Candles

When we were children, my brothers and I played a betting game every night of Hannukah. Each of us would pick a different candle in the menorah, betting that it would be the last one burning. It was a reverse race, with victory going to the slowest. Since the candles were of uniform size they burned at similar rates, and the finishes were usually close. Years of competition led me to conclude that the results were pretty random. Neither of the observable variables—not placement toward the center or the outer edge of the menorah, nor color of the paraffin—seemed predictive of performance.

When I had young children of my own, we continued the game. With the kids grown and out of the house, my wife and I still try to pick the winner, but as often as not we're out of the room when the race ends, and we miss the payoff.

As with any sporting event, we spectators would tend to narrativize the race, and since we were invested in the outcomes, we found the endings dramatic. Sometimes a candle seemed destined to lose, burning faster than its rivals, but then magically it would hold on for the win. Reduced to only a red hot wick in a pool of liquified wax with the faintest of blue flames, it would somehow outlast the still solid stubs of neighboring candles. More often the winner would be the stately candle that burned slowest from beginning to end. It was fun to assign virtues to the candles, whether they be the scrappy survivor, or the calm steady presence. As with all games, the variety of outcomes accommodated a variety of contradictory metaphors about winning and losing.

But one metaphor has been pretty consistent over the years, and it applies to the moment each candle is extinguished. Perhaps everyone has observed a candle burning out, but we would watch for it avidly. The moment is clearly marked by a puff of smoke, more voluminous than one might expect from a fading ember. Sometimes the smoke ascends upward in a beautiful curving thread. Sometimes it forms a curling spiral. No matter the pattern, after a moment it's gone. It's hard to witness the extinguishing of a candle and not contemplate death. And the metaphor works just as well whether we envision a soul ascending to heaven, or a consciousness leaving a body and passing into oblivion.

This year it was painful for me to watch the candles die, because each puff of smoke reminded me of the lives being snuffed out on a daily basis in Palestine. I realize that innocents die around the world every day, and have through all the Hannukahs of my existence, but on a holiday that celebrates my people's fight for freedom, it was too much to bear my people's heartless, relentless bombing of civilian targets.

The idea that there is a progressive form of Zionism died in me a long time ago. As a child I was raised to think of Israel as a symbol of religious freedom, of a country striving to create a socialist paradise. I was not taught about the people who were displaced in Israel's creation, nor about their ongoing segregation and oppression. (Not unlike the way I was raised to think of America as the triumph of democratic idealism, with scant attention paid to the Native Americans or enslaved Africans who were actually central to the narrative.) By my early adulthood I no longer believed in the righteousness of Zionism, but remained surrounded by well-meaning loved ones who wanted to believe that the story of Israel was a happy, hopeful one.

Even as Israel grew more militantly right-wing, even as settlements spread unabated, too many of my Jewish relatives, friends, and colleagues continued to hope for a path to peaceful coexistence with Palestinians through a two-state solution, though that solution looked more chimerical with each passing day. Because these are people I love, I forgave them their illusions, understanding that like me they had been raised in the grip of a powerful but profoundly false myth. (I also looked for opportunities to challenge that myth, but rarely pressed the point when I encountered too much resistance.)

October 7, and the Israeli response has changed everything. To continue to believe that Israel is reasonably working toward a peaceful resolution, one has to somehow ignore or minimize the 20,000 deaths it has caused in the last 10 weeks. And yes, Hamas' attack was brutal and totally unforgivable, but being the victim of evil does not give one the moral high ground to perpetuate an evil at 17 times its scale.

And so as I watched the puffs of smoke emerge from the menorah this year, I was pained not only by the deaths of innocents, but by the moral deaths of those loved ones who have been unable to confront the magnitude of Israel's crimes, and unable or unwilling to grieve the loss of life Israel has caused.

But though I felt totally hopeless as I watched the candles of the menorah die, writing this I find myself nurturing a new hope. The death of the fantasy that there can be a progressive Zionism leaves a vacuum, where those Jews who always wanted to do the right thing can throw more of themselves into the struggle to create a world of justice and lovingkindness for all of humankind. When we stop believing in nations, we have no choice but to believe in each other.