✨ From Austin to NYC: A Chanukah Party at Amazon 42 years in the making
#ChaiSociety Dispatch Season V Episode I
✨This month’s #ChaiSociety Dispatch takes us from New York to Teaneck to Austin to London and back to NYC - and gives a look at the power of the public menorah and how it inspired some incredible Jewish events for Jews at Amazon’s offices around the world.
💡 Think:
*Record Scratch* *Freeze Frame*
Yep, that's me… with the family at Amazon after hosting the first ever Chanukah party for Jewish Amazonians in NYC.
You may be wondering how I got here.
Now it’s not surprising to see Tech Tribe in tech offices around the city. What’s amazing about this particular party is how we got there…
The Talmud, in defining Chanukah, understands it to be a holiday built around public displays of Judaism - pirsumei nisa in Aramaic. Even the very basic placement of the Menorah is centered around broadcasting it with the world:
The Sages taught1: It is a mitzva to place the Hanukkah lamp at the entrance to one’s house on the outside, so that all can see it. If he lived upstairs, he places it at the window adjacent to the public domain. And in a time of danger, when the gentiles issued decrees to prohibit kindling lights, he places it on the table and that is sufficient to fulfill his obligation.
Perhaps, as forecast by the second half of the Talmudic passage, which worried that fanatical Zoroastrians2 might harm Jews who kindled their menorahs in the public, the menorah turned inward.