What Special Meaning Does Hanukkah Have for the Families
It's no hush-hush that the American holiday agenda is thoroughly color-coded. The Fourth of July is cherry-red, white and blueish, for obvious reasons. Halloween has pumpkin orange, and the Thanksgiving tabular array tends to be festooned in the brown and red colors of the harvest flavor. And as those autumnal hues begin to fade, the red and green of Christmas take their identify.
Merely, though those colors tin can tend to boss the American landscape in December, they aren't the but shades of the season. For Jewish Americans, this fourth dimension of year is celebrated with the blue and white (and sometimes silver) of Hanukkah.
That color choice has fiddling to do with the the holiday's religious meaning — and everything to do with 20th century American civilization, say experts on the field of study.
In the post-World War 2 The states, equally more Jewish families began moving to suburbs, the holiday season presented a trouble for parents.
"In that location was pressure on Jewish kids to participate in celebrating the Christmas pageantry that went on in public schools," Dianne Ashton, a professor of religion and American studies at Rowan Academy and the author of Hanukkah in America: A History, tells Fourth dimension. "And that increased the pressure on parents, I think, to do something — to make children okay with beingness Jewish, to exist happy to be Jewish when they weren't celebrating Christmas."
I solution was to make Hanukkah a bigger deal, despite the fact that it hadn't previously been considered equally such. Because the events the holiday commemorates took identify after the time period covered by the Old Testament, its observance is not biblically mandated, explains Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. So information technology really wasn't until this cultural desire for a parallel vacation that happened to fall around Christmas time that Hanukkah became widely observed equally a child-friendly celebration, Wertheimer says, and particularly so in the Usa.
Parents weren't the only ones who noticed this trend. Companies like Authentication saw what was happening, likewise.
The company, which was founded in 1910 every bit a postcard manufacturer, had quickly gotten into the holiday card game, and its dominance in the greeting-carte du jour industry was growing. If Hanukkah could exist marketed as a Christmas for Jewish children, it stood to reason that the company would diversify its offerings, branching out into Hanukkah cards and political party appurtenances too. Those products were easily visible to American shoppers in the supermarkets where the items were sold.
"I think that that's function of what made Hanukkah actually visible to a lot of people," Ashton says.
And just as Christmas had colors that made Christmas stuff immediately recognizable, Hanukkah needed them as well. But why blue and white?
Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives.
Though scholars like Ashton betoken to Hallmark'southward office in spreading and popularizing these colors, a representative from the company tells TIME that there is no tape definitely confirming how their employ of bluish and white came nigh. But, while blue and white decorations are largely an American phenomenon and not office of the holiday's commemoration elsewhere, the most common reason cited for the color selection is an international one: blue and white are the colors of State of israel'due south flag. The Hallmark representative says that Authentication'due south production teams pattern their vacation items off the premise that the color scheme has e'er been connected to that symbolism.
Israel became a state in 1948, which coincides with the post-Earth State of war Ii cultural Hanukkah phenomenon. Ashton notes that the story of Hanukkah — most the Maccabees reclaiming the Temple and Jewish independence — is also oft likened to the story of Israel's independence, making the clan that much closer. (But somewhat ironically, she notes, "Hanukkah shrank in importance in Israel" later on the nation was established. Israel's own Independence Day, historic on May eight, replaced the wintertime celebration every bit the vacation most linked to that idea.)
Only the association betwixt Judaism and those colors didn't starting time in 1948.
Blue and white are likewise theologically important colors in Judaism. The tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, is customarily made in a white fabric with black stripes and one blueish string, Wertheimer says. This blue fringe comes from the blue snail dye that is mentioned throughout the Torah. The colour blue is also mentioned extensively throughout other religious texts, according to Chabad.
Today's Hanukkah decorations carry on the tradition of the vacation's early on American popularity, in that they look just like Christmas decorations, but they're blue and white. "Hanukkah bushes" akin to Christmas trees can exist found in many Jewish homes; string lights in blue and white rather than green and red are strewn on houses.
"Again, this is participating in the seasonal consequence that the whole country is doing," Ashton says, "but with the markers of showing that you're doing it in a Jewish way."
More than Must-Read Stories From Fourth dimension
- How Volodymyr Zelensky Defended Ukraine and United the World
- Introducing TIME'southward Women of the Year 2022
- How to Assist People in Ukraine Right Now
- Why Y'all Should Keep Wearing a Mask on Planes—Even When You lot No Longer Have To
- Amal Clooney Won't Back Down
- What Ketanji Brown Jackson Could Bring to the Supreme Court
- The Window to Adapt to Climate Change Is 'Quickly Closing,' Warns the IPCC
Source: https://time.com/5458247/hanukkah-colors-blue-white/
0 Response to "What Special Meaning Does Hanukkah Have for the Families"
Postar um comentário