Sustaining Light in Dark Times- A Chanukkah Drash (Reflection)
This drash (reflection) on Chanukkah was given by Max Fineman, from JVP Columbia/Barnard, at Return the Birthright’s rally and speak-out outside of Birthright Israel Foundation’s offices, December 3, 2017
Chanukkah, as is often said, is about sustaining light in dark times. At a time when desecration and destruction and actual imperialism ran rampant through the streets of Jerusalem, it seemed impossible to light the menorah in the temple- it seemed impossible, with the resources they had, to bring any light into the city, or into their world. And yet at this time, when so many houses, and houses of G-d, had been destroyed, a finite amount of oil produces an infinite amount of light.
Eight nights. Eight nights. In Judaism, 7 represents perfection, completion, the whole of our finite world, the idea that resources are limited, that we need rest, that our oil does run out. Eight, on the other hand, represents the beyond, the infinite, the confirmation of what seems impossible: we can derive unlimited light from our finite world and from our finite selves. Eight nights tells us to dig deeper into our work precisely at the moment where there seems to be no hope, when our oil is almost gone. Eight nights tells us that oil is capable of sparking an infinity; that we are capable of beginning ever anew; that we are capable of defying the order which currently sets the borders, which says who we are and who we must be.
And yes, eight nights tells us that we are capable of defying Sheldon Adelson when he tells young Jews like us that our Jewishness demands that we support an apartheid state. We are capable of defying the idea that our connection to a sacred land should come at the expense of the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and to their homeland. We are capable of defying the borders and the limits set by an Israeli state that puts its communities of color on its most dangerous borders, that consistently demonstrates that it does not value the lives or the identities of Jews of Color unless they actively enforce its project of occupation. And we are capable of defying the walls that the Israeli state, the American Jewish establishment, and the ideologies of occupation and apartheid seek to erect between us to stop us from standing together in solidarity. When we light a menorah, we spark something eternal. We are forever beginning that project of sparking into the world something which could produce light and therefore produce justice.
The word ‘Chanukkah’ means dedication. The lighting of the menorah in the Temple, that miracle of so little oil turning itself into so much light, was the moment of a rededication of the Temple after it had been desecrated. It was a moment of beginning anew, but also of recommitting to the practices that existed in the Holy Temple long before, and had only been temporarily interrupted. It was a rededication to a light and a love and the infinity of justice which existed in our people, in our prayer, in our work, in our movements long before this current time of imperialism, of darkness, of destruction, of desecration. And so this moment of Chanukkah, of rededicating with the lighting of the menorah, is for us both a new beginning and return to a sacred past, the creation of infinite light and a return to ourselves, a recognition that we are always beginning anew, that we have always been beginning anew, and so in beginning anew we are constantly returning to ourselves as creators of justice in this world. And so let us rededicate ourselves once more to the sacred work for which we gather here together today, in solidarity with the liberation of Palestine.
Right of Return — We rededicate ourselves to the Palestinian right of return, to the commitment to return to Palestinians the right to live and flourish in their historic homeland. We recognize the desecration involved in Birthright and its erasure of Palestinian history and we recommit to the standing with the struggle for the right of return today, for example, by boycotting Birthright and the unjust political projects it represents.
Community — We commit ourselves once more to the project of building new Jewish communities centered on justice, communities that put their resources into the struggle for everyone’s liberation. We commit to building our communities in solidarity, in the belief that we can only liberate ourselves when we liberate others, that we liberate ourselves when we struggle for the liberation of others. We build communities to amass our collective power and our collective voice, to pray together and to protest together, which are perhaps not so different after all. We cry out together, in community.
Teshuvah — Teshuvah, often translated as repentance, means return. We recognize today that our struggle for justice in Palestine and against organizations like Birthright are both radically new, and at the same time, far older and more deeply rooted than those that we struggle against. We are returning to deeply rooted Jewish principles of justice, older than the darkness and destruction than present themselves in the current moment. We also recognize the capacity for people in our communities, new and old, to do teshuva, to change and to join us. In this work we commit to having compassion, to leaving space for growth, to the courage to see that our normal mechanisms of self-defense — the blame, guilt, anger, judgment and shame we mobilize to protect ourselves — offer no real protection to anyone. The courage to see that if we want liberation in Palestine we must be willing to welcome in those that seek to destroy without being controlled by them. We must summon the valor to meet hate with love, anger with compassion and to make our enemy into our beloved.
Zikaron, Remembrance — We take a moment to remember and to invoke those who came before us, in the Palestine solidarity movement and in our own stories. We have arrived here as the sums of the work and the lives and the lessons of our predecessors and of our ancestors. If today we stand here to rededicate ourselves to principles of justice, we invoke the names of those who stood against imperialism and the forces of destruction, demolition, and desecration before us, who have always been fighting to relight the menorah. Rav Yitzhak Hutner explains that in the time of Chanukkah the imperialists compelled us to forget the Torah, but that despite their wishes, this very forgetting was the basis of the reconstruction of our Torah in new times. Today we are committing to the re-construction of our sacred communities by remembering the ancestral and historical lines in which we stand.
Resilience- Chanukah comes from the same root as the Hebrew word chinuch. It is usually translated as education, but some Rabbis have pointed out that it really refers to the process of becoming who we truly are. Chanukah and chinuch are about having the courage to bring ourselves to fruition in all our beauty and in all our freedom. We recommit to the resilience to realize our goals and to remain steadfast in our solidarity with BDS and with Palestine in the face of much opposition from so much of our own Jewish communities.
Vision — On Chanukkah we do not light a menorah that fills the whole world, or even usually the whole room, with light. For that we would need the complete power of liberation and redemption. But there is still always darkness beyond us. The work is not ours to complete. We recognize that who we are, what we know, what we see is limited. To take the our holy work seriously is to affirm that we can and must bring light into otherwise abandoned places, that we can bring moments of meaning and companionship to places overrun by heartache and devastation. What we can do, what we must do, is to soften the threat of night, to soothe and ease the pain of the world, even though we cannot obliterate darkness and eliminate sorrow. We must humble ourselves to see that we are not the whole story, the whole power, and so we commit to flexibility, to openness, to keeping ourselves open to the diversity of paths our movement can take.
Solidarity & Accountability — We commit to standing together, to the project of collective liberation. To living up to the way we speak, to living up to our responsibilities in the wider movement. To respond to the Palestinian call for BDS and for justice. To take leadership from those most affected, in our work and in our own communities.
Tikkun- Finally, we rededicate ourselves to the work, to actualizing our vision of liberation. We make a tikkun in the world by gathering up the brokenness and desecration, the broken pieces of the Holy Temple that lie in ruins, the remnants of the destruction of homes, of families, of lives, of peoples. We gather up these pieces and these stories and we create a vessel for the light to shine, a holy container which is strong and stable enough to hold the brilliance and energy of revolution and liberation. We piece ourselves and our world together so that our sparks can turn into enduring lights. So that the sparks we create here today, the candles we light, the work that we do, can have an enduring effect, can contribute to a lasting, G-d willing eternal, justice on the earth. We commit to the building of holy vessels capable of containing, sustaining, and embracing divine light, so that we may witness the return of that everlasting light of justice in our world. במהרה בימינו. May it come speedily in our days. Thank you.
