December 20, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Miketz—Rosh Chodesh—Shabbat Hanukkah
Two Lights
December 20, 2025—30 Kislev 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
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?
Hanukkah is of course about eight lights. But I think the flip from the darkness of Saturday night to the light of Thursday night flows from two lights: an external light, and an internal light.
The external light, as we all know, is the hero of this year’s Hanukkah story, Ahmed al-Ahmed. Ahmed al-Ahmed is a Muslim who was born in Syria, who immigrated to Australia and became an Australian citizen. He is 43 years old. He owns a fruit shop. He is married and the father of two. He is not a member of the Jewish community, but he was there, at Bondi Beach, when the massacre began, when the shooters started shooting. The video of his heroic intervention has gone viral. The video begins with him crouching behind a parked car. He emerges from the car, runs towards the shooter who is actively shooting, he tackles the shooter, thereby exposing himself to real risk, he manages to strip the gun from the shooter. That is what the video shows. And that is more than heroic in and of itself. Whatever the highest award Australia offers its citizens, he deserves it. But his story is even more heroic than that. What was he doing before the video began?
Answer: He was having coffee with a friend. He was safe and sound in a café when he heard shots ring out. He easily could have said: This is not my fight. But he didn’t. Instead, he ran towards danger to save a people that is not his people.
And the good he did by doing so is literally incalculable. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin famously teaches that if we save one life, we save a universe, because we save not only that life, but we also save the life of all the universes that can now be born.
So Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim originally from Syria, at the risk of his own life, saved who knows how many lives and how many universes. The goodness he brought into the world is beyond measure.
The shooters are real. They are part of humanity. But Ahmed al-Ahmed is also real. He is also a part of humanity. Humanity contains both.
Our question now is, who do we want to be, and what can we do, to tilt the scale towards the good. We are not spectators. We are participants. We have agency.
Few of us could do what Ahmed al-Ahmed did. Few of us could tackle a terrorist and wrestle away the gun.
But all of us can try our best to emulate the moral core at the heart of what Ahmed al-Ahmed did. He transcended his tribe to embrace humanity and decency. Can we like people who are not like us? Can we sacrifice for people who are not like us? In a world torn by strife and division, can we do what Ahmed al-Ahmed did?
It is hard to do when we feel endangered. Feeling endangered can make us circle the wagons. But Ahmed al-Ahmed inspires us to care about, to work for the betterment of, all human beings of goodwill. We need to build bridges with people who are not like us, always and especially now.
Ahmed al-Ahmed is the external light that gave us hope this week. But there is also an internal light, which is this: There is something built into the Jewish people, built into our story from our very beginning, that adversity makes us tougher, stronger, more determined than ever. When Pharaoh begins persecuting the Israelites, the Torah noted a pattern: ka’asher yeanu oto, kein yirbeh v’cheyn yifrotz, the more our ancestors were oppressed, the more determined they became to keep on living. True then. True now.
When I was at our Hanukkah party Thursday night, I met a man who shared the following story. He was holding his phone, and he said I need to show you something. He said I was in Israel during the war with Gaza. I was with three friends in a bar when a platoon of Israeli soldiers walked into the bar. There were a lot of soldiers, I would learn in time the exact number, 30. They were wearing their uniforms. They were carrying their guns. They walked into the bar and took seats. They looked exhausted, like they had been through the ringer.
Instinctively I jumped out of my chair, went to the bar, and asked the bartender to give the soldiers a fine bottle of whiskey, on me. We could see the soldiers knocking down the shots, and that bottle went quickly. In time my three friends each paid for another bottle of excellent whiskey, and in time the soldiers invited us to join them, and to take shots with them. The 34 of us, 30 IDF soldiers, 4 Americans, went through four fine bottles of whiskey, and in the course of that sharing they told us their story. They were a special forces unit of the IDF, they were in Gaza for 300 straight days, and they just got out. This bar was their first stop back home. At the end of the evening, after we thanked them and were ready to go, they did something I will never forget. They said that each of the 30 soldiers is carrying a bottle of sand from Gaza, and the bottle of sand has the insignia of their special forces division, and a bunch of writing in Hebrew that I cannot understand. But each soldier carries this bottle of sand back home to Israel because they fought and risked and survived the unimaginable to defend our people. This bottle of sand means we do not give up on life. We do not cower. We do not shrink. We fight for our life and for the life of our people. Even if it means 300 straight days in Gaza. There were 30 bottles of Gaza sand in the bar that night. Then they said: you are us. And four soldiers gave up four of those bottles of Gaza sand to the four of us. Pointing to the picture of his bottle of Gaza sand on his cell phone, he said: this is the most meaningful thing I own.
How do we get from Saturday night to Thursday night? What powers the arc from deep sadness to deep joy within one week? We have two lights. The external light of the decency of others like Ahmed al Ahmed. The internal light of our own determination to never give up on life that is as old as the Hebrew Bible and as new as the IDF. If we can hold onto these two lights, then even in a week like the one we just had, we can fulfill the vision of the psalmist in psalm 30, which is also the psalm for Hanukkah, ba’erev yelin bekhi b’laboker rinah, in the evening there is weeping, but joy will come in the morning. Joy came Thursday night. Joy is here this morning. Our story is joy. Shabbat shalom and Chanukah sameakh!