The Best Deal Ever & Tevet

As a rabbi, I guess it’s probably more than a little blasphemous for me to say, but Christmas brings up a lot of nostalgia for me.

(Besides my family history of celebrating in the biggest, most consumerist, way, this podcast, Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs, helped me understand a little more about myself, my family, American Jews, and Christmas).

This year, we lit the first Hanukah candle on Christmas Day. Tonight, this last night, and Secular New Year’s Day of 2025, we light all eight candles.

When I was a kid, Hanukah was never a big deal (and it’s a minor holiday, as Jewish ones go). We would even often forget to light the candles, which is why I inherited boxes and boxes that were only half-full when my mother died almost seven years ago.

For some reason, this “holiday season” was especially intense in the nostalgia category for me. The week has been a hard one. I’ve been feeling a lot of sadness and grief. (Need I explain why?)

So what did I do? I did the American thing, and went shopping to wipe all my sorrows away.

I was looking for a long black, wool coat (for funerals, since I started doing a lot of funerals this past year), and I knew the sales would be good after Christmas.

But I also decided I wanted to be a tourist in my own town.

So, speaking of nostalgia, I went to Macy’s at Herald Square, the original Macy’s, where my mother always took us as children. She believed in shopping for high quality for the school year, so one set of clothing sufficed from September to June, whether you’d outgrown them or not.

Macy’s was decorated for Christmas, and I went straight up to the 8th floor, on the old wooden escalator (amazing that it’s still functioning).

But all I saw around me were tourists and consumption: people with glazed looks in their eyes, seeking good deals like me—and photos to post on social media to show they’d been there.

I tried on a bunch of coats, but the quality was poor (too much polyester imitating wool), and the prices high. I was proud that I left only having spent $20 on a toaster (which I really needed).

Then I stopped in at my neighbor Nelson’s. We talked about ordering from Amazon and the easy returns, or going to outlets in New Jersey—a whole-day “experience” of taking a bus to a mall that feels like a village of stores and restaurants.

But didn’t I really want a more authentic, New York experience? And one that didn’t involve the increasing consumerism and materialism Americans have fallen into —-which Jimmy Carter warned against back in 1979 before he lost to former actor Ronald Reagan? (How crazy was that, we thought? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and idolize Jimmy Carter. As Chris Hedges points out, he did a lot of horrible things during his presidency, though they may pale in comparison to today’s world.)

The kind of consumerism that carries the “I want it easy and fast” and “I don’t care who gets hurt by it” and “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality.

My Communist upbringing makes it impossible for me to put these feelings aside.

So we tried another way. On New Year’s Eve day, we went down to the Lower East Side, ate at Katz’s Deli (where we gave extra tips to the Dominican butchers and servers who so skillfully prepare the meat at this Jewish deli).

Then we started walking into thrift shops on Orchard Street, where there would at least be an intent at reusing and recycling—and maybe I’d find some “vintage” coats.

Interestingly, the place where I found a coat was an old, bare shop with worn linoleum floors, weird, old artifacts in the show windows, and a hand-written,“Going Out of Business” sign, out front.

Just on the edge of survival, the movie industry had shut them down for a couple months, they’d never bounced back, the building is being sold, and they have to get rid of everything. Freedman’s, named for a Jewish man who had opened the shop almost a hundred years ago to sell men’s “fine clothing,” was now being emptied out by a Puerto Rican family that has worked there for decades.

Yes, it was consumerist. Neither the brands nor the clothing were second-hand, or of pure wool, but we were in an area where the remnants of an old world are still palpable.

I paid cash, and then they brought me across the street to the tailor shop, where again, there was a clash—or a blending—of the old world and the new. A long, narrow shop (that would have been called a sweat shop in another era), with plastered photos on the wall of Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, Shirly Temple, John Lennon, Sonia Sotomayor,…even a Pope.

Immigrants sat lined against one wall at sewing machines in this crummy little shop, but instead of Jews or Italians, perhaps, these were more newly arrived immigrants from the Dominican Republic, the old guys teaching the younger ones. (Ironic that the label on my new coat said “Made in Dominican Republic,” perhaps by men just like these.)

A young man had me stand on a platform in front of a three-way mirror and marked up my coat with a piece of chalk, and then his mentor, an older man, came and checked his work.

Yes, I ended up spending more on the coat because it needed to be altered (I could tell my neighbor Nelson was internally rolling his eyes at my foolishness), but it felt like I was directly impacting the lives of real people—struggling immigrants like my family—same place, same street, different era.

As we finish the story of Joseph and his brothers in Torah, with the tragic enslavement of the Egyptians as Joseph saves the Egyptians and his own family from famine, there is also a kind of peace that comes to them.

New meaning is made from Joseph’s original dreams of “lording over” his brothers and father, of the competition among them that has caused so much pain, the fancy long coat that was given to Joseph by his father as a show of his favoritism of the son he loved most that came from the only wife he loved that in turn resulted in so many hurt feelings and yearning for love that never came.

Instead of rejoicing at his dreams coming true, Joseph breaks down and wails—more than once.

His dreams are not the ones he thought they would be. His life has not turned out the way he’d hoped. He’s named his children Menasheh and Ephraim: “God has made me fruitful in the land of my misfortunes,” and “Make me forget.”

But he has never forgotten. The pain is still there, buried under his life of power and luxury as second-in-command to Pharaoh.

Yet, despite his trials, he has a chance to do something good now, for the brothers who had hurt him and whom he had hurt.

It’s an opportunity to repair and heal pain passed down through generations, and to change the flavor of his dreams—though some of it is still misguided, as in the enslavement of the Egyptians for the sake of his own family and the Royalty.

As we come to the close of the darkest month of the Jewish year and light all the candles on our menorahs, we remember that we have the power to increase the light in the world through our actions, as we increased the daily light with our candles.

Hanukkah reminds us that good is more powerful than evil. The story of Joseph teaches that we need to keep reaching for the light, even if our dreams don’t offer the clarity we wish they did. Yes, we sometimes lose sight of our goals for ourselves and the world—or maybe give up on them in despair—but these stories remind us not to. It’s generations of pain that we’re trying to repair, and it’s not easy work.

As we transition into the month we call Tevet, which comes from the Hebrew word for “good,” let’s remember the power of good over evil, and that we are able not only to reveal the good that is hidden in our lives and the world around us, but also create it, even in the small choices we make on a daily basis.

Amazon covers up all the pain and exploitation of people around the world, in our country, and also of the Earth—enslavement that happens in so many ways, hidden and sanitized, a clothing industry of sweat shops we don’t have to see from the comfort of our homes for the sake of ease.

Tomorrow I’ll return to the Lower East Side to pick up my new coat, tailored by these Dominican men (who knew?). My neighbor Nelson and I plan to take a tour at the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, just down the block from the tailor shop where I’ll pick up my newly tailored, long, black coat. Nelson chose a tour about Jewish immigrant women, mothers, who set up garment factories over a hundred years ago in the front rooms of their tiny apartments.

The month of Tevet carries the meaning of righteous indignation and Divine Grace.

One by one, we can choose to resist the consumerist/materialist world of ease we’ve fallen into, be righteously indignant, and bring Divine Grace and light into the world, one light at a time with one choice at a time, thinking about the impact our shopping habits have on those we depend upon who provide goods and services we depend upon.

Maybe it’s not always about getting the best deal.

Or maybe, as deals go, I actually did get the best deal.

Because I got to witness people helping other people, looking out for one another, the owners of one little shop bringing business to another little shop across the street, and I got to be a part of their community for just a moment, and to support immigrants trying to find and make a better life for their families, just as my family was helped in the past by others.

May we continue to dream of a repair and peace that can come to all of us in the coming year of 2025.

Because we always have the chance to do something good.