How to celebrate Hanukkah ─ Passion For Truth Ministries

Hello everyone, I'm Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries, and this is our Hanukkah how-to video. Every year we get a lot of people asking us as they learn about Christmas and they kind of want to transition from Christmas to doing something a little bit more biblical, a little bit more depth, a little more meaning. They always turn to one of my favorite holidays of the year, the Feast of Dedication, or the Festival of Lights, or more popularly known as Hanukkah. Hanukkah is simply a Hebrew word that means dedication. And we find even Jesus himself, Yeshua, going to the temple for the Feast of Dedication in the Gospels. Not only is this an amazing festival that is so relative to Christians But even our Jewish brethren around the world keep it as well. And I believe that as you learn more about Hanukkah, you're gonna wanna be able to take part in it as well. And so this video is not to go over all the details of Hanukkah itself. I have other teachings that talk about that. This one is really more, how do you transition and what do you do during Hanukkah? So we're gonna talk about the story itself. We're gonna talk about the ceremony that we do each night during the Festival of Lights. How about gifts? Should we give gifts? Should we not give gifts? Traditions, lights, everything from games to latkes and food and baking. We're going to talk about all of that in this video and hopefully by the end of this teaching or this video, you'll get not a chance just to meet my family alone, but you'll get some great ideas that will hopefully spin your creative juices to where you can begin to create some good ideas and some good transitions, good traditions for your family. All right. So let's travel with me back in time to about 180 years before the birth of Christ, and that is where the story of Hanukkah begins. At that time period, Alexander the Great, he was the ruler of the then known world. And Alexander was actually a very good ruler, a benevolent ruler, and he let all the different peoples in the different regions maintain their religious beliefs and pretty much maintain They're changing their habits of daily life. But a little over a century later, Antiochus Epiphanes the fourth would not be so benevolent. Matter of fact, he massacred many of the Jewish people. It was really a holocaust in many respects. He put a Hellenistic Greek priest into the temple and even desecrated the temple by putting a pig on the altar and putting a statue of Zeus inside the temple. Well, amazingly, About three and a half years into this control that the Greeks had, there were two groups of people that fought back. There was a man by the name of Mattathias the Hasmonean and his son Judah Maccabee and another group of people called the Hasidim. And the Hasidim would eventually become the Pharisees of the first century that we read about in the Bible. And as the story goes, that Judah Maccabee could not take it any longer, and he pulled out his sword, and he killed one of the Hellenistic priests, and that started the revolt of the Maccabees, the revolt of the Maccabees that eventually took back the temple from the Greeks, and they cleaned the temple, they took all of the oil that was polluted and unclean, and they replaced all of the oil, and that was one of the first things that they did. was set up the menorah back in the holy place and if you know anything about the temple the menorah represents the word of God, it represents which eventually would become flesh represents Jesus himself, Yeshua our Messiah and so this holiday is incredible because not only is it connected to the ancient story of the Jews taking back their temple but ladies and gentlemen remember this was our temple too this is the the very same temple that would be rebuilt in the third in the millennium, when the Messiah comes and he says that he's going to be the light of the temple, and that temple represents the very word of God, the light, the city on a hill, as it's talked about in the book of Matthew, it's connected to the end of times and Revelation and Daniel, the three and a half years in the tribulation when there be a desecration of the temple and the altar. It's the same desecration that happened of the three and a half years. takeover that the Greeks had over the temple. And so prophetically, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit and the enemy has taken our temples over in many categories, in many areas. And now is a time during the festival of dedication, the festival of lights to renew our temple and teach our families, our kids, and even ourselves that this is a time, an eight day feast to focus on the light in our temple and to get out idols in our life. To get out the things that aren't of God and the traditions and doctrines of men and to focus on the things that are true, the things that are holy, looking at our temples and preparing them to meet our King. Speaking of the truth, there's a story made up by the rabbis that the miracle of Hanukkah is that of the oil lasting eight days when it was supposed to only last one. This was made up because it was against their laws to celebrate military victories. So they needed an alternative reason to celebrate this