Light the Lights

Sermon, Shabbat Mikets

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Hanukkah is a time of celebration for Jews everywhere, commemorating the great victory of our ancestors over deadly religious persecution.  While not as theologically important as the High Holy Days or Pilgrimage festivals, historically it is the most important of all our holidays.  Without the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, Judaism would have disappeared 2200 years ago, and the belief in one God with it.  Without Hanukkah, Christianity would never have existed, and Islam would never have been created, since both religions emerged out of Judaism and incorporate many of our teachings, and our entire Bible, into their daughter faiths.

Hanukkah should be a time to rejoice, to bring light to a dark time of year, to celebrate the victory of faith over repression, belief over hypocrisy, good over evil.

This year the experience of Hanukkah has been severely damaged by the horrific Anti-Semitic Islamist attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia by radicalized Pakistani Muslims with connections to the Islamic State.  That attack was the worst antisemitic attack in Australian history, the culmination of a series of antisemitic attacks that the current government of Australia has been weak responding to.  On a personal note, I served as a rabbinic intern and cantor in Sydney for four months some years ago, not far from Bondi Beach, and the Australian Jewish community is quite wonderful.  This terrorist atrocity struck home.

The Bondi Beach attack took place at a Hanukkah event put on by Chabad.  The murderers took long guns and killed two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl, among the 15 innocent people they deliberately shot to death.  This was pure anti-Semitic hatred, cold-blooded terrorist murder of Jews celebrating the holiday that guarantees religious freedom. 

This attack, like the murders in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the attacks that take place all around the world, are supposedly a response to Israel’s war in Gaza.  That is a preposterous lie.  The entire world condemns Russia’s Putin-driven brutal invasion of Ukraine, yet no one deliberately murders Russians on the beach in Thailand or commits arson against Russian Orthodox churches. There are real genocides that have taken place all over the Muslim world, from Syria to Iraq to Iran, and genocidal mass murders are being perpetrated today by Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria, yet mosques are not routinely attacked or surrounded by protestors in London and Amsterdam and Toronto and Los Angeles and New York.  Christians are perpetrating genocide against Muslims now in the Central African Republic, but all churches don’t have full-time security forces to protect them from terrorism.  This has nothing to do with Israel or its military actions.  It is pure, unadulterated antisemitism, racism, terrorism.  Against people gathering to celebrate the festival of religious freedom from persecution. 

For goodness sake, Chabad adherents in Israel don’t even serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Well, at Bondi Beach the Intifada has been “globalized,” as protestors of a concert in Amsterdam chanted on Hanukkah. “Intifada” means murdering innocent civilians living their lives, shooting them or blowing them up to cause chaotic destruction.  It is a hate-fueled effort to annihilate a people, we Jews, who constitute less than one quarter of one percent of the world’s population, homicidal actions taken by fanatics who seek to destroy civilization.   

It has nothing to do with protecting the Arabs of Gaza or improving their lives. 

We hoped the end of the Gaza War would bring sanity back to this planet.  But the end of the war wasn’t cheered by those who agonized about the Palestinian victims.  Strangely, the end of the danger to Palestinians brought no joy to those chanting for the destruction of Israel and Jews.  Because these protests were never about the suffering of Palestinians, or the evils of the Netanyahu government, which are real.  They were about destroying the only Jewish state on the planet and, along the way, all Jews.

After Bondi Beach, Jews in Australia were told not to hold public celebrations as a form of self-protection.  For a while all Jewish schools and synagogues were closed. 

That is the opposite of what Hanukkah represents.  It is a time to affirm our right to celebrate our heritage publicly and positively, to light bright lights on these darkest days. 

Antisemitism, oldest and most virulent form of racism in world history, is back now with a vengeance.  Which makes Hanukkah, and Jewish affirmation, ever more important: we must fight for our right to be Jews, and do so publicly, proudly and with great energy.  We must bring even more light into this dark time.

There have been some sparks of light in this challenging season.  I received a call yesterday from a non-Jewish Oro Valley resident who asked if it was OK to put a picture of a menorah in support of the Jewish community.  She was outraged at the attacks, and she is not alone.  We have many friends, and it is part our mission to continue to cultivate them.

So how does Judaism 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.  And it banishes the darkness, truly.  That light will lead Joseph to save that country from famine, and then to save his own family from starvation, and finally catapult him nearly to the throne.  

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

It is fascinating that the central prayer we say on Hanukkah, al hanisim, praises God for the miracles that were wrought for our ancestors in those days long ago.  In truth, those miracles were really a simple matter of a more deeply committed people fighting for their homes and their beliefs and culture against a larger, numerically stronger, better funded enemy.

Kind of what we are facing in many ways right now…

My friends, I can’t say that I enjoy talking about Antisemitism.  At one point in my rabbinate I believed that it had declined so much in popularity and virulence that I wouldn’t have to teach or preach about it for long.  I was wrong, of course.  When I interviewed Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League who will be on my Too Jewish Radio Show and Podcast this Sunday, he said that what he recommended for all Jews to do is to be more Jewish, more openly and publicly Jewish, to bring more light in these dark times.

I told him he sounded like a rabbi…

Because what we rabbis always say, correctly, is that the best response to antisemitic acts of violence and repression is to renew our own commitment to Judaism, and our own acts of Jewish observance. 

It’s what Joseph taught us; it’s what the Maccabees did.  Celebrate your Judaism, live it actively, and share it with your friends and neighbors.  Then you will be lighting these lights brightly when we most need them.