HINENI: The Mindful Heart Community Light and Darkness • Dec. 8, 2015 Phone Call Rabbi Jill Berkson Zimmerman

QUESTIONS

• What is the light of the first day? Who was the light for?
• Is it your experience that "light" is associated with the "righteous"? What is the quality of that light?
• Hidden light - detaching it from "righteousness" - can you relate to times when you feel the light is hidden from you (the light of awareness)?
• Is it your experience that when you study/learn, that "a ray appears and flows down upon you?"
• What else do you do that "releases light?"
• Who do you know that emanates light?

Lighting Up the Darkness: Hanukkah as a Spiritual Practice

by Rabbi Shai Held (http://www.mechonhadar.org)

We are all of us afraid of the dark. At night, anxieties suppressed or repressed come swimming to the surface of consciousness: am I safe? Am I loved? Am I needed? Is there meaning in the world, or is it all, ultimately, just a swirl of chaos?

For some of us much of the time, and for all of us some of the time, darkness suggests peril and instability, the sense that life is fleeting, tenuous, random and senseless. Physical darkness threatens, at least at moments, to conjure existential darkness: It is dark, and I am alone and afraid.

The Talmud reports that when Adam and Eve first saw the sun go down, they were panic-stricken, thinking that the setting of the sun was a consequence of their sin, and that this new, intense darkness would spell their death. They spent that entire first night weeping, until dawn broke, and they realized, to their immense relief, that this was simply the way of the world -- day followed by night, and night followed by day (Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 8a).

Now, we who come after the first couple are all aware that night is not permanent and that morning, too, will inevitably come. And our fears are usually less that night is an outgrowth of our failures and more of what it suggests, of the feelings and concerns that night has the power to elicit.

But if we think of night in metaphorical terms, who among us has never had a foreboding akin to Adam's: What if night never ends? What if meaningless and loneliness are simply all there is? We are also aware of profound links between physical darkness and existential darkness: As the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer, moods often shift, worries often mount and hope often wanes.

Judaism does not ask us to ignore this darkness and the sense of doom it might educe in us. On the contrary, it asks us to face them squarely, and then, ultimately, to defy them. But how?

In Genesis, God takes Abram outside and says, "Look toward heaven, and count the stars, if you are able to count them." And God adds, "So shall your offspring be" (Gen. 15:5). On the surface, the meaning of God's promise is clear: the children of Abram will be so numerous as to be beyond counting. But the great Hasidic master R. Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger (1847-1905), known as the Sefas Emes, offers a very different and deeply arresting interpretation of God's promise. God's promise, he says, is not quantitative but qualitative: To be a Jew is, like a star, to bring light to places of vast darkness. Thus, even and perhaps especially when Israel descends into the darkness of its Egypt, its mission is clear -- to light up the darkness of the most depraved and immoral parts of the world (Shemot, 1878).

Let me add one note to the Sefas Emes' comments. In understanding our mission in the world, there is something crucial to keep in mind about the nature of stars. Stars do not eliminate the darkness, but rather mitigate it; do not turn the world into a palace full of light, but rather find ways to shed light in places that would otherwise be consumed by absolute darkness.

In a similar vein, we ought to be wary, to say the least, of the fantasy that human beings can somehow remove all darkness from human life…But we can -- and to take the covenant between God and Israel seriously is to affirm that we must -- bring light into otherwise abandoned places, to bring flashes of meaning and companionship to places otherwise overrun by heartache and devastation.

What does all of this have to do with Hanukkah? Think for a moment about the central ritual act that marks this holiday. It is winter now: the days are getting shorter and shorter, and attendantly, the nights are getting longer and longer. Pesach and Sukkot begin in the middle of the Jewish month, when the moon is full.

But Hanukkah is different: it begins on the 25th of the month, when the moon has all but completely disappeared. We are in one of the darkest periods of one of the darkest months of the year. All around us is darkness. And what do we do? We light a fire. Not a bonfire, but a small fire -- now one, now another, and so forth for eight nights. In other words, we do not pretend to be the sun, but only stars. We do not bring an end to darkness, but soften its effects.

"The soul of man is the lamp of God," the Book of Proverbs tell us (20:27). What this means is that ultimately, our task is not to light candles, but to be candles. We have the potential to be the bits of light that help bring God back into a world gone dark. As the Sefas Emes puts it in discussing Hanukkah, "A human being is created to light up this world" (Hanukkah, 1874).

Light Meditation

Effecting Change in Ourselves & Others

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (Likkutei MoHaRa’N 282)

Know that you need to judge each person on the side of merit. Even one who is completely bad, you need to seek out and to find within that person some small bit of good, that bit where she is not bad. By this means, when you find that bit of good, and judge her generously, you actually raise her up to the level of merit, and you are able to turn her in teshuvah.[1] This is what it means [in the book of Psalms], Just a little bit more and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there (Psalms 37:6). That is, the verse warns us to judge everyone on the side of merit, and even if you see someone who seems completely wicked, even so you need to seek out and search and find within him a bit of good, that place where he is not wicked—this is the meaning of “Just a little bit more and there will be no wicked one,” for you need to seek out within him just a bit more good that is still within him.

For even if a person is sinful, how is it possible that there isn’t any good in him at all? How is it possible that he never in his life did some mitzvah, or some good thing? And by this means, when you find within him a bit of good, where he is not bad, and you judge him on the side of merit, by this means you raise him up in truth from a guilty judgment to the side of merit, so that he turns in teshuvah. Then indeed you will look at his place and find that the wicked one will not be there [referring again to the verse from Psalms]—for he is truly no longer in the place you originally found him. You have helped move him from that place.

And this you must also do in regards to yourself. For it is known that a person must take great care to be joyous always, and to stay far, far away from sadness and depression. For it can happen that you begin to examine yourself, and you can’t find any good, all you see are transgressions and missteps, and the Negative One[2] will try to push you down into depression and bitter darkness—when this happens, it is forbidden to be pushed down. Rather, you need to seek out and to find within yourself some small bit of good. For how is it possible that you have never done some mitzvah or good thing? But then you find that good thing, and you see that it too is full of defects; all the ways that you tried to act in good ways were for the wrong reasons, ulterior motives, motivated by negative thoughts. But even with all that, how is it possible that within that mitzvah there isn’t some bit of good? That’s all you need to find: just the smallest bit, a small point of goodness within your actions. That should be enough to give you life, to bring you back to joy. By this means, by seeking out and finding within yourself a bit of good, you truly bring yourself to the side of merit, you effect real change in yourself, bring about true teshuvah. Thus, just as we need to judge others on the side of merit, even those who appear wicked, and to find within them points of goodness, we need to do the same for ourselves.

Then you’ll be able to seek out and gather more points of goodness, and from these are made niggunim[3], a process of collecting your own good spirit from the realm of darkness and depression. The principle here is that a holy melody is very powerful, and the niggun is created by clarifying the good from the evil, the positive from the negative, and by clarifying and gathering the points of good from within the negative—from this comes niggunim and holy songs. And by not allowing yourself to fall, and enlivening yourself by finding the good within yourself, gathering it and clarifying it out of all that is negative, thus you can come to a place of prayer, thus you are able to sing and to praise.

(Translated by Rabbi Toba Spitzer, based on a translation by Rabbi Arthur Green)