I’m writing this, my last Shalom NNLS, on the closing day of Chanukah – some days early so that it can be scheduled to go out while the shul office is closed over the holidays. As I hand over to my colleagues, I feel accompanied by the afterglow of the eight candles burning on the full Chanukiah.I’m drawn once again to the Talmudic discussion about whether one may light one Chanukah candle from another. The answer is affirmative, so long as the flame is passed directly, with no intermediary. I see that response not just as a legal decision, but as about how life works. It’s how we learn to see, feel and be, more deeply.

As I close my time at the New North London, I want to give thanks for the light I’ve been given and open my heart to the new lights I will be shown in the future. So many people in our beloved community have shared their light and guided me.

Thank you to the teenage leaders, madrichot and madrichim, whom I’ve seen calmly lead a shy child, frightened by the charming behaviour all around, to a still corner to read the Shema. It’s like watching kindness itself smooth down a tiny, safe patch of calm amidst the screaming chaos of contemporary life. There’s godliness in the way those teens do that.

I respect and appreciate those who’ve said, but not in words: ‘Take this candle and accompany me.’ They’ve lead me to places in the heart, chambers deep underneath, safe from the depredations of time, where love abides despite the death of the beloved years ago. Here, they listen to them still, commune with them, and, although they cannot hold them in their arms, or bless them as one blesses one’s child on Friday night, they are still strengthened, hurt, and made more deeply human by that love which can never be extinguished.

How susceptible to pain the heart is. How important, therefore, is every moment of kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity and tenderness in a world which so often proves unspeakably cruel.

Thank you to those who’ve said ‘Haven’t you seen?’ and showed me a plant, shared a line from a poem, illumined words of Torah. During lock-down I received as many photographs of nature as questions about Jewish law. ‘What bird is that?’ ‘Have you noticed how the Judas trees have begun to flower!’ (In Hebrew they’re called clil hachoresh, the crown of the forest.) How poorer we would be if people didn’t hold out a candle and say, ‘Look there! See this beautiful world!’

I honour everyone who’s said: ‘Contribute more!’ People dedicate themselves to so many essential concerns: ‘We do therapy with horses and dogs for people who lost family in the fighting in Israel and Gaza.’ ‘We’re training local women to support victims of rape after the war in the Balkans.’ ‘Will you join us planting hedgerows and mini forests in Barnet?’ ‘Help me support these refugees who’ve nowhere to sleep but the streets.’ What can I say? You light pathways into worlds that desperately need our care. You illumine the road of conscience.

I’m thankful to colleagues of all faiths with whom we’ve stood against the hatreds that distort religion and cut deep wounds of violence into our world. Together we have striven to affirm the true oneness of God, whose spirit flows through everything making all life sacred.

I’m grateful for the prayers, music, poetry and Torah, which have led us to the hidden, holy core of life and held us there, even momentarily, so that we may know it and be at one.
All these are lights which kindle my, and your, inner light.
I shall try, as we all do, to stay faithful to the light with which I have been entrusted.

May God’s light, present in all life, illumine the path of goodness and compassion for us all.

I see the lights of Chanukah reaching out into the darkness. Chanukah is a festival of hope, courage and inspiration and we, and the world, urgently need them all.

But now, not only after Bondi Beach but at the close of a cruel year, that darkness feels deep indeed. My Christian friends speak similarly as they approach the celebration of Christmas. We, and the Muslim colleagues who sent words of sorrow and solidarity, share the simple prayer: ‘May the light prove stronger than the darkness.’

It’s a prayer addressed to each other, ourselves and our governments, as much as to God. We need light.
That doesn’t mean that we can ignore the hatred, cruelty and contempt abroad in our world. But I won’t detail them here. I will focus on the light, because we need it so badly.

On a personal note, the second day of Chanukah is the Yahrzeit for Raphael’s and my mother, Lore. She left us a collection of stories, Maerchen in German, fables in poetic prose. One of them concerns a little boy who is terrified of the dark and gets lost in the forest in the pitch-black night. Yet coming, panic-stricken and exhausted, upon a clearing, he sees the bright moon and stars and hears the swaying of the trees. He stops, breathes in, and stands still in wonder: ‘I always knew it,’ he says to himself, ‘beyond the darkness there is light.’ I think now that, knowing she was dying, our mother wrote this story as a message to her two young boys, and to herself.

Returning to Chanukah, the date marks the repossession of the Temple by the Maccabees. Who knows what they actually thought as they contemplated the ruined precincts? Their battles weren’t over. Right next door stood a fortress still in enemy hands.
Yet the Talmud chooses to tell us that the first thing they did was look for light. Whoever the editors of the Talmud were, they wanted this to be the message of Chanukah for future generations: Seek light! Whatever the darkness around you, seek it out! And when you find it, even if it’s just one tiny jar, even if you think, ‘This won’t last. It’s a mere nothing! It’ll be out before it’s lit!’ – go ahead and light it.

That, taught Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, is where the miracle of Chanukah’s eight days begins, not in heaven, but on earth. Eight, he wrote, represents transcendence, seeing beyond. In kabbalah, the eighth sacred quality if we count upwards, is binah, intuition. It’s the insight that beyond, and within, everything, even in the heart of darkness, resides God’s spirit. There is an inalienable holiness, and inextinguishable point of light, at life’s core.

On Chanukah that or haganuz, that hidden flame, is kindled on our Menorah and placed not in secret, but overlooking the highway, in the public square. Hope and light must be ‘out there,’ a call to courage and the strength of collective goodness.

The Talmud asks, and then confirms, that ‘we may light one candle from another’ directly, flame to flame. This represents the truth that one person’s light, creativity, kindness, bravery inspires others, who inspire yet others about whom the individual who lit the first flame will never know.

So we must never say: ‘It’s too little. The darkness is too thick.’ Despite everything, let the lights of courage, inspiration, creativity, companionship, goodness, kindness, determination and hope shine forth into the coming year.