great moment in Israel history. As far as our family goes, we choose to stick to the historical facts so we don't confuse the kids. So that's pretty much, in a nutshell, the story of Hanukkah. One of our favorite parts of Hanukkah is food. Everyone loves food and Hanukkah is no different. We love to spend time in the kitchen with my kids and our family during Hanukkah. And this is kind of one of our favorite things to do is to bake Hanukkah cookies. And so that's what we're doing here today. On our left, we actually have a shofar. So we have an actual shofar, ram's shofar. We have a menorah. that the kids will be decorating here a little bit the word chai which means life and we got a couple snowflakes as well and we also have a Torah scroll that they'll be decorating and also the dreidels which are always really popular and dreidel is very much a part of Hanukkah and it's also a game that we'll talk about as well and another amazing thing that we like to do a tradition in our family is the This is the baking of bread or challah bread and this is a traditional challah bread that we make for Hanukkah and it's actual challah bread menorah. This is our challah bread menorah that my daughter Sierra made and we actually made it pretzel bread because... Pretzel bread and challah bread are a perfect combination. Another fun dessert that we have taken on this year, someone gave us a great idea, this came from someone in our local fellowship, is marshmallow dreidel sticks. So each one of these marshmallows has Marker, it's edible marker, but it has the letters of nun and hay and gimel and sheen on it. And on top is a Hershey's Kiss that's melted on there with a pretzel. And the great part about these is that when you're done using them as a dreidel, you can eat them. They're pretty good. Are you guys having fun? What you doing? Icing the cookies? All right. You're doing pretty good there, Malia. How you doing over there, Kyla? Doing pretty good? All right. Sierra? Ms. Sierra down there, how you doing? All right, the traditional foods during Hanukkah are really the fried foods. Everybody loves fried foods, from fried donuts to fried latkes. And I encourage you to look online. There are some fantastic recipes of latkes online. Some of them are extremely elaborate to very simple with just applesauce on top. Either way that you choose to make them, your kids will have fun, and the story of Hanukkah behind those are great as well. There are eight nights of Hanukkah, and it's very traditional to invite people over during the nights of Hanukkah to celebrate with you. So it's an awesome time to get together friends, to get together family, and create new traditions. So it's not just one night like it used to be with Christmas, but this is an entire over a week-long process of just friends and family getting together, playing games, eating food. Trying out new things and creating new traditions for your family. In the transition from coming from our background of Christmas to Hanukkah, first it's kind of very frustrating and then you get creative and you begin to have fun with it. And so that's what we're doing here. I want to give you just a couple of ideas that the Staley family has come up with. First of all, one of the things that we did right off the bat in the very beginning is we wanted to portray pictures. Everybody loves pictures and we love We love taking pictures of our kids and our pictures are Our kids are our stars, if you will, and so what we did was we decided to take stars, cut them out, and put pictures of each year as we're preparing for Hanukkah and doing Hanukkah and put them on the stars and then hang them on the ceiling from our house. Every year we take new pictures from what we're doing and we'll put those pictures on Stars and Snowflakes next year and then we'll kind of trade those out. And what's fun is years go by, you pull out these pictures, it just brings back memories when you're showing pictures of your kids when they're small or as everybody gets older. It's just a neat, it's a good feeling to pull out those pictures, those memoirs as you're decorating for Hanukkah. That year another tradition that we've done early on is actually making our own menorah. This can be really fun It can give you the opportunity to to really dive in with your kids or your grandkids and be creative and do something fun And so that's what we've done here with this. This was our very first original menorah that we made I think we picked something up at at one of the craft stores We have some blue sand that we put in there and then we just simply put candles Inside of that menorah. Originally we used clear oil candles. We wrapped the oil candles in paper for each night of Hanukkah and on the paper it would have what light represented. So it started off with the light of creation. I put creation around it and then had different lights and the light of Yeshua as the center. Shemash candle. And so I'll be talking about that a little bit later as I go through the actual ceremony and kind of what we do each night of each candle of Hanukkah. But one tradition is you might be able to make your own Hanukkiah. You don't have to have just one. You can have them all over the house. And there are all kinds of different Hanukkah