A Blessing for Shabbat Chanukkah

The Kabbalists (Jewish mystics) teach that before humanity was created, the world was a perfect vessel of Divine light.

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When the universe birthed its first humans, that light shattered, each fragment to spark the hope and imagination of every soul who would ever dwell on Earth.

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Tonight, after this year we’ve been through, we feel the rupture and the shatteredness acutely; we feel it in our bodies, in our kishkes, in our souls, in our tears.

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In a sky dark with a politics of callousness and peddlers of cynicism and despair, we could so easily be consumed by the blight of despair.

The miracle of Chanukkah is not that oil lasted for eight days or that the Macabees defeated the Assyrian army.

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The miracle of Chanukkah is that in the depths of winter & the valleys of darkness, each of us has the capacity to take our spark of Divine light and illuminate the world with it. We Jews are a people intoxicated with compassion and consumed with hope. Hope is our superpower. 5/

So on this Shabbat Chanukkah, as we light the flames of Shabbat and of Chanukkah, we are called to ignite possibility and promise, kindness and decency.

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It isn’t easy. Forces want to snuff out our hope, want us to believe we have no power, need us for their own material gain to believe that we and our lives do not matter.

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But we do matter. And when we join together to touch our sparks with our neighbors, to ignite the promise of equity and equality, justice and human dignity, we create a blaze of truth and a fire of holy love that will remake the world.

#HappyChanukah #ShabbatShalom

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