I know this is a little out of season, but I thought I'd pass this on
anyway. I supposed I could have saved it for next Christmas, but we can all
save this anyway.
Cecily
During the wee hours of Sunday morning, December 8,
1996, after the third
night of Hanukkah, someone took a baseball bat, and
broke the front window
of
a house in Newtown, Pennsylvania. It might have been
considered simple
vandalism by the local police except for one
significant factor: this house
was
the only one on the street with a lighted menorah in
the window. The
perpetrator had deliberately reached through the
shattered window, took
the menorah
and smashed it on the ground, breaking all nine bulbs.
The menorah is a symbol of the eight-day Jewish
Festival of Lights, also
known as Hanukkah, which occurs around the same time
as Christmas. As a
Nativity
scene reminds Christians of their heritage and faith,
a menorah does so for
Jews. It is the symbol of a miracle.
The woman who lives in the house in Newtown did not
think of miracles when
she found the shattered mess in her front yard. It
was not the first time
she
and her family had been targeted. As a child, she had
come to the United
States to escape persecution in the former Soviet
Union. But now as she
viewed
the smashed candelabra, the familiar fear returned.
Lisa Keeling, a young mother, lives down the street
and heard about the
incident when she and her family returned from Sunday
mass. "A neighbor
left a
message on my answering machine," Lisa says. She was
appalled. She had
never heard of anyone in Newtown being singled out
because of their faith or
ethnicity.
But an idea was taking root. "I'd like to buy a
menorah and put it in our
front window, so that family will know they're not
going through this
alone,"
she told her husband. "If the vandals come back,
they'll have us to target
too. What do you think?"
Lisa's husband didn't hesitate. "Go for it," he said.
Lisa returned her neighbor's call, and told him about
her idea. "Why don't
you contact Margie Alexander?" he suggested. "She's
doing the same thing."
Margie lived around the corner, and was involved in
the Neighborhood Watch
program. She had been as horrified as Lisa when she
heard the news, and was
now driving from store to store looking for menorahs.
"But they're almost
impossible to find by now," she told Lisa over her car
phone.
Lisa began calling stores from home, then relaying
locations where the
candelabras were available to Margie. "Buy as many as
you can," she
suggested, since
several Christian neighbors had dropped by, asking for
instructions on where
to purchase, and how to display, a menorah. Word was
getting around.
Sundown-the time for lighting---had almost arrived by
the time Margie sped
home, and distributed all that she had located. "I
took down the Christmas
lights
in one of my windows, and put the menorah there, all
by itself," Lisa
recalls. "I didn't want there to be any doubt about
the statement we were
making."
Was she prepared for trouble? "Maybe," she says. "It
passes through your
mind. But it's just something you do."
That night when the Jewish neighbor turned onto her
street, she stopped in
amazement. Greeting her was a sea of orange lights,
shining in silent
solidarity,
from the windows of all eighteen Christian households
on her block. We are
with you. the warm glow seemed to say. Blinking back
tears, she went home,
replaced the broken bulbs in her own menorah and put
it back up in her
window.
The vandals did not damage any property that night.
Eventually police
arrested three teenage boys, who admitted that the
neighborhood's
unexpected show
of strength and unity had deterred them from further
activity. But they
were not the only people affected. As the days of
Hanukkah went on,
Christian
families from nearby blocks began to display menorahs
alongside their
wreaths and Nativity scenes. "I'd drive past and see
a menorah in someone's
window
and think: 'Wait-I see that family at church-they're
not Jewish.' Then it
would dawn on me that they were supporting us as we
supported the people on
my
block," Lisa recalls.
Margie and Lisa are still amazed at all the attention
they received because
of what to them seems "something any caring person
would do." But each year
they now display their menorahs. "It's become a
cherished part of my
Christmas," Margie says, "because it represents a
wonderful lesson I've
learned:
Just one little step in the right direction can have a
domino effect. It
can make life better for everyone."
Copyrighted
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