menorahs out there. The menorah is a beautiful instrument that is a candlestick of light and that light, like I said, it not only connects to the light of creation and the light of the Word of God and representing the Bible and the Scriptures itself and ultimately Yeshua, but it also has a connection. They call in Judaism the tree of life because it actually looks like a tree and the blossoms On the candlestick branches itself, ...are coming from the almond tree, which is the tree of life that was found in the garden. So it has this beautiful connection to the actual Garden of Eden in the eternal tree of life. That's what the menorah represents, is the tree of life. And so when we create a menorah on our tables, when we buy a menorah, when we decorate a menorah, however you do it, when you light the menorah, You are literally prophetically lighting the tree of creation. You're bringing back that pure, holy, beautiful light that was never supposed to be burned out. If you look online, you'll see about 5,000 different kinds of menorahs that are out there, from kids' menorahs to very elegant menorahs to very simple wooden menorahs. You can choose one for your family or multiple ones for your family. We have several, and this is one, our dining room table. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the menorah. and share what I share with my family each and every night and how we do it because the whole point of this video is to kind of give you some ideas not necessarily so that you could do exactly what we do but it's for you to give some ideas of how the Staley family does it and then you can kind of spin off your own ideas if you want to or you can adopt some of ours there's some great ideas that are out there all right first and foremost you start on the right hand side And this is day one, and so day one, I make everything about light, and so I'll pull out the Bible, I'll pull out the scriptures, and pull out scriptures that are connected to each one of the days that are found as we move through here. So on day one, I talk about the light of creation, and I'll pull out scriptures in the book of Genesis where it talks about creation, where it talks about light, and I'll have one of my kids read those scriptures. Day number two, I call the light of Adam, and the reason why I do that is because the light was given to Adam and Eve to be able to hold it up and to take that torch, and I bring in scriptures and let the kids read the scripture about how Adam and Eve fell and how they put their light under a bushel. They didn't pass their light on, and so what we're doing is we're doing an evolution of light through Genesis to Revelation so that my kids, my family, the people that are spending Spending time with us that night. You can see exactly what I believe Hanukkah is really all about, or the festival of lights. It's about light. The third light, and by the way, the first light that you normally light is what's called the shamash candle. It is the servant candle. And from the servant candle, which you can notice is higher than all of the other candles, it stands higher. And even today in Judaism, nobody knows why the shamash candle is higher than the rest of the candles. Well I have a hint of why it's a little bit higher. I believe because the greatest servant is the greatest in the household and the greatest servant ever lived is Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, who stands higher and he serves all of the rest of the candles. And so from the shamash candle, you light each and every candle. And so the third light, but since our shamash candle is a little A little modern here, I'm gonna use a lighter. Our third candle, This is where the light was given back to Moses and his job was to take the light and to share it with all of Israel. And Moses did a great job doing that. And we'll pull scriptures out and let them read a little bit of how Moses got the Ten Commandments and how David calls the Ten Commandments light unto his path. Which brings me to the next candle, the fourth night. One of my most favorite figures in the Bible is King David. He was an incredible king, as you well know. But he has some phenomenal scripture, some amazing sayings that we find in the book of Psalms. And so I like to go to the favorite, longest chapter of the Bible, Psalms 119. And it's specifically 9 through 11. And I let my kids read that and how it says, How can a young man keep his way pure by keeping it according to thy word? And it talks about how the commandments are the light unto his path and that there's no way for him to keep his way pure outside of following the light of the commandments. And there's other scriptures about how it's a light unto our path and a lamp unto our feet. So finding scriptures, and you can find some scriptures as well, maybe you've got some better ones, that can go through each one of these days. When we come to the fifth day, this is the day of the disciples. So we have Yeshua on this day, and the light comes to Yeshua, who is our Messiah, and he is connected to the fifth and the sixth and the seventh and the eighth days, because on the fifth day, this is his day. This is the light of the Messiah, the resurrection of our Lord. And so it's easy to find scriptures and to