Whatever your celebration this season, try to be a lamplighter in our dark times

Hanukkah is not “the Jewish Christmas.” Unlike, say, Passover and Easter, these two winter festivals share virtually no historical antecedents. To oversimplify a bit, Hanukkah marks the victory of a small band of Jewish traditionalists over both the Hellenistic empire of the Seleucid King Antiochus and the more assimilation-minded Jews who sided with them. Many centuries later, the Talmud added the famous myth of the apocryphal cruse of oil that miraculously burned for eight nights.

And although Hanukkah (which ended two weeks ago) has become a widely observed festival in America, it is, religiously speaking, a relatively minor Jewish holiday.

Yet it is no accident that Hanukkah and Christmas do, in fact, reflect a common practice: kindling lights to illuminate the darkness. This is because both of these celebrations — and many others associated with this season — are derived from pagan solstice festivals. Long before Moses or Maccabees, Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed, people across the Northern Hemisphere marked this time by rejoicing in the return of the sun’s light.

The Talmud recounts a legend that recalls this: “When Adam saw that the days were getting shorter, he said, ‘Woe is me, I sinned and therefore the world is getting darker and returning to chaos. That must be the death decreed upon me!’ Adam then spent eight days in fasting and prayer. When the solstice came, Adam noticed that the days began getting longer and said: ‘This is the way of the world.’ He went on to observe a festival for eight days.” The text goes on to note that the Romans adopted this tradition and called their solstice festival Kalenda.

Even today, winter’s descent into darkness is deeply depressing to many people; how much the more so in a premodern age, before electricity lit up the night. It is entirely natural that people everywhere would revel in the return of the light.

We still do, both literally and metaphorically.

We are, in many ways, living in dark times. Our nation is riven with painful divisions and awash in greed and political corruption. The land of the free and the home of the brave has become a place that separates children from their parents and puts refugees in cages.

But the light will return — if we are persistent and courageous enough to bring it. The story is told of a student who once asked her rabbi: “What does God ask of me?” In good Jewish fashion, the rabbi responded with a story of her own:

“Once upon a time, before there was electricity, there was a person in every town who was responsible for lighting up the streets. A lamp sat on every corner, ready to be lit each night as the sun set. And there was one person whose job it was to walk from street to street, from lamp to lamp, with a flame she carried at the end of a long pole. Each evening this person would walk her route, lighting each and every lamp — no matter how cold it was, or how hard it was to reach.”

“But” — the student interrupted — “What if the lamp is in a distant wilderness, far from everything and everyone?” The rabbi answered: “Then, too, it must be lit, for without it, there would be no light.”

The student looked again at the rabbi and asked: “Rabbi, I still don’t know the right answer. What does God ask of me?”

The rabbi looked at her student and replied: “You can be anything that you want to be. But no matter what you decide to do with your life, you must be a lamplighter on the streets of the world.”

Whatever we are celebrating this season, let us all be lamplighters.