Flame of Hope
UU’s have a great deal of respect for our interfaith neighbors. This sermon is about the lessons of hope arising from Hanukkah, and what they might mean for us. It was delivered on December 5, 2010.
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Happy Holidays! Today is the fourth day of Hanukkah. At my house, like other Jewish and interfaith homes, we’ve gotten into the rhythm of the holiday by now. The Hebrew blessings for lighting the menorah, which I stumbled through on the first night, come more easily to our mouths. We have made latkes (potato pancakes) and have another few days to experiment with toppings like applesauce and sour cream.
As you might expect, there are some things about this Hanukkah that are the same as in previous years, and some things that are different. We light the same menorah that we have lit for the past dozen years. We got it when we were still new at being away from our parents, figuring out how to be our own family. We have moved it to five different homes since then. I hope to celebrate in the same place for awhile.
Making latkes is the same and different. Like in past years, we eat fried cakes made from grated potatoes and onions. Some years there are improvements to the recipe or the technology. Uri got a food processor for his birthday earlier this year, and we are all happy about using it to grate onions instead of the bare-knuckle technique. I have high hopes for getting through the holiday with a minimum of kitchen-related bloodshed.
The biggest change is our larger family. We celebrated many years as our hopes for children were deferred. Last year, that hope was a delicate ember. In the early months, it was very difficult to trust that things would turn out OK. This year, as our babies see the Hanukkah candles for the first time, our hopes for them fill the room just as surely as the light from the menorah.
Hanukkah is a holiday about hope. The traditions and stories around the holiday teach us to keep hope alive, to keep working for beauty and liberation when the odds are against us. This time of year, when the sun is scarce and the temperature drops, hope can be hard to come by. I think there are things that we as Unitarian Universalists can learn from Hanukkah about gathering up the sparks of hope, breathing life into them, and passing the flame on to the next generation.
The third of seven UU principles is “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” It’s our theme of the month for both December and January. To me, the line about “in our congregations” is a reminder to engage with all of the people in our congregations: children, adults, youth, and elders. Today I want to focus on the “encouragement” part. We need it for ourselves, and we need to share encouragement with people of all ages around us. Hope is, I believe, food for spiritual growth.
From generation to generation, Hanukkah is a container for hope. There are a couple of things about the holiday that make it effective for sharing encouragement. Hanukkah teaches us to celebrate the small hopes, the intermediate steps as well as the decisive victories. It instructs us to clear a space for ritual, to embody the spirit of the holiday. We may not feel enthusiastic every time, and our ritual may be small, but small flames of hope add up. Hanukkah brings around captivating visuals, moments of beauty when we can reflect on and represent the possibility of hope. In-between celebrations, embodied rituals, and captivating visuals are sparks of wisdom that we can apply to our encouragement of one another.
Celebrate In Between
In this morning’s Time for All Ages story (One Candle by Eve Bunting, illustrated by K. Wendy Popp), the elders of the family tell of the time when a single flame “lifted us to the stars” in the middle of a horrifying time. They didn’t wait until the end of the war, they didn’t wait until it was safe, but they risked everything to celebrate the holiday and their survival.
There is a similar thread in the original story of Hanukkah, in which the Maccabees rose up against their oppressors in order to regain freedom for their religion and culture. According to that story, the Jewish rebels fought against the larger, professional army of their enemies. Despite the odds, they won back the Temple that their enemies had desecrated. Some say that, in the process of rededicating the Temple, the oil needed to keep the holy flames going lasted for eight nights instead of one. That’s where the holiday retelling usually ends, but that wasn’t the end of that particular war. The book of 1 Maccabees goes on for another twelve chapters of violent conflict. The more apologetic version in 2 Maccabees is shorter, but the rededication of the Temple is still an in-between step, a celebration that provides a respite in the middle of a struggle.
Whether the Hanukkah stories come from 168 BCE or 1940, we see examples of celebrating in-between hopes. The heroes of these legends take time for the small victories when they come. When the small victories are not forthcoming, the heroes celebrate surviving so far.