bring them up and to talk about the light Raising from the dead and him even giving instructions about a city on a hill and we shouldn't put our light under a bushel Those are great scriptures to read on day five when you come to day six It's real easy Yeshua gives his light to the disciples and he says and he turns to them and says you are a light of The world you are the light of the world and it gives them instructions on how to take the his light and give it to to him and how they're supposed to take his light and give it to other people and so the disciples were the next part of the chain of light if you will to take the light from creation to Adam to Moses to David from Yeshua to the disciples on day seven the next day the second to the last day the disciples are giving their light to the gentiles and in my case that's me And I explained how Israel is a part of, is the entity, the national entity of light that God gave, or the children of Israel, the children of God, and how the disciples, the Jewish disciples from the southern kingdom, mixing with the Israelite Gentiles, if you will, of the northern kingdom, and how coming together, all of Israel becomes the beautiful, perfect light to be able to give to the rest of the world. The great gospel of Jesus Christ, Yeshua HaMashiach. On the last day, day eight, The eighth day is the greatest day, matter of fact, during the festival of Sukkot, which many theologians believe is why Hanukkah is an eight-day festival, is because they did not get a chance to celebrate Sukkot, which is the favorite holiday of the year, the favorite holy festival of the year. They never got to celebrate it while they were under Seleucid control of the Greeks, and so they decided that when they got back control of the temple that they were going We're going to celebrate the Feast of Sukkot. And so that's why they mixed the menorah with the eight-day festival and out comes a nine-branched Menorah, because you have the Shamash candle. So the eight branched menorah with the center candlestick being Yeshua himself. The very next light that comes is the return of the Messiah in the light of the millennium. This is where the light, the perfect light of the temple will come into existence and we will see, not dimly, we will see as we are seen. And so I pull out scriptures that have to do with the millennium. And so all together, the nine branch candlestick represents the light of the world. Jesus the Messiah, Yeshua our Messiah, and everything together puts together perfect light into this world, this dark world. All right, one of the fun new traditions that we did this year was actually letting the kids make their own Hanukkah t-shirts. It was a fun experiment, and some of them turned out really fantastic. So I'm just gonna walk through my kids and let you see their shirts and kind of what they did. This is my second oldest, Sierra. Show us your shirt. We got Happy Hanukkah, little snowman down there, little dreidel, a menorah, and she sports the ring around the collar, snowflake style. All right, this is Elena, number three. She also has a menorah, very creative the way she did hers. Happy Hanukkah down the side, and with the base of the menorah being a dreidel. I thought that was pretty cool. Malia, show us yours. All right, turn towards the camera there. All right, that's very cool. Oh, yours is a form of a heart, so you have a heart and the Star of David in yours. That's beautiful, and happy Hanukkah down there. You did a really good job. That's awesome. Ayla, give me five. Yours turned out really good, too. You have a white shirt, and you kind of did the same menorah as your sister. Really good job. And then my little bit, Selah, give me five. Show us yours. You have, what is that? A snowman. Very good. Happy Hanukkah to you. This is an awesome opportunity for you to be able to be creative with your family, from ideas that you make up in your head to all the ideas that you'll find online. This is a festive season. Listen, it's called the Festival of Lights for a reason. It's all about light of the menorah. It's all about taking back the temple and making it ours again, kicking the enemy out and putting Yahweh back in his place. That enough is time for celebration. So Festival of Lights, it's the time where Yeshua was... Conceived in his mother's womb, and what a great time for you to start conceiving new ideas and new traditions for your family. Another thing that you can do during Hanukkah is play lots of games, especially if you have kids. Kids love games. Adults love games. Matter of fact, I love this game. This is one of my favorite games. It's actually the most traditional game in all of Hanukkah season, and it's called the dreidel game. And on the dreidel, there are four Hebrew letters. There is the letter Shin. There is the letter Nun, there's also the letter Gimel, and the letter He. Together they form the acronym Nes-Gadol-Haya-Sham, which simply means a great miracle happened there. And so each one of these letters has a significant meaning, and when you play the game, whichever letter it lands on gives you instructions on exactly what to do. So if it lands on the letter He, they get to take half the pot, If it lands on the letter Gimel, they get to take the entire pot. If