The Darkness Is Real. So Is The Light.

Hanukah is the most popular Jewish holiday of the year. If you don’t believe it, just check out every available survey and study of American Jewish identity, and you will discover that only the rare Jewish family would say “humbug!” to the Festival of Lights. It's got everything: decent food (greasy, but that's part of the story); gifts; proximity to Christmas (an overreated reason, probably); an orientation to kids and family, and a celebration of the values of religious freedom that all Americans could really get their heads around.

But here is what I have noticed. Many commentators on Hanukkah seem to be overly focused on the subject of the lights themselves, and they are making those lights into metaphors — for the inner light, the light of the spirit, the light of courage, etc. As Will Rogers once said: I never metaphor I didn't like (sorry), but let's not metaphorize Hanukkah out of all reality. Sure, the lights are pretty and light, itself, is one of the world's most dominant religious themes.

But this year, let's own up to the fact that the darkness is real.

• The 148 victims of the Taliban terror attack on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan — a grim, gory testimonial to the fact that religious freedom is, for too many, still a fiction.
• The racial and class divisions in this country. We might imagine that race relations have moved forward, and in some ways, we would be right. But until African-American parents no longer have to have “The Talk” with their teenaged sons, we are not free. No way. 
• The grim and horrific revelations about our country's implicit endorsement of torture. And why aren't there more religious voices screaming about this? Isn't this a theological issue — or do we no longer believe in that hoary concept of “the image of God?”
• The growth of anti-Semitism. And not even, just, international anti-Semitism. This is not just about Europe. This is about what is happening on college campuses in this country. When a mother of a soon-to-be college freshman asks me, in all candor, whether she should have her own version of “The Talk” with her son, and tell him to take off his kippah, you know that we have a problem. 

And yes, there is some light as well. American Jewish prisoner Alan Gross has been released from his long incarceration in Cuba — making the theme of freedom even that much more powerful. 

So, let's not just lift up “light” as a spiritual metaphor –as popular and as authentic an option as that might be. There is real darkness out there. And there is the real possibility of light as well. 

May your Festival of Light — however you choose to spell it — be filled with precisely that — the light of moral courage. 

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