I finally watched “Barbie” this week. I was on the plane, heading home after an intensive four days of work, too exhausted to do much of anything else. So, the movies. 

The other night our middle son, Micah, had a basketball game. We always try to light Hannukah candles together as a family, so we waited for him to come home. We wound up lighting the hanukkiah after 9 pm. (They won the game, btw–and he even had a three-pointer.) Natalie and I take fire safety seriously, so we wanted to make sure the flames were out before going to bed. So I decided to sit by the candles as they burned down.

As I sat there gazing at the flames, I realized that so many of the Hannukah teachings and practices I’m familiar with focus on lighting the candles, kindling the flames: observing the light, the idea of creating light in the darkness. Even the way we tell the story about the miracle of the oil has to do with its lighting (“It’s a miracle they found any oil!”) and the duration of the burning (lasting for eight days).

But that evening my attention was more drawn to the dying of the flames, the way they burn brightly and then, as they get lower and lower, diminish into a hushed presence. You don’t know exactly when they’re going to go out, but you can sense it’s coming–in a similar way to an animal or a person who is clearly in the process of dying. And then, suddenly, the flame is gone, a wisp of smoke rises up, and with it the smell of a candle snuffed out wafts into the air and lingers for a while.

We tend to like beginnings. They convey hope and a future. Perhaps for this reason we follow the custom of Hillel, to work our way up from one lonely candle on the first night to the majestic display of eight candles on the last. Our tradition opted for this position rather than that of Hillel’s great rival, Shammai, who argued that we should start with eight candles and work our way down to one.

In a poem she published the other day, Rabbi Jen Gubitz explores an alternative history of Hannukah:

What if Shammai was right?
What if
Each night
We go to light
And there is more darkness in our hearts
Than the night before?

What if we are not like Hillel
Cannot see the light increase
Cannot strike the match
Or have run out of wax and wick?

What if the wickedness
Of the world
Or the pain in our soul
Casts dark shadows
On the glimmering lights?

What if the miracle
Is the single flickering flame
On the last night
While the world
Tries to snuff you out?

I found Jen’s poem to be a poignantly honest expression of the Hannukah many of us have had this year–one that feels filled with more loss and heartbreak and darkness than we’ve felt in a long time, perhaps ever. What if, indeed, Shammai was right?

But I also want to end on a hopeful note, and for that I look to the Torah portion. Specifically, I look to a wordplay that happens in the Hebrew. In verse 53 of chapter 41 of Genesis, the Torah writes, “the seven years of plenty came to an end.” The opening word of this verse is וַתִּכְלֶ֕ינָה, vatikhlena, “they came to an end.” It comes from the same word that marks the completion of the six days of creation at the very beginning of Genesis, vayekhulu.

Now comes the wordplay: The next verse reads, “and the seven years of famine began.” The first word is וַתְּחִלֶּ֜ינָה, vatchilena, “they began.” The two words sound almost identical–but they mean precisely the opposite of one another. One is an ending, the other a beginning.

While the meaning of the text could have been conveyed in many different formulations, the Torah, through this exquisite little move, seems to go out of its way to gesture toward something else–a poetic expression, perhaps, of the reality that every ending is, indeed, a beginning; or, put differently, what we believe to be endings and beginnings are illusions. This is, in so many words, exactly what Joseph tells his brothers in next week’s Torah portion: “God sent me on ahead of you to make you a remnant on earth” (45:7). What they thought was an ending was, in fact, a beginning.

We are constantly living through endings and beginnings. Some are hopeful, some are painful, many evoke a jumble of feelings. As the final candles in our hannukiot burn down and those wisps of smoke ascend heavenward, may our practices help us live through every moment of transition (which, in reality, is every moment) with ease, wisdom, and peace.

This coming Saturday night marks the fifth yahrtzeit, or death anniversary, of my father, Lou Feigelson z”l (pictured above with my mother during the dancing at our wedding; it’s a favorite picture.)