it lands on the letter Noon, they don't get any of the pot. Goes to the next player. And if it lands on the letter Sheen, they have to put one into the pot. So you simply go all the way around by spinning the dreidel and let's see what happens. Sheen, I have to put one into the pot. So everybody starts off with five, I have to put one in the pot, and you simply play the game until it goes all the way around. Now the great part of the game is what's in the pot. What's in the pot are... ...gold coins, and these gold coins are not just any gold coins, these are chocolate gold coins, and you can use any kind of candy that you want, but it is more traditional to use the golden coins. Why? Because in the Seleucid times, during the takeover of the temple when the Greeks were in control, the tradition is that the Jewish people were hiding in the caves, and when the Greeks would come by, they would stop and put their Torah scrolls away because they were not allowed to read the Torah during the Greek... A takeover of the Jewish people at that time and so they would put their Torah scrolls away and they would start playing the dreidel game and they would teach the kids the Torah through the letters of the alphabet and so it was to trick the soldiers during that time period and then as soon as the soldiers were gone they would pick their Torah scrolls back up. That's the tradition story anyway, but let's play and have some fun and eat at the same time. I'm going to do over with that. Oh, you get all of it! Whoa! She's got to put one in. Cheese! Cheese! Look here. Good job, Kyla! You win! So along with the dreidel game, our family likes to play a variety of games, and one of those games that we like to play Even just in general is memory. So we decided to make up our own Hanukkah memory game and we just kind of drew some different pictures on here of things that have to do with Hanukkah. These two youngest ones always beat everyone. So let's see how they do. All right, gifts. A lot of people ask us about gifts. Is it okay to give presents during Hanukkah? We don't want to be like Christmas and we don't want to do all that stuff. This is each person's individual conviction. We've tried multiple different ways. When we first started out, we used to give gifts every night. And of Hanukkah, one gift a night per kid. Well, when you have six kids, that kind of adds up and feels a little bit too much like Christmas to me. And they kind of got too excited about the gifts that they were getting each night and weren't paying attention too much to the actual meaning that I was trying to bring to each night of Hanukkah. So we stopped doing that. And what we do today is basically we give one gift each, one or two gifts each, on the last day of Hanukkah. You can do it on any day, the first day, middle of the week, or at the end. And that way there's absolutely no focus on the gifts at all. We don't make them expensive gifts at all. They're just to tell them that we love them. And so some people are against gifts, and that's okay. That's their conviction. But you can give gifts any time of the year. We choose to give one or two gifts. Just to say that, look, you've brought light into my life, and I want you to know that I appreciate you. It's just from us to them that makes it real simple, very acute, and it works. And so that's kind of how we work with the gift thing. We're not really into the whole piles of gift. That's one of the materialistic things that is, I believe, one of the downfalls of Christmas is it's fallen into materialism, and it gets people focused on the materialism. So no matter what holiday you celebrate, When you do that it really takes the focus away from the spiritual message that we're trying to create. So that's what our family does. Alright let's talk about lights. This is the festival of lights and so if there is no better time to decorate your house inside and out with lights Then the Festival of Lights. If anybody has the right to put up lights on the outside of their house, it is us because Christmas is nothing to do with light. Christmas has to do with all kinds of crazy stuff. But this is the Festival of Lights and we have the right to banner lights on the outside of our house. And so I encourage you to do that. Do it big, do it small, do it however you want to do it. And I always encourage you to put your menorahs up outside. Let people know that we're not celebrating Christmas. We're celebrating the Festival of Lights. And it creates great conversations for your neighbors because they're probably going to think you're Jewish. And it gives you an opportunity to witness to them and let them know what you really believe and where you're coming from. And so we always enjoy decorating the inside and outside of our house with lights. And I encourage you to do the same. All right. Well, I hope you enjoyed our Hanukkah video, giving you kind of a daily how-to and how we do things here at Passion for Truth and our own personal home. I pray that God gives you tremendous ingenuity, creativity to come up with some traditions of your own family. As you transition into this amazing holiday, we pray that God blesses you along the way. Are you ready, guys? One, two, three. Happy Hanukkah! See you later, guys. Shalom.