This week Hanukkah is upon us, fatty foods, hypocrisy and all. Or so I read in the NYT, which reaffirms what I thought was common knowledge all along (click on the picture for the link). From the article:

According to most modern scholars — and a few rabbis I called on to help me out — the story of Hanukkah is based on a historical conflict between the Maccabees and the Hellenized Jews, the former being religious zealots who lived in the hills of Judea and practiced an ancient form of guerrilla warfare, the latter being mostly city-dwelling assimilationists who ate pork, didn’t circumcise their male children and made the occasional sacrificial offering to pagan gods.

Some of the details are up for debate, depending on which texts you consult. But everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews. So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism. Our assimilationist answer to Christmas is really a holiday about subjugating assimilated Jews.

 

Let’s blissfully forget about the politics and focus on the presents, one per day, that I am going to give to myself this week: an imaginary trip that will allow me to meet interesting people and explore new places. I am starting with the mountains of Tajikistan and a man who is a paragon of determination, curiosity and adaptation:

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/576898/botanist/

I learned of Raimberdi, an Kyrgyz man from a nomadic tribe in the Pamir mountains, through a short documentary I chanced upon (link above.) After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan was thrown into a civil war and to this day is utterly bereft of essentials for survival (food, kerosine, gasoline etc) which were previously supplied by the Russians (who the protagonist claims are bitterly missed.)

Raimberdi engineered a hydroelectric power station out of junk he found, invented numerous things to ease the life in his poor village, including reliable means to start cooking fires, and, most importantly, leaned into botany to reclaim the ancient knowledge of the remedial properties of plants growing in this desert region. He is also a volunteer teacher inside and outside the classroom to impart his cultural knowledge on future generations.

Role model then, reminding me of the luxuries of my own life which stands in such stark contrast to what the Kyrgyz have to endure.

Photographs are in honor of botany, but also of contrast: nothing more luxuriously green and damp in this season of brown  backgrounds than ferns, in comparison to the desiccated flora of the Pamir mountains.

Green is also the color of hope – maybe one day there will be (Hanukkah) miracles that have nothing to do with war, power, survival…in a world less mad.