I hereby submit my nomination for the 2025 Golden Greek Award for Most Unabashedly Yuletide Chanukah Product: Manischewitz's Chanukah House Cookie Decorating Kit. The good folks at Manischewitz, a legacy company that tempts the palate with all sorts of shelf-stable Eastern European Jewish foods, typically lean traditional and nostalgic in marketing. But this year they are abandoning all pretenses by asking you to embrace your inner tinsel:  

Celebrate Chanukah and create a new family tradition with Manischewitz’s Do-It-Yourself Chanukah House Cookie decorating kit. This fun kit includes everything you need to make a festive, edible sculpture: 4 icing colors, sprinkles, mini beads, six-point star & menorah sugar decorations and sanding sugar. Whether you’re looking for a decorating activity to celebrate the holiday or a tasty kosher treat to share with the family, this Chanukah House Cookie Kit is sure to bring a ton of fun to your holiday.

• Certified Kosher Dairy by the Orthodox Union.

This is what happens when Chanukah is hijacked by corporate America. It's bad enough to spot your "Mentsch on a Bench" while gazing out at your inflatable Chanukah lawn ornaments and your blue and white flashing lights. Even the dreidel you spin probably has its roots in some other ethnic diversion (see Teetotum). But Manischewitz really went for the gold here by taking a Christmas gingerbread house kit, slightly altering the color palette, and slapping an OU-D on it, et voilà: a gingerbread Chanukah house, just like Bubbie and Zeidy used to assemble back in Lodz.

Manischewitz, of course, was purchased by Kayco brands in 2019, and is no longer run by anyone with cultural sensitivity and historical awareness. But what must Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz z"l be thinking? Back in 1888, he founded a small matzah bakery in Cincinnati and started out baking matzah for his family and a few friends. Eventually, he fed the growing needs of the Cincinnati community, and invented the world’s first square matzah. After Rabbi Manischewitz passed away in 1914, his family continued to manage the company with much success. A second factory opened in Jersey City in 1930. In a significant development in our nation's history, the Tam Tam cracker was invented in 1940, transforming kiddushes across the globe. The five sons of Rabbi Dov Behr ran the business until the founder’s grandsons took over in the 1960s. They continued to run the company until 1972, when they turned its operational reins over to a team of professional managers. However, majority ownership of the company remained with the Manischewitz family. All that changed, though, in the past two decades, when the company was acquired by a series of soulless private equity firms.

This is how you get a product like the Chanukah House: a blatant rip-off of a Christmas staple repackaged to reach a new Jewish market that they somehow believe lacks rituals involving baked goods and sugar. There is a double level of painful irony at work here.

Firstly, let us note that the name Manischewitz simply means "Son of Menashe." Now consider why Yosef Hatzaddik names his eldest son Menashe (Bereishis 41:51):

וַיִּקְרָא יוֹסֵף אֶת־שֵׁם הַבְּכוֹר מְנַשֶּׁה כִּי־נַשַּׁנִי אֱלֹהִים אֶת־כׇּל־עֲמָלִי וְאֵת כׇּל־בֵּית אָבִי׃

Yosef named the first-born Menashe, meaning, “God has made me forget completely my hardship and my parental home.”

He named his son "מְנַשֶּׁה/forget" in honor of severing ties with his family heritage? This sounds heartless, at first glance. Most commentaries see it as an admission of connection and a desperate grasp for Jewish memory; Assigning the name Menashe reveals that Yosef's family was constantly in his thoughts. Rav Shimshon Rafael Hirsch writes that "to forget" is not the only meaning of נשה ;נשה also means "to be a creditor" and נשני can just as well mean: God has made my misfortune and my family my creditors. What until now appeared to me as misfortune and mistreatment, God has made into the instrument of my greatest happiness, so that I am deeply indebted to my misfortune and my family. "Menashe" becomes a magnificent statement of allegiance to Yosef's family, a declaration that my life has been shaped this way for a reason. Through naming his sons, Yosef gives notice that he will remain distinct and not be seduced by Egyptian culture. This is the first bitter irony about the Manischewitz Chanukah House: from matzah to maror.

