Oil, Light, and the Courage to Keep Going

This year, we are lighting a new hanukkiah in my home.

It is a traditional one, meant for oil rather than candles. It was a gift from Keren and Harel, dear friends whose lives and family are rooted in Kibbutz Re’im in the Gaza envelope. It was made there, by hand, from a place that now carries profound grief and unimaginable loss after October 7.

Each night when we fill the small cups with oil, I will think about how deliberate this ritual is. Oil is messier than candles. It requires patience and care. It cannot be rushed. And yet it is oil, not wax, that is at the center of the Hanukkah story.

The miracle of Hanukkah was never just that the oil lasted for eight nights. It was that someone believed it was worth lighting at all.

This Hanukkah, that truth feels especially close.

Since October 7, Jewish communities around the world have been holding grief, fear, anger, and exhaustion — often all at once. We are mourning lives brutally taken. We are bearing witness to the sharp rise in antisemitism. We are being asked, implicitly and explicitly, to shrink ourselves, to dim our visibility, to be quieter about who we are.

And yet Hanukkah arrives each year with the same insistence: light anyway.

The Maccabees were not fighting for dominance or conquest. They were fighting for the right to live openly as Jews — to practice their traditions, to pass them on, to refuse erasure. The story is ancient, but the emotional terrain is achingly familiar.

What sustains us is not just memory, but relationship.

The hanukkiah on our table is not only a ritual object. It is a bridge — between Israel and the diaspora, between past and present, between devastation and determination. It carries the hands of the people who made it, the kibbutz where it was formed, the friendships forged through shared values and shared pain.

It also sits at the center of a family that looks different than it once did — and different than it might have in Maccabean times.

This year, we will light the hanukkiah together: me, my son, his father, his father’s wife, and their new baby — my son’s first and only sibling. Our family has changed. It has expanded and reshaped itself in sometimes difficult, but still beautiful ways. And yet, we are still passing the same light, the same blessings, the same story forward.

There is something profoundly Jewish about that.

Judaism has never required our families to look just one way. It has only asked that we show up for one another, that we carry memory with care, and that we teach the next generation who they are and where they come from.

When we light the hanukkiah, we are not ignoring the pain of this moment. We are honoring those whose lives were cut short by insisting that Jewish life continues to matter. That it is worth protecting. That it is worth celebrating.

The oil reminds us that resilience is not loud. It is steady. It is intentional. It is choosing to show up again and again, even when the world feels unstable.

I want my own community, and Jewish communities around the world to hear this clearly: it is okay to feel joy this Hanukkah. It is okay to gather. It is okay to be visibly, proudly, publicly Jewish. Joy is not a betrayal of grief. It is one of our oldest forms of resistance.

We remember those we have lost not only by saying their names, but by living the values they were denied the chance to keep living. Their lives mattered. They still matter. And the light we bring into the world now is part of how we carry them forward.

The oil is still burning.

Not because it is easy.

Not because we are untouched by fear.

But because we are Jews — and bringing light to darkness has always been our answer.