‘She always saw the best in people.’ ‘He had a gift for finding the good in every situation.’ How I admire people like that!

I’m speaking on the phone to Matthew Biggs, of Gardener’s Question Time Fame. He’s not been well. He tells me that when he’s having treatment, he stares out of the hospital window and sees where daffodils could be planted and thinks what it would mean to others to have a truly beautiful space to look at while waiting anxiously for therapies or results. Then he describes exactly what he’s doing to make this happen.

That’s the essence of Chanukah, which now draws near. It’s about finding the light in any situation. When the Maccabees re-entered the Temple precincts after a long and bitter war, they must have encountered an utterly dispiriting sight: everything in ruins, everything holy contaminated and broken. But, in the Talmud’s words, ‘they searched and found one single vial of inviolate oil’ with which they lit the Menorah so that it burnt for a week and a day with a wondrous, sacred light.

We commemorate this miracle ritually by lighting our Chanukah candles. But we live it through how we see the world. Time and again our eyes are drawn to destruction; media and social media thrive on disaster, anger and hate. But there are other ways of looking.

For example, during Covid there were nature-lovers who wrote in chalk the names of the wildflowers that grew through the gaps in the paving stones and walls. There were nurses who, helpless to do more in the loneliness of lock-down and knowing what love means, sent their patient’s family their own mobile number, put their phone to the ear of a sick husband and father, and enabled those who loved him to say goodbye.

Such people manage to see midst the bleakness life’s sacred light. Today, in these tough times, with the world so full of destruction, it matters that we do likewise. God’s light resides in all that lives; it’s up to us to see it.

But seeing it is not enough. The Talmud has a motto: Ma’alin bakodesh: in sacred matters we go up, not down. That’s why on Chanukah we don’t start with eight candles and descend, night by night, to just one, even though this makes sense since the quantity of oil in the Menorah lit by the Maccabees must have got less and less. Instead, we follow the School of Hillel and start with one light, ascending, night by night, to eight.

Ma’alin is a causative verb: it means not just ‘go up’ but ‘raise up’ and applies not just to Chanukah, or religious rituals, but to all of life. When we encounter what’s holy, we must try to raise it up, and, as the Hasidic Master taught, however hidden, repressed and neglected, an inextinguishable spark of holiness resides in all life. The challenge is first to see it, then to nurture it, cup our hands around it and let its flame rise up.

This applies even to little Iggle, the tiny baby hedgehog carefully nursed back towards its survival weight by my wife Nicky. It applies, too, to the ancient chestnut tree for which a friend campaigned until the council relented from cutting it down. Nothing living is so small that it doesn’t matter.

It applies all the more to children, orphaned, hungry and heart-broken, in terrible wars in which their only role has been to suffer. Can we do something, anything, that brings, food, healing, hope even to just one of them, wherever they are in the world?

Chanukah is not just about the miracle of the light that was. It’s about the light within all life that waits for us to find it and raise it up. That’s how we create hope, and the hope we bring always illumines hope in others too.