Friends,
The Hasidic masters taught that as hidden, elusive, or otherwise hard to find, there is always light somewhere. The world could not exist without it. Sometimes we only find the light after we crack open all that obscures it.
Life teaches us that the cracking is so often a bitterly painful thing. Shattering hurts. And religion teaches that we must become better, wiser, more compassionate people—people who protect light, nurture light, guard it from that within us and among that threatens to obscure it—so we need not go through shatterings again and again and again.
Judaism enjoins that as we grow into better versions of ourselves, we not let our despair that we are not yet there overcome us and snuff out the search for the light that already inheres in our world, again however obscured. Judaism insists we remain unflinching in our seeking, even when we feel so very lost in the dark.
This tenacity in the search for light and resistance to being overcome by despair is what Hanukkah has always signified for me, and it does so now more than ever.
This is what I pray that all lights of all the holidays of the season will reignite in all of our souls.
Particularly during these heartbreaking times, I find glimmers of hope in all efforts to humanize and connect across vast differences and seeming impasses—efforts both longstanding and entirely new. Recently, I joined such an effort as Associate Director for In Your Shoes™ Research and Practice Center. I am moved to share with the SCS community what I wrote in the piece welcoming me to the role:
In Your Shoes™ offers me a way to double-down on my commitment to pursuing a better world, and to contribute to the ongoing, tenacious peace and justice work of the countless individuals and organizations I have been privileged to engage with over the years. Along with all those doing this work, I refuse to give up on the values and visions that we have worked so hard to bring to each other and our communities. It isn’t easy. But it is the best way I know to remain fully alive and to live purposefully, openly, and with hope in this broken and blessed world.
For those particularly invested in engaging with the issues facing Israelis and Palestinians, I commend you to learn more from this small sampling of co-existence organizations and resources I have personally worked with over the years, including:
- Roots
- Parents Circle
- Heartbeat
- Standing Together.
- The Hotline for Israel/Palestine founded by current Harvard undergraduate students, which non-judgmentally fields all questions and offers multilayered responses and resources for further reading from a range of perspectives on Israel and Palestine.