Attuning to the Hidden Light

Rabbi Zelig Golden

As we approach the Festival of Lights, we step not only into a season, but into what Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato — the RaMCHaL — calls the original light of Hanukkah. Each year, he teaches, the spiritual energy embedded in this sacred time returns, inviting us to encounter it anew. The darkness of the Hanukkah season gives us the opportunity to see the hidden light, the deeper light, that dwells within.

This year, many of us feel particularly  in need of that light.

Across the world — and in our own communities — I notice we are heavy with grief, fear, and fatigue. The political climate feels brittle; the rhetoric harsher; the center more fragile; the tensions high. I keep wondering: How do we hold hope when the night feels long?

The medicine of Hanukkah, the eight days of “rededication” to the sacred, is precisely for such moments.

Seeing the Hidden Light

Rav Kook teaches that Hanukkah is a re-opening of access to the holiness that always exists but becomes concealed — by conflict, fear, the noise of the world. The rededication of the Temple was not only about stones and altars; about relighting the oil in the Menorah and the fire on the altar; it was also about the people learning again to feel God’s presence in the world after a time when that felt impossible.

Reb Zalman, of blessed memory, expands this by reminding us that the Hanukkah candles are not utilitarian. We are not meant to use their light. Rather we are instructed by the sages only to gaze into them. Hanukkah light is there to cleanse “the doors of our perception.” To let their soft glow attune us again to the Or Ganuz, the hidden, primordial light of Creation, that Reb Zalman calls “the miraculous order that quietly suffuses all things.” He reminds us, no matter our experience, we live within a miraculous world and our attunement is the only true barrier from dwelling in the miraculous.

The candles, he explains, teach and invite our full presence. With the light. within the dark. No fixing. No strategizing. No debating the world’s brokenness. Hanukkah is a time for invoking and witnessing the light — remembering the essence – and allowing our hearts to soften. 

A Hanukkah for Our Time

So what does rededication to the light look like right now?

Given our political climate, and the venture we’ve embarked upon with Makom Shalom, I think about this a lot. Hanukkah for me presents an opportunity to take a sober look into the darkness and explore how I will choose to bring the light. Without ignoring the realities, how do I keep the noise of our political moment from hardening my heart? How do I remember that those I might see as “other” are, in truth, not so far from me? How do I muster the vision and the courage to perceive the miraculous – to see that there is still magic everywhere and everyday? God is in this place, and I forgot. How can I remember? How can we remember together?

This Hanukkah I aim to approach each candle like a small sanctuary. I want to let the light soften what has tightened within me and invite the light to illuminate the potential for healing and return to present moment awareness of the simple, profound beauty of the world we live in. 

May these eight nights help each of us rededicate ourselves to the inner light we each possess within, bring that light beyond the windows of our perception and into our conversations and relationships, and gather together in circles of friendship and community to inquire - how can we bring this light into our world that needs it so? 

May this Festival of Lights bring renewed hope to each of us, and to all creation.

Chag Urim Sameach,

~ Rabbi Zelig Golden