During some of the times in our lives when we need infusions of hope, we may think of it as trying to come “back” from a tragedy or a disappointment. In those times, in-between celebrations may feel like reminders of places we passed on the way down. I can think of times when I was unemployed or under-employed, or when I was recovering from a health setback, when I was troubled by resentment about where I thought I ought to be. I needed rituals and good friends to settle my feet on the ground of the present moment. A poem of persistence may be just the thing for mustering encouragement.
There’s a Hebrew blessing called the Shehechiyanu that is said on the first night of every holiday, when a ritual is observed for the first time that year or for the first time in someone’s life, or when a food is enjoyed for the first time that season. In our house, we say it for other joyous occasions. Today’s opening reading by Jewish scholar and poet Marcia Falk is an interpretation of the Shehechiyanu from her work, The Book of Blessings. She writes:
Let us bless the flow of life
that revives us, sustains us,
and brings us to this time
A slightly more traditional interpretation that I like is:
Blessed is the source of life
that has kept us alive,
and sustained us,
and enabled us to reach this moment
It’s a short blessing. As the Hanukkah stories demonstrate, one need not have much of an excuse to stop and reflect. Yet the small moments of gratitude can light the way for the arrival of greater hopes. Like the shammash, the helper candle on the menorah, one flame of hope kindles another.
In-between celebrations give us a place to land in the present moment. Bracing our hands and feet into the rich soil of now, perhaps we can find the strength to push forward with hope. May the in-between blessings lift us to the stars.
Embodied Ritual
Hanukkah happens on a regular week during a busy time of year. It’s not traditionally a major Jewish holiday, although it gets some attention for happening around the same time of year as some holidays of other religions. The beginning and the end are observed as days off, but the rest of the time people go about their business at work and school. Every night, there is a time to choose celebration, to bring out the menorah and to stand still.
I have to say, sometimes, in the middle of regular life, I am not feeling it. My hands arrange the candles and light the match before my heart can catch up. A couple of nights ago, we had family over for latkes and sufganiyot (Hanukkah doughnuts). We hoped that our loved ones would understand that, with babies around, we were not up to our previous level of cleanliness. I was anxious about the house not being set up for our toddler nephew, and about not having finished my sermon. I worried that the excitement would get the babies too wound up to sleep at their newly established bedtime.
When we finally gathered around to say the blessings, there was a moment when all of that anxiety fell away. My worries came and went throughout the evening. I definitely had more moments of joy and peace having decided to celebrate than I would have if we had skipped it. Clearing space for an embodied ritual is one of the things I learn from Hanukkah.
The same thing is true when it’s despair that gets in the way. Imagine what it was like for the Maccabees when they returned to the Temple after two years. The armies of Antiochus had done their best to destroy the center of Jewish religious and cultural life. The Maccabees must have been overcome with grief and shock. “[T]hey found the temple laid waste, the altar desecrated, the gates burnt down, the courts overgrown like a thicket or a wooded hillside, and the priests’ rooms in ruin” (1 Maccabees 4:38).
The first thing they did was to mourn. After that, they got organized. The defiled altar was removed, and they brought in new stones to build a new one. They repaired the building, re-consecrated it, and made new sacred objects to replace what had been stolen.
Perhaps having sacred work in front of them that so clearly needed to be done helped prompt the Maccabees to get started. Don’t think about it, just pick up a broom. I imagine that the physical act of cleaning and rebuilding helped get them into the mindset to practice their faith once again.
As Unitarian Universalists, we also have times to clear a space for ritual. Some of the same things get in our way: busy-ness, anxiety, shock, and despair. Even so, the hymnals come out every Sunday morning, and they get put away every Sunday afternoon. We light the chalice when we gather, and we say a few words of encouragement. Perhaps you have meditative rituals at home: reading, singing while washing the dishes, taking walks, or something like that. Choosing to clear a space for ritual, to come to church, even when we don’t feel excited at first, is an act of hope. I am reminded of the Adrienne Rich poem that is excerpted in the hymnal (#463):
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age,
perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world
Clearing a space for ritual, whether it’s lighting the menorah or the chalice, helps our hands and feet invoke hope when our minds and hearts have forgotten. It’s a kind of muscle memory. Rituals for particular times of the day, the year, and our lives provide opportunities to make choices. As Chuck sang this morning, we can put fear in the driver’s seat, or we can take the wheel. I think that choosing to embody rituals of hope, even when we don’t feel inspired, steers us toward life.
