Winter Solstice Message

And Hanukah, Too!

When I was in my first year of college, and long before I became a Witch, I had a small part time job teaching Jewish Sunday school. As we approached Hanukah, I started to tell the children the story of how, in the second century BCE, the Greek overlords forbade the Jews of Palestine to practice their religion. The Maccabee family led a revolt that, by some miracle succeeded. When they went to cleanse the temple that Greek soldiers had defiled, and relight the eternal flame, they found that they had only enough oil to keep it burning for one day. Replenishing the supply would take at least eight days. Nonetheless, they lit the flame, and by a miracle it burned for all eight days. And that is why we light candles, increasing by one each night until, on the eight night, the Menorah is fully ablaze.

One my young students looked at me and sighed, clearly bored. “We heard that story last year!” he complained.

I was taken aback. Clearly, he didn’t understand that the point of ritual and ceremony is to tell the same stories over and over again, so they become embedded in your experience of the cycles of the year and the cycles of your life. Hopefully, with each turn around the wheel, you find new meanings in the same old tale.

This year Hanukah’s culmination coincides with the Winter Solstice, and that seems particularly fitting. Many of us believe that the miracle of the oil is, in reality, merely a cover story for a magical Solstice ritual, possibly far older than Hanukah, to bring back the light at the darkest time of the year. After all, as miracles go, this one seems pretty undramatic. It’s not like the parting of the Red Sea, with those waves hovering above the heads of the fleeing Israelites, or the walls of Jericho tumbling down. Just a small flame, that doesn’t go out.

This year has been a hard Hanukah, with the shootings at Bondi Beach that cannot help but rekindle ancient traumas and fears of persecution. And it’s been a sequence of hard Hanukahs for those of us who care about justice, who cannot stand to see Israel committing atrocities in Gaza and Palestine, and yet in spite of all our efforts, we cannot stop the slaughter. The combination of undeserved victimization and unwanted complicity is especially painful, although not nearly as painful as holding the bloody, broken bodies of your loved ones in your arms.

And it’s not just Jews. All of us, at least here in the U.S. who still retain some compassion for others and a sense of justice, who deplore the acts of our government and yet are not personally rotting in some hell-hole of an immigration jail, or starving while relief food rots in a warehouse, or clinging to the edge of a blown-up boat waiting for the second strike, or watching our kids die of a preventable disease, all of us who are celebrating this holiday in warm houses with good food and friends and family around us, all of us feel some combination of fear—will we be next?—survivor guilt and the complicity we can never completely dispel.

So maybe this year we do need precisely the lesson of that little light that did not go out. The message of Hanukah is that while terrible things have happened, and may happen again, sometimes the weak can triumph over the strong, The defiled can be cleansed, and resistance can bring liberation. And the message of Solstice, retold every year, is that just when the world grows darkest, the sun will rise again.

We are each a little light, a small flame that needs sacred fuel to burn. Yet we can keep that flame alight, longer than we might expect, if we commit to acts of courage and compassion. On this longest night, as the Great Mother labors to bring forth the sun of the new year, we are midwives. We tend, we comfort, we empathize, we do the work. Let us bring to birth the warmth of compassion, the fire of commitment, the light of truth this year. The wheel is turning. After each night comes a new dawn.

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If you’d like an audio meditation for this Solstice, here’s one from my podcast: