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The Winter Solstice, Hanukkah and Emerging from the Darkness [1]

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Date: 2022-12-21  

I. The Solstice

At 4:47 pm today, we welcome the Winter Solstice.

Since 9/11, I’ve had my own private appreciation of the Solstice. That autumn, fear and uncertainty gripped us while temperatures fell. The light of hope was hard to sustain as each day’s sunlight decreased. As December slowly progressed, I yearned for the Solstice, hoping like the ancients for fear to subside as the days finally grew longer.

And it did.

Eventually.

Two years ago, Elizabeth Diaz wrote How We Survive Winter in the New York Times

The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter.

In the twenty-one years since 2001 we have repeatedly been plunged into darkness, but also redeemed by light. It’s sometimes but not always sequential — redemption can be served cold or at any temperature.

Darkness descended with the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Trump’s election, and the Global Pandemic. But light emerged with election of our first African-American President, vaccines saving millions of lives, economic recovery and the miracle of ousting an authoritarian President through an election.

II. Hanukkah

No holiday captures the emergence of light from darkness like Hanukkah, which this year brackets the Winter Solstice. In the story collection, The Power of Light, Issac Bashevis Singer showed how this can happen even in the very darkest of circumstances. In the title story, Rebecca and David, 13 and 14, survive the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and hide in a cold cellar. After foraging in the ruins, David brings back some food, and also a single candle and matches. It was the first day of Hanukkah and they lit the candle:

They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.

Shortly thereafter they escaped through the sewers, reached the forest and safety with the partisans. Years later, Rebecca said:

If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn’t know we possessed.

Like our earliest ancestors, like the Maccabees, like Rebecca and David, we celebrate the reemergence of light, most joyfully when we feared darkness will overtake it completely. One of Dr. King’s most famous quotes paraphrases an 1853 sermon by abolitionist Theodore Parker Jr. In that spirit, permit me to add just a bit to the quote:

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