Small But Mighty

Every Chanukkah since I was three years old, my dad has written a Chanukkah play. On the Saturday night of Chanukkah week, 30 families from our small Jewish community of Tallahassee, FL would cram into my parents’ house for our annual Chanukkah party. And while the parents schmoozed downstairs, the kids would go upstairs to learn and rehearse the Chanukkah play that my dad had written that year.

The plays would retell the story of Chanukkah—but instead of an epic battle between the Jews of ancient Israel and their Hellenizing neighbors, these retellings would focus on the small-but-mighty Jewish community of Tallahassee, trying to maintain their identity as a cultural minority in the South. The plays were full of corny jokes and puns (“groaners,” we used to call them), and rewritten songs from classic Broadway musicals. The plays were invariably cheesy, and as we kids grew older, we grew more and more embarrassed about performing in them.

But when I look back on those Chanukkah plays, I recognize that they were not only about a small-but-mighty Jewish community trying to retain its identity, the plays helped to enable that community’s identity to form and grow.

After the play was over, all the families would go out onto the back porch and light our menorahs—one for each person that was there. And for one night in Florida’s panhandle, the light of all those candles and the sound of all those voices singing the blessings helped to illuminate the dark. Like the Maccabees, like their oil that shouldn’t have lasted—we may have been small, but my, were we mighty.