How To Be The Light

Sermon Parshat Mikets 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

How many of you have personally experienced the midnight sun, those days in the farthest reaches of the north near the Arctic Circle, in say, Alaska or Scandinavia, where the nights basically disappear—and depending on how far north you go, they totally disappear?  It’s a very odd sensation the first time you look out the window at, say, 2am and it’s fully daylight outside.  In many Baltic nations and other northern countries the summer solstice around June 21st is a holiday, Midsomer Day, and often the days on either side of it are also festive.

Of course, we are now in the opposite time of year, the period with the very shortest days, the time when light is more often experienced from artificial sources than from the eternal Tucson sun of other seasons.  We might have 310 days a year of sun here—like today—but our sunny days in December are far shorter than they are in June.  It’s for that reason that so many cultures throughout the Northern Hemisphere have festivals of light this time of year, at the time of the winter solstice, or thereabouts.  It is an effort to bring light into darkness, to illuminate artificially what the natural order has left dimmed. 

This desire to light up the darkness of December is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon.  It is no accident that pagans had special ceremonies for the winter solstice, in places like Stonehenge in England and in Babylonia and in Iran and in Japan and in Guatemala and in Peru—and that later, Christians and others simply adopted the dates those cultures celebrated and some of their practices.  And it is probably no accident that our Hanukkah menorah, our Hanukkiah, adds its own brilliant lights to this otherwise dark season.  When things are darkest, we simply add light.

I told the following story on our Hanukkah broadcast this week, but it bears re-telling.  Once there was a shammes who was afraid of the dark.  “Tell me, Rabbi,” the shammes asked his rebbe, “How can I chase the darkness from the world?”

So the Rebbe sent the shammes into the deep darkness of the shul’s basement.  Handing him a broom he said, “Go sweep the darkness out of the basement.” 

Before long, the shammes returned. “Rabbi, I swept and swept, but the darkness did not budge an inch!”  The Rabbi nodded and murmured sympathetically.  “Darkness can be stubborn thing…”

He then reached into his drawer and took out a ruler.

“Take this stick and drive the darkness out by beating it.”  Soon the Shammes returned and told the Rabbi, “Beating it did not chase away the darkness!”  So the Rabbi suggested he shout and scream at the darkness to frighten it away.  But yelling at the dark did not work either; it only made the Shammes’s voice hoarse.

Exhausted, frustrated, he made his way up the stairs, tired and afraid, and approached the Rabbi again. The Rabbi took out a candlestick, lit the candle, and led the Shammes back down the stairs.  And it was a miracle!  For wherever the light’s glow met the darkness, the darkness evaporated before their eyes.

“We dispel darkness,” the Rabbi said, “Not by sweeping gestures, or by violence, or by loud noisy cries, but by bringing a little bit of brightness to our world.”

The mitzvah on Hanukkah is to light a small flame, L’Hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.  That is the essence of the Jewish response to a world that seems to fill with darkness.  When faced with darkness, shine a light.

We have always been afraid of the dark. Our sages tell us that as night descended at the end of humanity’s very first day on earth, Adam saw the sun go down, and was terrified.  Would the sunlight ever return? Adam sat and wept. Was the light to be banished forever?  And God gave him the capacity to think of a great idea, perhaps humanity’s most important innovation: to pick up and rub two sticks together and so to create light.

This year, many of us have experienced moments of anxiety and fear. We want to banish the darkness, to sweep it away, but our efforts seem futile. We strike out, and change nothing positively.  We shout angrily, but the world is the world, it is large and indifferent, even sometimes hostile.  The gloom lingers. 

We are only finite creatures of flesh and blood and weakness who cannot prevent sickness and loss, who cannot stop terror attacks or political insanity or alleviate great suffering. So how can we possibly sweep darkness out of the world?

We can’t.  But we can learn from the story: it is not our task to sweep away darkness, or beat it into submission.  Instead, it is our task to kindle light.

So how does the Torah help us to hold on through life’s inevitable dark times?

In this week’s Torah portion of Mikets, Joseph is in the depths of despair, forgotten, locked away in an Egyptian prison, then as now a terrible place.  He has fallen far and fast, betrayed by those he trusted most.  He has every reason to give up hope, to surrender to despair.

And yet he chooses not to.  Instead, the great dream interpreter tries to help his fellow prisoners, to stave off depression by caring.

In the darkness of a dungeon, he lights a light.  It is the light of help and the light of hope for his fellow prisoners.  And it eventually not only sheds a little light on the subject, it turns out that it actually banishes the darkness.  That light will ultimately lead Joseph to save the entire country, and then his own family, from death, and finally catapult him to the throne.  What an inspiring reminder that just a little bit of light can spread and shine out to the whole world.

This has been a frightening period for many of us in the past year, since Hanukkah 5781.  COVID-19 raged all last winter, and only with the arrival of vaccinations did it abate.  And every time we thought it was safe to go back in the ocean, as it were, another variant seemed to come along to frighten us again.  As so many of us mourned the deaths of relatives and friends, and others worked hard to defeat the virus, in a twisted response, some of our own politicians chose to add much heat, and no light at all, to the response to the greatest public health emergency of our times.

It is notable that there are prominent Jews central to the development of the most effective vaccines, Albert Bourla of Pfizer and Tal Zaks of Moderna.  Bringing light into dark times.

In another area, darkness also remained thick.  Anti-Semitic actions occurred in many places in the world, as they always seem to do.  And we Jews responded as we must: by building bridges with other people of different faiths to combat the dark insanity of religious persecution that waxes and wanes but never truly leaves.  

My friends, our job, as Jews, is to be an or lagoyim, a light to the nations.  We do this by challenging all who would bring destruction to the world, and all those who would choose to act to violently silence those who believe differently than they do.  We must also act to respond to those who would refuse the responsibility we have to guarantee freedom of religion to others in our society.

Chanukah is the ultimate holiday of religious freedom, celebrating the victory that affirmed monotheism’s right to exist in this world.  Without the events we Jews celebrate at Chanukah, Judaism would have ended more than 2100 years ago.  Christianity would never have happened at all—Jesus came from Israel, in the Galilee, out of a completely Jewish society—and Islam, the second great daughter religion of Judaism, would never have developed. 

Which should remind us that freedom of religion is not automatically guaranteed in any society, even one as open as America’s. 

In place of heated rhetoric, we must instead encourage light.  Hanukkah affirms religious liberty as a human right.  It also has a great deal to do with securing that liberty against any who would destroy it, including religious extremists.  It is our responsibility both to fight any who would deny the right of others to believe and practice as they wish, and to guarantee that no one, through violence or other means, is permitted to destroy the rights of free people to worship freely.  Both are central to the message of Judaism, and to America.

During this holiday of dedication and renewal, may we renew our own dedication to guaranteeing freedom of religion, and the security to celebrate it, now and always.

And may we also choose, like the rabbi of that story, to illuminate the cellar containing the darkness of ignorance with the light of knowledge, to affirm bright, intelligent choices for our own society at a time when dark wells of dusty falsehoods remain to be dispelled.

During these shortest days of this year, it is time to rededicate ourselves to the real purpose of Chanukah. For the lights of Chanukah were meant to banish darkness from our world—both our society’s and our own darkness.  With this light, we can emerge from the shadows and illuminate our world.

We can truly become the light we all need.

Chag Chanukah Samei’ach.  Chag Urim Sameiach—May this become a happy, bold, bright holiday of light.