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.

Like so many others, I’ve been struggling for words since October 7. “Ein milim,” “There are no words,” is the phrase many Israelis have used to greet one another. For me, it feels like this time has tested the limits of my ability to formulate words, that language is insufficient to reflect and express all the thoughts and emotions I’ve been having.

Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been preoccupied with questions of speech and silence in the last eight weeks, for this very reason. Judaism is, if nothing else, a tribute to the magnificent possibilities of language. It’s probably why silence feels so immediately countercultural to so many Jews–even though Judaism has a rich tradition of teachings and practices of silence, many of which we teach here at IJS.

But we’re living in a moment when, especially thanks to social media, we may judge ourselves–and we are certainly judged by others–about both our speech and our silence, the words we say or write and the ones we don’t. In the last two months, I have received my share of critical feedback for personal or organizational statements that, in the eyes of the reader, failed to say what needed to be said–on behalf of Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, Palestinian Arabs, Jews confronting antisemitism, Muslims confronting Islamophobia, the kidnapped, the soldiers, the innocent civilians. Feedback has come from everyone from strangers to former students to close relatives. As a result, I have felt acutely aware of and careful with the words I’ve said and written—and with those I’ve left unexpressed. I have felt a kind of sensitivity, an intense critical gaze, peering over me and judging me both for the letters on the page and the spaces in between them.

To be sure, I’ve gotten much more positive feedback than negative. And I appreciate every piece of feedback, whether affirming or critical, as it’s a gift that enables me to learn and grow. But if, as the great leadership theorist Ron Heifetz teaches, leadership is the art of letting people down at a rate they can absorb, then–and I’ll say this on behalf of my fellow Jewish communal leaders–our speech acts today feel like an acute lesson in its limits. Language doesn’t seem capable of communicating all that we want and need to express. It often feels like I’m groping around in the dark, looking for words and expressions I can’t quite find, waiting for the sun to shine and illuminate them for me.

Parashat Vayishlach brings us to the climax of the story of Jacob, so much of which takes place at night. As Avivah Zornberg has noted, Jacob is a creature of the dark, the night: He steals Esau’s blessing from his blind father, Isaac, who lives in a kind of perpetual nighttime; his dream of the ladder connecting heaven and earth takes place at night; his own deception at the hands of Laban, resulting in his marriage to not only Rachel but her sister Leah too, happens at night; it’s at night that he paints Laban’s flocks, and it’s in the darkness that he flees Laban with his family. Now, as he prepares to encounter Esau, he is again awake in the middle of the night, making preparations.

It is notable, therefore, that Jacob’s famous wrestling match with the mysterious man/angel takes place as the sun is about to rise: “And he wrestled with him until the break of dawn” (Gen. 32:25), and “He said, ‘Let me go, for dawn is breaking,’” (v. 27). After the angel leaves, the Torah notes that “the sun rose upon him” (v. 32). Rashi picks up on a perhaps unusual detail in the Hebrew in this last verse: viyzrach lo hashemesh, literally “the sun shone for him.” Rashi seems puzzled about the word lo, for him. His first interpretation is that this is idiomatic, the way we might say that “the sun was shining on me” to mean that something good happened for us: “When we reached such-and-such a place, the sun shone on us.” In this case, it comes to say, perhaps, that the sun shone upon him and he was healed of the injury he sustained in his fight. Or, Rashi offers, that just as the sun had set when Jacob left home (Gen. 18:11), it now rose to greet him as he returned.

But perhaps the Torah is gesturing at the idea that, after a lifetime of living in the murkiness of the night, Jacob finally experienced the light that comes “seeing the Divine face to face” (v. 31), of arriving at not only a physical but a spiritual home. Perhaps Jacob is finally at home with himself—and thus prepared to encounter his twin brother not from a place of fear or lack, but from a grounded sense of abundance: “To see your face is like seeing the face of God,” he tells Esau. “I have everything” (33:10-11)—I am content, I am not afraid, I can embrace you wholeheartedly.

Despite the Rabbis’ midrashic and Talmudic interpretations, I think the plain meaning of the story is that Jacob and Esau both mature into a posture of generosity. They are willing to give one another the benefit of the doubt, to be charitable in both their speaking and their listening. We don’t know what might have led Esau to that, but we can see that, for Jacob, it comes about after the profound inner work that allows the shadows of the night to emerge into the warmth and clarity of sunshine. That’s something I’m working on for myself as a I read and listen to the words of others, and I hope it’s something you’re working on, too. As we make our way through our own long nights, we need all the help we can get. May we support one another on the journey toward the dawn.

I recently heard a podcast interview with Benjamin Wittes, the editor of a blog called Lawfare that I read every now and then. Wittes was talking about the role of context in determining the meaning of speech acts according to the law. He cited the following example: If an insurance salesman says to me, “You have a beautiful house, it would be a shame if something happened to it,” we can understand that as a perfectly normal thing to say. But if a mob boss says the same thing to me, we would understand that as a threat. That is to say, words often don’t have absolute meaning. Rather, we have to understand the context in which they are uttered in order to discern the meaning they convey.

I’ve been thinking about this issue of words and context a lot lately, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war. There has been, of course, a great deal of public discussion of the meaning and context of the words, “From the river to the sea.” Likewise, we encounter questions about the context in which references to Amalek are invoked, or  the meaning of words like “humanitarian pause” or “ceasefire.” At the rally on the National Mall that I attended on Tuesday, I found myself thinking about how messages that are directed internally to the Jewish community are understood by people in other communities—or how words directed internally within other communities are heard and experienced by our own, given our particular stories and experience. Words like “Never Again” can evoke different emotional responses depending on our own history, who is saying them, where and when.

There is perhaps nothing Jewish tradition does better than consider the possible meanings of words. Torah, in its broadest meaning, is understood not only as the Five Books of Moses, but the thousands of years of interpretation of those books—and of the further interpretation and discussion of those interpretations. For Jews, the work of making and interpreting and understanding language is the holiest thing there is. It is what we mean—or, perhaps more accurately, one of the things I think we mean—when we say, as the Mishnah does, “The study of Torah is equivalent to all the other mitzvot put together.”

Parashat Toldot contains one of the murkiest, most mysterious passages in the Torah: Jacob’s deception of his elderly, blind father, Isaac, in order to steal his brother Esau’s blessing. One of the ways we can understand this story is as a reflection on the complexities of language and interpretation. We can read the story as the struggle of Isaac to understand clearly what is happening—and of Jacob to discern how to behave. As readers, we sense Isaac’s profound challenge: He seems to know something is off in this situation, as reflected in his repeated attempts to verify the identity of Jacob (who he thinks, and wants to believe, is Esau). We can sense Jacob’s struggle to carry out the task. And we can even sense the struggle we, as readers and interpreters, have in discerning the meaning of the story—this last perhaps most clearly when Isaac asks, “Who are you, my son,” and Jacob replies, “I am Esau, your firstborn.” Rashi, unable to live with the idea that Jacob lied so directly, strains credulity by parsing the verse, “I am, [and] Esau is your firstborn.” In the context of the story, such an interpretation is incredible. In the context of Rashi’s larger project, and his theological and ideological commitments, it’s understandable. Context is key.

One of the values I find in mindfulness practice is that it invites, even demands of me to pause and consider the context of words—both words I speak or write and words I hear or read. As I shared recently, I’ve been referring a lot lately to the Buddha’s five principles of right speech (and right listening): Are these words true? Are they timely? Are they gentle? Are they beneficial? Are they spoken with goodwill? Wartime is, almost by definition, one in which our capacity to create space between stimulus and response is reduced. Our world of social media, which is designed to feed and feed on our reactive impulses, intensifies that reality even more.

All of which suggests to me that we need to double down on our practice, to insist on more space and time in evaluating the words we see and hear, and the contexts in which we see and hear them, and crafting the words we put out into the world and the contexts in which we do so (and, it should go without saying, to reduce our time on social media).

So much depends on our words. A few words uttered by Jacob in this week’s Torah portion have an enormous effect on his own life and that of his descendants—right down to today. May our practice help us communicate wisely and listen with clarity and resilience.