Fueling Hope

Happy Hanukkah, my Hebrews and Shebrews! I usually write a punny post for this happy holiday, but it's a different sort of year.

I've traded לביבה (latkes) for 감자전 (potato pancakes), and with COVID-19 looking serious at home, it feels more appropriate than ever to recall the Syrians of the 2nd Century, or rather, the havoc they wreaked.

We're all looking for a miracle; you can call us carefree wannabees, which is why I wanna bring up the Maccabees.

It's a time when we can all use some hope and a little warmth from the fire -- from another fire than that which has been the dumpster fire of this year.

There's something poetic about the Hanukkah story, how it would be nothing without a little bit of oil.

As a refresher, that little bit of oil lasted for reportedly eight nights. Life was rough, a temple destroyed, and where there would be hope and optimism and any manner of confidence in the future, there was a void and enough oil to last for one night.

Hope is hard to find these days. You've gotta work for hope. You've gotta work for optimism. Every day, it feels so easy to give up, admit defeat, to want to question the mask, rebel against reality, go back to normal, and all of our hope goes into a vaccine, into the pharmaceutical machine that we debate if we can or should trust, helpless against the situation which life has thrust us into, into solitude and social distance, into being a thankless hero by staying home, into an extrovert feeling alone, and even introverts bored of being alone.

And yet, thousands of years ago, there was a little bit of oil after an invasion, enraged with so many dead, a temple destroyed, religion oppressed, and yet, it was hard to celebrate a revolutionary victory when you counted fewer reasons to celebrate than to be depressed.

And yet, they found hope.

And yet, we find hope.

I've heard the stories and songs of Hanukkah all through my life. They were always fun and lighthearted. We would light the hanukkiah, eat, and be happy. But never did oil ever much occur to me or affect me.

But maybe there was never any oil. Maybe it was a metaphor of a time long ago when there was no hope, and yet people found hope within themselves, enough to last long enough to carry them into a brighter trial.

And this is our trial: hope in a time of denial, of confusion and revolution, of understanding and both sides demanding to be heard. We need to hear. We need to see. It's hard to see what you cannot, like the things you refuse to see, or the things that are too far in the future, or when the world seems dark, a light put out by corona, and you feel alone again, and there's so much fighting, and in-fighting, and maybe if you can just look a little farther, just reach a bit more yonder, you can see a light.

There's a little oil inside each of us. Keep it burning.

Happy Hanukkah!