do candles have feelings?

Sun­day night, Decem­ber 13, with the staff of Hazon, I had the plea­sure of expe­ri­enc­ing (and meet­ing) Yis­rael Camp­bell. He has a one-man show (per­for­mance/­s­tand-up rou­tine) now play­ing at the Bleeck­er Street The­ater (near HUC-JIR).

The New York Times gave it a pos­i­tive review.

You can watch a vari­ety of videos of Yis­rael on YouTube and even (inter­spersed with some com­mer­cials) a 46 minute long film of him and this show.

His rou­tine is, per­haps, use­ful in Intro­duc­tion to Judaism class­es and he’s “per­formed” at at least one Lim­mud con­fer­ence, so it is fair to say that he thinks of his per­for­mance as a mode of teaching.

Of this moment is his explain­ing why we light the newest Chanukkah can­dle first.

From my archives, I offer a vari­ety of mate­ri­als relat­ed to Chanukkah.

I’ve been wear­ing this but­ton in hon­or of the week.

chanukki­ah