Secondly, Kayco's insertion of a gingerbread house into Chanukah attacks the sanctity of Chanukah's epicenter: the house. Our rabbis were very careful to link Ner Chanukah to the home, through the core requirement of נר איש וביתו and the positioning of the chanukiyah at the פתח הבית, the doorway to the home. Chanukah candles may not just be lit anywhere you choose. They are rooted halachically to your house, and they honor the sacred role the Jewish home plays in keeping us spiritually pure. Purity is the ultimate theme of Chanukah, with the purest of oils lasting eight days and the rededicating of the Mikdash after it was contaminated by the Syrian-Greeks. The Chanukah lights in the house beckon us to carefully consider and filter what enters a Jewish home and what we imbibe from the surrounding culture. If you take a Christmas gingerbread house and dress it up with a candy Star of David and some blue icing for Chanukah, the Greeks have won.

Now, if you feel this Grinch-like crusade against some cookies and candy is unwarranted, I will accept your hesitation as long as you view the Manischewitz Chanukah House as a mashal for my real point. Because whether we purchase this product or not, we are all at risk for Judaizing foreign values.

We occupy an agenda-driven world in which authenticity has become a rare commodity. In this milieu, we are at risk for taking whatever "ism" strikes our fancy, and then sprinkling some sugar sand on it to dress it up as Jewish. We approach the Torah through the lens of our personal convictions and cherry-pick certain halachos or ma'amarei Chaza"l to justify our positions, ignoring the entire corpus of the Torah Sheb'al Peh and the mesorah that is its guardrails. Let's say you are a laissez-faire capitalist, or a militant environmentalist, or a die-hard liberal, or a hard-line conservative, and you want to harmonize your philosophy and faith. To have the Torah on your side would minimize any cognitive dissonance. This desire compels you to see the Torah through a distorted lense, and suddenly the Torah believes in your "ism" as well. You have taken a foreign ideology and decorated it with some blue and white sprinkles to make it appear Jewish. The Torah is not your starting point; it's just the icing on your cake.

The Torah Jew bends his or her will to the Torah, and refrains from bending the Torah in order to conform to his or her will. Otherwise, the Torah becomes a tool of society's fleeting whims. Chanukah celebrates the preservation of Torah values in a hostile religious environment. This is precisely the notice Yaakov Avinu gives to his brother Eisav in a scene we always read in shul before Chanukah:

וַיְצַ֤ו אֹתָם֙ לֵאמֹ֔ר כֹּ֣ה תֹאמְר֔וּן לַֽאדֹנִ֖י לְעֵשָׂ֑ו כֹּ֤ה אָמַר֙ עַבְדְּךָ֣ יַעֲקֹ֔ב עִם־לָבָ֣ן גַּ֔רְתִּי וָאֵחַ֖ר עַד־עָֽתָּה׃

[Yaakov] instructed them as follows, “Thus shall you say, ‘To my lord Eisav, thus says your servant Yaakov: I stayed with Lavan and remained until now.

Rashi offers a famous insight into this strange preamble:

גַּרְתִּי בְּגִימַטְרִיָּא תרי"ג, כְּלוֹמַר, עִם לָבָן גַּרְתִּי וְתַרְיַ"ג מִצְוֹת שָׁמַרְתִּי וְלֹא לָמַדְתִּי מִמַּעֲשָׂיו הָרָעִים

The word גרתי has the numerical value of 613 - תרי״ג - it is as much as to say, “Though I have sojourned with Lavan, the wicked, I have observed the תרי״ג מצות, the 613 Divine Commandments, and I have learned naught of his evil ways.

Yaakov, who was about to be reunited with Eisav and encounter his sphere's influence, made a bold assertion: During my stay in hostile territory, I did not let Lavan's outlook on life alter my belief system; I remained committed and untarnished by this chapter. So as I move back closer to you, Eisav, I fully expect to continue that record. My faith is not the product of whim, and thus I will preserve its integrity. I will not dress up your creed in my attire and consider it authentic.

Someone like Yaakov does not adopt local behaviors. From that perspective, he embodies the spirit of the Chashmonaim who would follow his lead, taking a stand against these influences.

You can call me a Scrooge for lampooning the edible Chanukah House, but, man oh Manischewitz, have we not forgotten our parental home?