President Joe Biden’s workers has dispatched invites to a “Menorah Lighting to be held on the White Home” on Dec. 1, the night when the fourth candle of the eight-day pageant of Hanukkah will likely be lit. The occasion guarantees to be fairly totally different from final 12 months’s occasion, hosted by Donald Trump.
The occasion is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. ET. Watch the ceremony within the participant above.
President Trump in 2020 held what he referred to as a “Hanukkah Reception” in midafternoon earlier than Hanukkah started. The reception was a closely partisan affair, no candles have been lit, a lot meals was consumed, and among the individuals went maskless, the raging COVID epidemic however. Most Democrats in addition to many Jewish leaders stayed residence.
President Biden’s “menorah lighting,” against this, guarantees to privilege ritual over reception, specializing in the lighting of the standard Hanukkah candelabrum itself. Reportedly, the occasion will likely be nonpartisan, with COVID-19 precautions enforced. In response to the Jewish Ahead, no meals or drink will likely be served in any respect, so masks received’t even must be lifted. As well as, the visitor record has been severely pared right down to encourage social distancing – a lot so {that a} senior White Home official was quoted as saying it might probably be the smallest White Home Hanukkah occasion in historical past.
The vp and second gentleman Douglas Emhoff are slated to be amongst these in attendance, and for the primary time the ceremony will likely be livestreamed. On Nov. 28, Emhoff additionally attended the lighting of the Nationwide Menorah on the Washington Ellipse.
Missed amid these fastidiously parsed particulars is a query that, to me, as a historian of American Jewish life and a scholar of American faith, appears much more fascinating and essential: How did the workplace of the president of the US come to carry official White Home menorah lightings and Hanukkah events within the first place?
White Home traditions
For many of American historical past, the one December vacation that gained White Home recognition was Christmas. President John Adams and first woman Abigail Adams, again in 1800, threw the primary White Home Christmas occasion, a modest affair, deliberate with their 4-year-old granddaughter in thoughts, and with invites despatched to chose authorities officers and their youngsters.
In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge inaugurated the observe of lighting an official White Home Christmas tree. He additionally delivered the primary formal presidential Christmas message. His message assumed, as most People of that point did, that everyone celebrated Christmas.
It displayed, based on The Washington Submit, “the reverence of a Christian individuals giving on the seat of their authorities the expression of their reward for ‘the King of kings’ on the eve of the anniversary of His start.” Neither Adams nor Coolidge uttered one phrase about Hanukkah.
Official discover of Hanukkah waited one other half-century – till 1979 – by which period Jews had turn into way more seen as members of American society and authorities. Sarcastically, the president who first paid consideration to Hanukkah was Jimmy Carter, though he wasn’t the Jewish group’s favourite Democratic candidate. When he ran for reelection in 1980, he obtained lower than 50% of the Jewish vote – lower than any Democrat since 1928.
In 1979, following weeks of seclusion within the White Home after Iranian college students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, seizing 52 diplomats and residents, President Carter emerged and crossed over to Lafayette Park. He lit the big Hanukkah candelabrum, dubbed the “Nationwide Menorah,” that had been erected within the park with non-public funds and delivered transient remarks.
Seeing that Jews have a good time their very own vacation in December – Hanukkah – he directed his subsequent annual Christmas message to not all People, as heretofore, however solely “to these of our fellow residents who be a part of us within the joyous celebration of Christmas.”
Each president since has acknowledged Hanukkah with a particular menorah lighting ceremony or reception and restricted his Christmas messages to those that truly observe the vacation.
Menorah lightings
Hanukkah got here to the White Home itself in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush displayed a menorah there – a candelabrum given to him by the Synagogue Council of America.
However Invoice Clinton was the primary president to truly gentle a menorah within the White Home. In 1993, he invited a dozen schoolchildren to the Oval Workplace for a small ceremony. The occasion made headlines when 6-year-old Ilana Kattan’s ponytail dipped into the flame and a wisp of smoke was seen round her head. Clinton memorably extinguished the flame along with his naked fingers.
Menorah lightings grew in prominence in the course of the Clinton years. Memorably, in 1998 Clinton joined Israel’s then-President Ezer Weizman in lighting a candle on the primary night time of Hanukkah in Jerusalem.
However no White Home Hanukkah events ever happened below Clinton. As an alternative, he included Jewish leaders in a big annual “vacation occasion.”
Annual Hanukkah events
The primary president to host an official White Home Hanukkah occasion, and the primary to truly gentle a menorah within the White Home residence and never simply in its public areas, was George W. Bush, starting in each circumstances in 2001.
Bush made a degree of inserting faith into his many annual Christmas events. He sought to underscore by means of the Hanukkah occasion that the White Home “belongs to individuals of all faiths.” Since then Hanukkah has turn into an official White Home custom.
Hasidic leaders within the distinctive black fits worn by members of their group recurrently appeared at these events. Starting in 2005 the events turned utterly kosher.
Barack Obama maintained the custom of the White Home Hanukkah occasion, holding two of them in 2013, and Donald Trump maintained the custom as effectively. Each in 2018 and 2019, he additionally held two Hanukkah events for his pals and Jewish relations – together with his daughter, Ivanka – and invited chosen non-Jewish friends to attend them. Final 12 months, amid the pandemic, Trump once more held two Hanukkah events. He spoke at one among them and lamented the “stolen election” that he insisted he had received.
The truth that this 12 months the White Home is abandoning the Hanukkah reception altogether and returning to the custom of the menorah lighting suggests a shift again to the spiritual facets of Hanukkah.
What is really important, nevertheless, is how a lot America has modified since Presidents John Adams and Calvin Coolidge invented America’s White Home Christmas traditions and paid no consideration to Hanukkah in any respect.