How Do We Respond to the Darkness at Bondi Beach?

We woke up to a darker world. Not just metaphorically, but literally. Lights were extinguished. Candles meant to mark joy, survival, and public belonging were met with gunfire instead. On a beach in Sydney, where Jewish families had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah together, the light was violently interrupted, and people were murdered for the simple act of being visibly Jewish.

It feels as though darkness has won today.

What happened at Bondi Beach was not about Israel or Gaza, not about war or politics, not about borders drawn on a map. It was about Jewish presence itself. It was about Jewish life lived openly and joyfully. When people chant about “globalizing the intifada,” this is the reality of what it looks like.  Jewish life becomes the offense.

How does one respond when visibility itself is punished?

Darkness wants us to believe it is powerful. It wants to feel inevitable, heavy, and permanent. We speak about it as though it is a force with agency and intention, something that actively battles light. In truth, it is far thinner than that. Darkness is simply what remains when light withdraws. It appears when meaning, warmth, and continuity are stripped away. It cannot build. It cannot imagine. It can only empty. That is why hatred is so barren. It does not offer a vision of the future. It offers absence.

Jewish life has always been intolerable to darkness for this reason. It is dense. It fills time on this earth with ritual and meaning. It insists on gathering, on singing, on lighting candles even when the night feels unsafe. When others burn things down, Judaism lights things up.

This is why Hanukkah matters so profoundly. It is not a holiday of faith practiced quietly behind walls. Jewish law insists on the opposite. The menorah is meant to be placed where it can be seen, facing outward toward the street. The miracle is not meant to be protected from view. It is meant to occupy public space.

That is precisely what was attacked at Bondi Beach.

One of the people murdered there was Chabad Rabbi Eli Schlanger. In a video filmed last Hanukkah, now circulating widely, Eli stands beside his car in Sydney. He dances as he lights a menorah mounted proudly on the car’s hood in response to rising antisemitism. He offers to give anyone who wants one a menorah for their home. The video is pure joy. He understood something deeply Jewish: how to spread light. He was trying to fill the world with something where others demanded emptiness.

The purpose of terror is not only to harm, but to instruct us to be smaller, quieter, less visible. Jewish history and traditions have other instructions. Do not disappear. Do not dim yourselves. Do not surrender joy.

Lighting the Hanukkah candles this week is an act of continuity and love. It is the decision to meet fear with fullness.

If you are tired today, if the darkness feels heavy, light the candles anyway. Let them be seen. Let your window say what Jewish life has always said, loudly and unmistakably.

They want the world emptier.

So we fill it with light.