Home » Tonight’s the first night of Chanukah

Comments

Tonight’s the first night of Chanukah — 17 Comments

  1. One of my favorite prayers begins, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord.” American Jews, light those Chanukah candles this week, and help lead us all out of darkness.

  2. Happy Hanukkah, Neo and everyone!

    Has anyone else noticed that one can often tell Jewish tunes (even without words) because they typically begin in a sad minor key, have brief episodes of happiness switching to a major key, but then go back and end on the sad minor key?

  3. I hope this is correct…and I apologize if Madame Google led me astray.

    “Chag urim sameach”

  4. Happy Hanukkah!
    It’s interesting, having read the lyrics, how similar Yiddish seems to Dutch.

  5. Perfect! John.
    “Happy Festival of Lights”! (“Or”, pronounced more like o’er, meaning “light”—of “Let there be Light” fame, “urim” being the plural, thereof….)

    (Do you speak Gaelic, too?)
    – – – – – – – – – – –
    Well, those Germanic languages, you know…
    (One of the nice things about Finland is that they often have street and highway signs in Finnish AND Swedish—because of the sizable Swedish minority—which latter makes things much more understandable, Finnish, of course being more than a bit of a challenge…even if all you really have to know is “sauna”. And “coffee”…)
    – – – – – – –
    And many thanks for all those Chanuka/Hanukah wishes…
    (Time to haul out those Books of Maccabees, I guess…talking about asymmetrical warfare…and precocious women…)

  6. I love that song. It is so beautiful, and sad. It is hard to believe it didn’t come out of the Holocaust.

    One tiny quibble on the translation: I would break the grouping up differently:

    Oh, you little candles,
    You tell histories,
    Uncountable stories.
    You tell of bloody deeds,
    Of resourcefulness and courage,
    Miracles of long ago.

    When I see you sparkling
    A vision comes flickering
    Telling a dream of old:
    Jew, you fought once,
    Jew, you prevailed once,
    God, it’s hard to believe.

  7. There are more than one race or ethnicity willing to concelebrate, at least informally, the Maccabee moment.

    I do wonder though why the persistance of the “C”.

    Our Jewish confreres must know perfectly well that no matter how often we are reminded, we of “the coastlands” are going to mentally recite “chunk uh nuh” no matter what.

  8. Bill K,

    It’s a different scale than the common “major” scale typically deployed in western music. You are correct, that it is close to the western “minor” scale.

    This wikipedia entry does a good job of explaining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrygian_dominant_scale

    By the way, I absolutely love it! And you don’t have to listen too closely to hear the huge influence it had on American music; like jazz and the American Songbook. All those brilliant, “American” composers grew up hearing Cantors and playing klezmer and Hebrew music.

  9. Thanks, Rufus! Took piano for 10 years and some unofficial music theory and did NOT know that!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>