Shabbat Sermon: Two Lights with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

How did we get from Saturday night to Thursday night?

The arc of this past week, the dizzying emotional trajectory, is hard to explain, a genuine mystery. Saturday night, December 13, was Bondi Beach and Brown. The Hanukkah celebration by the Sea that became the Hanukkah massacre by the Sea. The school shooting at Brown, an hour from here, where we have students, parents of students, and long-time faculty at Brown who are members of Temple Emanuel.

Just five nights later, Thursday night, December 18, was our Hanukkah celebration. Now we do a Hanukkah celebration every year, but it was never better than this year. It was never more robustly attended, and never more robust in joy, in spirit. Hundreds of us were celebrating Hanukkah, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, singing, clapping, smiling, shmoozing, catching up with each other happily, eating latkas and sufganiyot, our youngest learners making sugar cookies shmeared with way too much blue frosting, but eating it all with a messy smile. The choirs sang, the musicians played, the parents shepped nachus. We also skewed young, very young that night: preschool children, elementary school children, teens and their parents and grandparents. We sometimes hear the question: where are the young people? The answer is: The young people were at our Hanukkah celebration in droves. It was the world as it should be, utter loveliness.

And we were not alone.

The Jews of Greater Boston celebrated Hanukkah this week with intensity and joy. We knew exactly what happened when there was a public celebration at Bondi Beach. Did that cause us to cower? Did that cause us to cancel our public Hanukkah celebrations? Just the opposite. We had a profusion of joyful, public Hanukkah celebrations in the week of Bondi Beach and Brown, inspired by a resolve not to succumb to terrorism and darkness.

We had joyful, public candle lightings in Newton, Chestnut Hill, Brookline, Needham, Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, Everett, Quincy, the Boston Common. The MFA.

How do we understand this arc from the darkness of Saturday night to the light of Thursday night? The darkness of Saturday night was real and deserved. The stories that came out—the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alex Kleytman, who survived Hitler, Naziism, and lethal European Jew hatred, only to die on a beach in Australia in 2025, every story its own infinite tragedy—all these stories are completely heart-breaking. If this infinite tragedy had curtailed our Hanukkah joy, that would have been understandable, but the opposite happened—a joy that flowed from a resolute place. Our members who thoroughly enjoyed our Hanukkah celebration were not faking it. We were not acting. We were not Meryl Streep. We were genuinely happy in the same week as this deep tragedy that befell our people. What is that?