We light candles again tonight, but they will be different candles. We will go into Shabbat in the very moments that Hanukkah ends, and I’d like to think we can bring just a bit of Hanukkah with us into Shabbat, to make it last a little longer. To extend the light. These last few days of Hanukkah, I’ve been singing a song I learned in my childhood. בָּאנוּ חוֹשֶׁךְ לְגָרֵשׁ בְּיָדֵינוּ אוֹר וָאֵשׁ כָּל אֶחָד הוּא אוֹר קָטָן וְכֻלָנוּ אוֹר אֵיתָן סוּרָה חוֹשֶׁךְ הָלְאָה שְחוֹר סוּרָה מִפְּנֵי הָאוֹר
“We have come to dispel the darkness/ In our hands, light and fire/ Each one is a tiny light/ And collectively, our light is mighty. Depart, darkness! Further away, dark Depart, in the face of the light!”
The words to this song were originally written by Sara Levi-Tanai, who lived an incredible life. Her parents came by foot, from Yemen to Ottoman Palestine around 1910. They were displaced by the Ottoman authorities during WWI and her mother died from an outbreak of disease in their refugee camp. Sara’s father suffered in poverty and she was raised in an orphanage. Later, she moved with her husband to Kibbutz Ramat haKovesh and became an early childhood educator. She wrote this poem, as well as many other children’s poems, before starting one of Israel’s premier dance companies. When Sara wrote these words in the early 1940s, she wrote it in the present tense and in the first person plural. It was a collective vision of what she could do now, when coming together with others.
In some ways, this song was a secular Israeli retelling of an ancient Jewish story, meant to put us in the shoes of the powerful Maccabees. It was meant to remind us that we could also be heroes of our story, that we could come together with others - even if our numbers were small - and we could prevail. This message feels important to me this year, it’s a message I want to feel for longer, not just during these days of Hanukkah.
I imagine that Sara Levi-Tanai knew darkness. She knew heartache; she knew pain. She knew oppression and she knew hatred. She knew all too well what it meant to be in darkness, she knew what it meant to be a light. She knew that each individual candle, each one of us, is an or katan, a small light, but that when we bring our light together, we are an or eitan, a mighty light. I felt that last night looking at the full menorah, and I felt that last night at our packed Hanukkah gathering at the shul. We can be lights for each other; we have the power to dispel darkness, to not let it overtake us.
These are the last two lines of the song: אך נדע יפה מאוד לספר, לשיר, לרקוד. “But we will know quite well/ To tell the story, to sing and to dance”
Sara Levi-Tanai, no matter what she had been through personally and no matter what her people had been through collectively, she believed that the light of our people could do something powerful. That it could lead us to sing and dance and to keep telling our story.
We will sing. We will dance. And if we are anything as Jews, we are storytellers. We will continue to tell our story. We will continue to bring our light together, to not let our lights be alone. Last night I lit eight, and tonight I will only light two. But I pray that those two lights will help dispel some of the darkness. And I know that we’re in it together, that with my little light, and with your little light, we can be mighty.
