to a glorious roaring beacon. At the end, you might have started your queer journey small and timid, but you need not stay that way. Each day, the divine pours more light into you. May you grow stronger and brighter with each passing night. There is another reason we celebrate Hanukkah. In addition to the miracle of the oil, Hanukkah also celebrates a military victory. The reason why most of the oil has been destroyed and how the temple came to be your reclaimed by the Jews in the first place. Now, Jews have been occupied in and exiles from Israel countless times over our history and the second century, BCE was one of those times the saluted empire wanted to outlaw Jewish practice to destroy Jewish distinctiveness, to coerce assimilation into a hellenized society.

1 (4m 28s):
Worship, and the temple became a mashup of Jewish and pagan cult worship. Eventually, a group of Jewish rebels led by Judas Maccabee revolted to oust the occupiers and restore Jewish cultural and religious practices in the land and in the temple. Right now, in our present day, there are people who want to stamp out queer distinctiveness. If they cannot erase or destroy us, perhaps they can coerce us into being imitations of them. Make your queerness smaller. They say, blend in, dull your glittery rainbow distinctiveness, and exchange it for khakis and sundresses. Give up your chosen families and retreat to insulated and isolated nuclear families. Bottle up your expansive love and force it into marriages that mirror straightness as much as possible.

1 (5m 13s):
Assimilate, conform. Hanukkah reminds us to resist the temptation of assimilation. Queerness is holy, and in a world that is still unjust. As we wait for Alam Haba, as we say in Judaism, as we wait for the world to come, as we work, as Christians would say, for the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, we need queerness now more than ever. Your queerness is a light like the timid flames of Hanukkah that somehow miraculously burned and burned and burned. May your light never go out. May you burn and burn and burn, and in doing so, may you light up the whole world. Can you hear Raton? May it be God’s will.

1 (5m 53s):
If you want to take better care of yourself, connect more deeply with the divine fuel, more integration with your queerness work for a better world, and yet it all just seems so hard. Shannon and I would like to invite you to take our rituals for Resistance and resilience workshop. You’ll learn about the revolutionary origins of some historic religious rituals while also being guided into crafting your own sacred practices that nourish and inspire you, so that you can go through the day with more joy, so you can feel more confident in your queerness, so you can be more bold in your words and actions. We would be so honored to support you. Learn more and register@queertheology.com slash rituals. The Queer Theology Podcast is just one of many things that we do@queertheology.com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration for L-G-B-T-Q Christians and straight cisgender supporters.

2 (6m 38s):
To dive into more of the action, visit us@queertheology.com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

1 (6m 46s):
We’ll see you next week.

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