While professionally my Dad made his living in real estate and property management in our hometown of Ann Arbor, at his core he was a teacher. Like so many children of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century, he was a product of public schools who commuted to the local public university (Wayne State). He was a Boy Scout and went to summer camp, which expanded his world beyond the Detroit of his youth (it was at a Fresh Air camp, Camp Tamarack, that he met my mom). And I think those two forces, school and camp, always remained, in his mind and heart, places and ideas and forces towards which he felt enormous gratitude, responsibility, and joy.

As I’ve mentioned before in this space, my Dad was our Boy Scout troop’s scoutmaster. One of the things I remember learning from him at an early age was how to run a patrol or troop meeting: having an activity for the scouts when they showed up that set the theme for the learning to take place, transitioning into an opening ritual, running a more identifiable period of teaching-and-learning, creating an opportunity for them to apply their newly-acquired knowledge in a fun and engaging way, review, recognition, closing. I probably learned that from him at age 11 or 12. It was only years later, in my own work as an educator (my brothers are attorneys; one of us had to go into the family business) that I came to realize that Dad had taught me what teachers would recognize as a “set induction.” He was teaching me to teach.

There is a poignancy, of course, to marking my father’s yahrtzeit on the third day of Hanukkah. The holiday is now, and for the rest of my life will be, bound up with remembering him. Which is frankly lovely, as Hanukkah was a holiday my father took seriously. Every morning he would clean out the previous night’s wax and get the candles ready for that evening so that they would be ready for us, as though they were reminding us all day, “It’s Hanukkah!” as we passed by them. Lighting the candles was a serious mitzvah for him.

And every year Hanukkah, and now my father’s yahrtzeit, comes as we read the stories of Joseph, a child separated from his father. While, thankfully, the circumstances were dramatically different (and my older brothers are good guys), like many other young people, I left home at age 18, about the same age as Joseph was sold into captivity in Egypt. And like many others, including Joseph, the years of my young adulthood were marked by looking for mentors and surrogate parental figures. (For Joseph, Potiphar and ultimately Pharaoh are two such people; mine weren’t quite so dramatic, but they were very important people in my life.)

The writer Sharon Daloz Parks, who was an important mentor to me as a young professional, wrote an illuminating book on the period of young adult life called Big Questions, Worthy Dreams. The book explores what Parks sees as the key task of young adulthood, namely to “become fittingly at home in the universe, moving from authority-bound forms of meaning-making anchored in conventional assumed community, through the wilderness of counterdependence and unqualified relativism, to a committed, inner-dependent mode of composing meaning.” This then points towards “a still more mature faith–an engaged wisdom grounded in the conviction of interdependence, seeking communion with those who are profoundly other than the self.”

I think that’s one way we can understand the story of Joseph, who, through a long period of suffering and searching and journeying, moves from a sheltered, privileged, even arrogant posture of his youth into a more mature, adult posture as an adult. He acquires a hard-won wisdom. Like his father and uncle, about whom I wrote last week, Joseph, like his brothers, grows up. And in that process of maturation, he and his brothers become shaped into characters who ultimately seem to understand their interdependence, the inextricability of their lives together, their mutual responsibility toward one another, as best evidenced, perhaps, in Judah’s poignant line describing the relationship between Benjamin and Jacob: “Their souls are bound up together” (Gen. 44:30). In this, they echo a lesson of Hanukkah, which invites us to recognize our mutuality and interdependence, to learn to kindle fire responsibly, to reflect and nurture the lights in our lives and the world.

In the last five years, as Hanukkah has become bound up with remembering the death and life of my father–as the yahrtzeit candle flickers and glows amidst the Hanukkah lights on the third night–the holiday has become richer and deeper for me. It’s easy for Hanukkah to be a children’s holiday, and thank God for that. But like all our holidays, its practices are ones that can help us grow bigger and wiser. This Hanukkah, when so many of us so deeply need it, may we kindle our lights within and without, may we deepen in both joy and wisdom, and may our practice lead to the light of redemption and peace.