Growing Accustomed

Yesterday some hundreds of preschool students descended upon Brandeis for our annual Preschool-Middle School Hanukkah Program. As they trooped into the gym hand-in-hand with our middle schoolers, agog at the bigness of those other kids, the space, the day, it was a good reminder to notice the same. It can be easy to lose sight of the scope and the wonder of our world; their wide eyes reasserted the awe of the season. When, in learning to make paper circuits with those same middle school buddies, one girl whirled around to her parents holding a shining LED, that wonder was for a moment captured, mastered, and given new form. She had done something new, something she perhaps hadn’t thought she could, and the radical amazement on her face spoke to mysteries and possibilities newly opened.

 

Earlier in the program Debby Arzt-Mor had asked all our guests to share with their new buddies what they most enjoyed about Hanukkah. I was standing with a preschool parent who said, “Latkes” without missing a beat, and then asked me what my answer would be. I responded that the combination of the melody we use for the prayer over the candles, and the candle lighting itself, are my most cherished Hanukkah memories—core childhood scenes that are evoked in an instant by the smell of the match smoke and the lilt of the song.

 

When I think of those Hanukkah memories, I picture our very small living room on Spaulding Street in Berkeley, the darkness of winter night pressing against the window, glowing with the light of the candles in our single hanukkiah (this phenomenon now where everyone gets their own hanukkiah to light remains an odd amusement to me). Usually what I think of in that memory is the light, quavering, the unfamiliar experience in twentieth century America of a room lit solely by candles. This year though, my younger daughter invited me to see that memory differently. On the first night of Hanukkah, we were lighting the one candle and the shamash, set at varying distances from that one candle in our various hanukkiot. Alma asked why we weren’t lighting all eight candles, and pointed to the spaces in between the lit ones, highlighting the absence their darkness contained.

 

Her question was at once simple and profound. We don’t light all eight candles because it’s only the first night—but what to make of all that empty space where light could be? I realized in responding that I had always experienced Hanukkah as a building up of light, an accretive holiday that gets brighter day by day. But in seeing it in those terms I render invisible what is lost, night by night—the darkness, the absence, between.

 

This realization brought to mind for me a funny Emily Dickinson poem, if you’ll excuse me for describing any Emily Dickinson poems as funny. It reads, in its entirety:

 

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye -

A Moment - We Uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

 

There is much to engage with, here—darkness as a space of uncertainty, the darknesses within our minds and spirits, the oddness of her describing someone walking forehead-first into a tree (maybe a branch?), and the beautiful, awkward pararhyme at the end between sight and straight, which always produces in me an abiding discomfort as a reader. No matter how accustomed we get to the dark, that off-rhyme seems to say, our paths through it will not be simple—only almost straight.

 

What it means to navigate darkness seems a worthy question of our hanukkiot this season. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks recently said to the House of Lords, our schools need to equip students with an ethical navigation system, so that they can meet the uncertain steps of the future with at least a moral compass to guide them. But I think what I learned from our guests yesterday, from my conversation with Alma this week, was that we can see in that darkness not only the absence of light, waiting to be filled, or the fear of the unknown, but as well mystery, possibility, and even hope.

 

Wishing you all holidays and sparkle seasons full of the bright and the dark, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan