First light // Ninth night
Let there be
“A moment comes like a thunderbolt in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Thunderbolt
These days, I sometimes feel like I am living inside that thunderbolt Heschel describes. The flash, the shudder, surrounding me on all sides. I know I’m not alone here. We are living through an era of perpetual revelation rupturing our dark apathies, one after another after another. It is breathtaking really, what is illuminated in the irrepressible bursts of light defining our time. The soul-shaking cracks of the holy whip from forces vast and unfathomable.
These moments of sacred reckoning Heschel describes aren’t asking for TikTok translations or reductive Instagram reels. We are way out in the desert. The sky wears dense clouds like an ancient argument. The electric swell is upon us and there are metal rods in the ground scattered everywhere and the bolts that zap them were desperate for release. I am consumed in their hot, bright fury… but the world rushes onward. Hasty interpretations or mad dashes to a disassociated exit, anything to get away from the burn. I’ve been there too, trying to make sense of the senseless as quick as I can to stem discomfort. But in the urgency to react, to craft a quick post, to turn trauma around into something digestible, truth becomes disposable to trend. I can’t keep up. I don’t want to. I want integrity on this walk toward truth.
There is a cost to wakefulness and the fever pitch of modernity cannot handle it, isn’t built for it.
There is a responsibility to wakefulness. I am learning how to meet it.
First light
On the “easternmost” edges of the Earth, dawn lifts night’s veil with the first light of a new day. Our planet rotates into the midnight position and yesterday becomes today along the erratic zigzag where astronomy and political strategy converge, known as the International Date Line. We in the west inherit the day that our eastern relatives lived ahead of us. It is tomorrow in Australia. On December 14th, Hanukkah was ushered in for us with the first of the menorah lights burning around the globe, only for it to be the last for fifteen Jews hunted on Bondi beach, from 10 years old to 87. Hour by hour as the Earth rotated along its axis, a new wave of Jewish people awoke to the horror of mass murder that would permanently stain our holiday.
A lightning bolt. Striking over and over.
I had no first night plans because my friend C scheduled a dinner at a fancy local restaurant for a big group of us weeks before, and I hadn’t thought then to check when Hanukkah started. There is only one other Jewish friend in this group and upon arrival, we met each other with a knowing, heavy-hearted look. We huddled together at the end of the night and she whispered: “It’s amazing to me that literally none of our friends can pause to acknowledge what happened in Bondi. We have to sit through an entire dinner with zero recognition on the first night of Hanukkah? It’s like it doesn’t even matter. It’s like the insidious notion that we deserve this is the unspoken collective understanding at this point.”
I shuddered, meeting her in the tenderness of resonance, positing about the surge of pogroms and the insidious influences tearing away at compassion and common humanity and decency, our shoulders pressed up against each other, cocooned in our ruptured world, staring into the candlelight flickering at the center of the table as our friends laughed and ignored us.
Ninth night
Hanukkah proceeded for me in hazy loneliness. Before the massacre, S made a WhatsApp group called “Hanukkah schemes” to divvy up the nights amongst our dwindling circle of Jewish friends splintered in the aftermath of October 7th. I didn’t want to host anything, but G nudged me into it. Second night, sixth night, and seventh night were snagged fast, and together, (and this is important), we decided I would host the last night – Monday. The first and the last are the holiest and I was honored to be “chosen” in a sense. I even made a cute little invitation.
But as the days drifted by, hosts dropped off. Only one of the nights we lit a menorah together, but that was because we were already gathered for a separate occasion — a Solstice party. The candle lighting was meaningful, poignant, and frankly the star of the night, but it wasn’t a Hanukkah party. There were no latkes.
Then it hit me. Monday was not the last night of Hanukkah. Not a single one of us had realized this. I sent out a quick text to G. “Should I cancel???” “No!” “Ok I’ll keep it. Dang. Well maybe we need a little extra light this year anyway!”
I texted the whole guest list – a mix of Jews and gentiles: “We’re doing it anyway! Turns out this is the Hanukkah miracle of 2025, a 9th night!” I laughed it off, put my phone down, laced up my apron, and got to work.
The same friend at that “first night” fancy dinner party walked in to my condo thick with cooking smells and the boisterousness of two former Yeshiva boys who are a lot like latkes in hot oil when they come together. She rushed into the galley kitchen where I was finishing three different dishes while frying latkes and grabbed me by the shoulders…
“You know what I thought about as I was driving over???!”
“What!?”
“… It’s perfect that you’re doing this. This is the night that was stolen from us…”
A lightning bolt. My whole body shivered and burned simultaneously.
“The ninth night is a redemption of the first that we didn’t get to have. That they didn’t get to have.”
. . .
The house filled with friends. I pulled out one of my Shabbat candle holders and a chunky non-Hanukkah candle as the shamash, the helper candle that lights all the others, and filled my menorah with the rest of my Hanukkah candles to rig up a little 10 candle situation for this unprecedented experience. We turned off the lights, lit the shamash… but we didn’t know what to do next. We’d never done this before! We knew we couldn’t recite the Hanukkah blessing as Hanukkah was over… so after a moment of classic Jewish debate, we settled on singing the Shehecheyanu, a blessing over the new. The new moon or the new year or the first night of a holiday, or the first time you’re doing something, a milestone, a threshold.
“Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.”*
*God, source, creator, the universe…
…in honor of our global family who simply seek to exist in our brightest light…
It is remarkable what 9 candles can do in the dark. The faces of your beloveds, once nearly invisible, suddenly come to life in striking, heart-melting glory. But 10 candles burning all at once? 10 candles is a revelation. A lightning bolt.
I didn’t know how to start this piece today. I’ve been in the quiet, in the pause, in the humbling and soul-shattering reverberation of shock through the cosmos that is living through terrifying darknesses on increasing display in the light of these harrowingly confrontational times. The torturous mechanizations of hatred leave few unscathed. I was tongue-tied. What could I say?
I flipped open my journal, and I’m ending with words I’d written on an undated page long ago, some kind of yesterday, that sparked me to show up to this screen today:
“Ceremony starts with the ending of a world and the creation of a new one.”
Our 9th night ceremony was exactly this.
In Celtic tradition, there is a concept of the 9th wave. In the old-world wisdom of a seafaring people, the 9th wave is when ceremony begins. You are right on the knife’s edge between safety and risk, home and the unknown, exactly too far from shore to turn back easily, and right on the cusp of infinite possibility.
I had no idea the 9th night of Hanukkah — an affair that I could never replicate in its singular importance this year in particular — would offer a similar portal. A moment came like a thunderbolt in which a flash of the undisclosed rended our dark apathy asunder. The ineffable shuddered itself into the soul, entering our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake.
Something had to end inside each of us that night, something has been ending in each of us, and we are slowly awakening to that specific death and rebirth as a Jewish people. As a microcosm, as a lightning bolt in the holographic reality we are constantly co-creating, a new world was conjured. A world we’ve been dreaming alongside our ancestors, Heschel included, all along, waiting for the right moment.
More on that in a future post.
We walk together. Your feedback in the comments — constructive critique, resonance, provocation, anything — is welcome.
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Thank you for writing this. It is painful that tragedy brings we Jews together and somehow appropriate to mourn with the members of your family.
This resonates so much. Especially the sitting through a dinner when our world has been shattered with tragedy and nobody acknowledges anything, and the laughter goes on. Thank you for your beautiful writing.