this joy

There was a moment this week, when I was biking in the bitter cold trying not to wipe out on the ice, my ears stinging from the wind, when I realized I was singing to myself. The little hum in my heart had become audible. “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. The world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away.”

Thanks to Rabbi Mó, the beautiful song This Joy written by the resistance revival chorus and produced by Righteous Babe Records, has become a KT Hanukkah anthem of sorts. This week, the actual darkest week of the year, punctured by numerous acts of heinous violence, the song emerged like a warm light from my frozen, frightened, grieving subconscious.

Given the explicit spiritual instruction to light the menorah in public, to take pride and radiate the joy and light, the attack at Bondi Beach was violating and destabilizing. I am grateful to Jewish Currents for translating my heartfelt experience into words:

“It was devastating to wake up Sunday morning to the news of a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. News like this is doubly distressing: First and foremost there is the reckoning with the loss of human life—among the dead were a girl of 10 and a Holocaust survivor—a reckoning that is particularly difficult amid nonstop news of massacres and gun violence. Then there is also the exhaustion of knowing that there will be no time to grieve or to collect our thoughts before we on the Jewish left go on defense, as we try to parry brazen attempts by the Israeli government, Jewish communal organizations, and pro-Israel actors to claim victims of antisemitic violence in the diaspora as proxy Israelis, and to link their deaths to the movement for Palestinian liberation.” 

The coincidence of the 8th night of Hanukkah with the Winter solstice has deep significance. I don’t know how often it happens, but I can tell you that the sages imagine it was like this in Gan Eden, when the world was first created. 

The Sages taught that when Adam HaRishon, the very first person, experienced the very first winter and saw that the daylight was progressively diminishing, they feared the days would just grow shorter and shorter until the light was gone and everything returned to tohu va’vohu, chaos and disorder. They said, “Woe is me; perhaps because of my own transgressions the world is becoming dark around me.” This must be my doing.

In response, that very first human offered songs of praise and lit candles and observed a festival for 8 days. And thus was the very first Hanukkah! until they saw that the daylight was progressively lengthening. They realized the days become shorter and then longer, and this is the order of the world (B.T. Avodah Zarah 8a).

This year, despite it being five thousand seven hundred and eighty six years since the creation of the world, there is something primordial happening. We are back in a state of chaos, kindling lights to reclaim order and hope. 

I know there are days when I feel the violence and disorder will not recede. I know terrorism and fascism are not akin to the solstice, nor should they be part of the natural order of the world. And yet, they are the doom and gloom of our time and we must use every spiritual resource we have to confront them. 

To quote the best fundraising email I have received this season from Bread and Roses Community Fund, “Despite everything we’ve lived through this year, there is another story unfolding—one where communities organize, resist, and rise up with unflinching resolve.” 

This joy, the world didn’t give it to us. But we can give it to each other! And we can remind ourselves that the world can’t take it away. Which is what Hanukkah is all about. 

I invite you to play this song on repeat til it wells up in you. Come sing it with us on Shabbat morning and again at our Hanukkah party on Sunday evening. Joy metabolizes stress and fear and anxiety. It is medicine for these times! ​