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When Light Is Targeted

by Ram ben Ze’ev



When Light Is Targeted
When Light Is Targeted

We are confronted once again with a moment that defies words and yet demands them. The Jewish Community has gathered, as we are commanded, in public, with dignity and courage, to praise G-D and to bring light into a world that too often prefers darkness. At a Hanukkah gathering in Bondi Beach, Australia, where families and communal leaders assembled to light the first night’s candle, that light was targeted. Reports speak of murder and injury, of lives taken and lives shattered, of a celebration transformed into mourning.


Hanukkah is not a private ritual. It is a declaration. We kindle light openly because we are instructed to do so, because the flame itself testifies that holiness outlasts violence and that truth does not retreat before hatred. That this commandment was met with brutality only sharpens the ache, for the attackers sought not only Jewish lives but the Jewish insistence on light.



We lament the dead. We hold the wounded in our hearts. We stand with the families whose tables will now bear an empty place. And we refuse to allow grief to be twisted into silence. Jews have never been a people who abandon G-D when the night grows long. We are the people who light a candle precisely then.


Trust in Hashem is not denial of pain. It is the refusal to surrender meaning. Emunah does not ask us to pretend that evil did not occur; it asks us to place evil within the larger truth that G-D remains present even when His face is hidden. Bitachon is not passivity; it is the confidence that our steps still matter and that our choices still draw protection into the world.


Yet Hanukkah also compels honest self-examination. When we ask what we can do to regain G-D’s protection, the tradition answers without cruelty and without evasion. We strengthen our commitment to Torah not as slogan but as life. We guard our speech, our dealings, our integrity. We repair fractures within our own community, replacing suspicion with responsibility and apathy with care. We increase acts of chesed, not as gestures but as habits. We sanctify Shabbat more carefully, we pray with intention, and we refuse to normalise the erosion of Jewish distinctiveness for the sake of comfort.


Protection is not purchased by fear. It is drawn down through alignment. When Israel aligns itself with its calling, light spreads beyond our homes and into the streets where we stand. That is precisely why the flame is public. That is precisely why it is contested.



The path forward is therefore clear, even if it is not easy. We mourn, but we do not retreat. We grieve, but we do not dim the lights. We demand justice from the authorities of nations, but we do not outsource our soul. We answer hatred with steadfastness, terror with truth, and darkness with an added flame.


Hanukkah teaches that a small light, guarded faithfully, can outlast an empire. The candle lit at great cost must now be answered with many more. Not in defiance alone, but in devotion. Not only with words, but with lives lived in the presence of G-D.


May Hashem console the mourners, heal the wounded, and shelter His people. And may we prove, once again, that when light is targeted, we respond by making it stronger.



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