Captivating Visuals
At the end of this morning’s story, the family goes outside to look at the Hanukkah lights in their front window. They remember a time when such a display would have been dangerous, they honor those who didn’t live to see freedom, and they toast to life. In that context, lighting the menorah in the front window is a visual reminder for those inside the house and a public witness for those outside. The lights attract attention. Captivating visuals represent a third bit of Hanukkah wisdom.
Creating beauty for a spiritual purpose requires some boldness. We have to be willing to be seen as spiritual people. We could be seen as weird enough to have hope, despite the popularity of cynicism. In making that declaration, we just might come to see ourselves as people with hope.
The risk of attention is one of the reasons why art is essential for encouraging the next generation. The people we are mentoring and raising and aunt-ing and uncle-ing need to know that we are willing to be identified, willing to go out on a limb for hope. Before any words are said, we have made a declaration that spirituality is worth the effort.
Another reason why visuals matter is that they transcend verbal and reading ability. Captivating visuals are remembered. (I realize that I am assuming the physical ability to see with this example. For people who are blind or have low vision, I think the boldness of beauty still applies in music, tactile sculpture, and embodied rituals.) A person doesn’t need to know the whole story of the Maccabees or the eight nights of oil in order to see the Hanukkah lights and to know something special is going on.
The holiday symbols inspire questions: Why are there nine candles? Why do we only see it this time of year? What do the letters on the dreidel mean? Engaging with those questions gives us a chance to make meaning together. That meaning may vary in emphasis from person to person or from year to year. This morning’s story offers hints of that. Some of the characters see gratitude, some see freedom, some see the comfort of family. Asking the questions is more important than repeating the answers. Symbols don’t have to have final answers.
Festive beauty is another way to jolt us out of auto-pilot. At our house, we often say that certain things are “background subtracted.” This is a term we picked up from Uri, who got it from artificial intelligence and computer vision research. If you are trying to train a computer to track an object in motion, first you show it what the environment of that thing looks like without the relevant object. When the object is re-introduced, the computer can subtract the environment, which means it can ignore everything else except the relevant object. We’ll have conversations like this:
Have you seen my pen? The one with the dinosaur on it?
It’s right there in front of you.
Oh! I looked there about ten times. I guess I had background subtracted it.
The scenery of our daily lives can become background subtracted. When artifacts emerge for spiritual celebrations, they pop into focus. The novelty disrupts our programming. That can be disorienting, but perhaps we need to re-orient every once in awhile. When the menorah first comes out, we experiment with the best place to put it. It looks odd in its new spot. I get confused between the blessing for Hanukkah lights and the blessing for Sabbath lights. By the end of the week, I remember. Just when I feel like I have this holiday celebration down pat, it’s over. This saves a little bit of complacency.
As Unitarian Universalists, we are sometimes a little bit wary of using bold visuals. We might be concerned about idolatry or impracticality. Sometimes we go for it. The collaborative art projects during Soulful Sundown, the T-shirts, the stained glass window are all memorable and beautiful declarations of hope. They say that we are not afraid of being identified as a group of people. UU art and design help us share that sense of identity with the youngest people among us. Visuals are silent encouragements to spiritual growth.
Conclusion
Maintaining and passing along hope is not as easy as it sounds. People of all ages in our congregations need encouragement. The stories and traditions of Hanukkah may give us some ideas about what we can do as Unitarian Universalists.
We can celebrate the intermediate steps, the in-between milestones on the way to our goals. Thanks and encouragement need not wait until the end of the story.
We can choose to move forward with embodied rituals, even when busy-ness or despair cloud our spirits. Hand out the hymnals, light the chalice, and set the table. Let our hands and feet invoke hope when our voices aren’t ready.
We can create captivating visuals that inspire us with beauty, provoke questions, and serve as a public witness. Put the portrait of Margaret Fuller on your screen saver. Welcome new forms of art in Sunday services. Wear the UU2 shirt or the chalice necklace. Risk being seen as a people of hope.
May we be sources of encouragement for one another throughout this season. So be it.
Blessed be. Amen.
