Saturday night brings the first candle of Chanukkah, a festival I have always loved. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room, watching the reflection of the small flames on their olive-wood Chanukkiah in the dark panes of the window onto the garden, where earlier in the year my brother and I had scrambled through the thickets to pick the blackberries. ‘How still they burn’, my grandmother would say. In our house now, where the windows of the dining room and those of the living room are opposite each other, I can even watch the reflections of the reflections of the candles, sometimes two or three levels deep, burning as if they were only the most recent in the lines of generations of Jews, bearing that same flame through the mysterious darkness of the world.
For, teaches the Sefat Emet, the Hasidic sage Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, the soul of every human being is God’s light, created to shine in this world like the stars by night. And if, in times of difficulty, we wonder, like those Maccabees searching the ruins of the Templefor a flask of unsullied oil, ‘Have I anything left inside to illumine? Is there any music, or poetry, or dance in me still left?’ – Then, he answers, we should remember that there’s never not enough spirit within the human heart to burn for at least one day. When that flame begins to give light, others gather round and their soul too is illumined and, like some secret samizdat, even in the most oppressive circumstances, the song continues to travel from mouth to mouth and generation to generation and the spirit is never extinguished.
Saturday night brings the first candle of Chanukkah, a festival I have always loved. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room, watching the reflection of the small flames on their olive-wood Chanukkiah in the dark panes of the window onto the garden, where earlier in the year my brother and I had scrambled through the thickets to pick the blackberries. ‘How still they burn’, my grandmother would say. In our house now, where the windows of the dining room and those of the living room are opposite each other, I can even watch the reflections of the reflections of the candles, sometimes two or three levels deep, burning as if they were only the most recent in the lines of generations of Jews, bearing that same flame through the mysterious darkness of the world.
For, teaches the Sefat Emet, the Hasidic sage Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, the soul of every human being is God’s light, created to shine in this world like the stars by night. And if, in times of difficulty, we wonder, like those Maccabees searching the ruins of the Templefor a flask of unsullied oil, ‘Have I anything left inside to illumine? Is there any music, or poetry, or dance in me still left?’ – Then, he answers, we should remember that there’s never not enough spirit within the human heart to burn for at least one day. When that flame begins to give light, others gather round and their soul too is illumined and, like some secret samizdat, even in the most oppressive circumstances, the song continues to travel from mouth to mouth and generation to generation and the spirit is never extinguished.
Never? I’m drawn to Chanukkah for more personal reasons as well. The second night is the Yahrzeit for my mother, Lore Shulamith. This will be the fiftieth year since she died. My brother and I owe our upbringing to Isca, our second mother, who lovingly brought us with our father from childhood through the charms of adolescence to our marriage canopies and is with us, thank God, now. But one remembers. It’s not only that one doesn’t forget. As everyone who carries such a loss well knows, one seeks – amidst other peoples’ recollections, in places and pages identified by the tug of some intimation – echoes and glimpses of light.
The light of a life does not go out. It rejoins the source of all light, the consciousness from which it came. Yet it is reflected on earth too, in the love engendered in those whom that person loved, and in the love which they in turn discover and bestow. Or, if love is too sentimental a term to refer to the daily responses to life’s struggles and troubles, the core and personality of a person is transmitted in how they used to talk over a cup of coffee, in some sudden glimpse of their inner dignity, in the irrepressible comradeship of laughter.
If a life ends and there’s no known circle of kith and kin, none to say Kaddish, still somewhere in the world are those who remember, who helped her with their shopping, sold her flowers, and who on hearing will say, ‘She? Gone? No!’ and who in ten years time will see before them as if it was yesterday the look on a face, the way a hand took a cake.
We are each a portion of the light which burns in one another’s hearts.
Shabbat Shalom and Good Chanukkah – Chag Urim Sameach
Never? I’m drawn to Chanukkah for more personal reasons as well. The second night is the Yahrzeit for my mother, Lore Shulamith. This will be the fiftieth year since she died. My brother and I owe our upbringing to Isca, our second mother, who lovingly brought us with our father from childhood through the charms of adolescence to our marriage canopies and is with us, thank God, now. But one remembers. It’s not only that one doesn’t forget. As everyone who carries such a loss well knows, one seeks – amidst other peoples’ recollections, in places and pages identified by the tug of some intimation – echoes and glimpses of light.
The light of a life does not go out. It rejoins the source of all light, the consciousness from which it came. Yet it is reflected on earth too, in the love engendered in those whom that person loved, and in the love which they in turn discover and bestow. Or, if love is too sentimental a term to refer to the daily responses to life’s struggles and troubles, the core and personality of a person is transmitted in how they used to talk over a cup of coffee, in some sudden glimpse of their inner dignity, in the irrepressible comradeship of laughter.
If a life ends and there’s no known circle of kith and kin, none to say Kaddish, still somewhere in the world are those who remember, who helped her with their shopping, sold her flowers, and who on hearing will say, ‘She? Gone? No!’ and who in ten years time will see before them as if it was yesterday the look on a face, the way a hand took a cake.
We are each a portion of the light which burns in one another’s hearts.
Shabbat Shalom and Good Chanukkah – Chag Urim Sameach