Candles, Chanukah, Turning the Gaze Toward

It was the first day of Chanukah when I decided to go wrestle with a poem instead of getting my blog post up. Actually, by then it was the second day, courtesy of our being so far to the left of whence time is measured. (Day teeters into day.) It's still the second day under my fingers here and now, but in Israel they're well into the third. (Day unto day uttereth...what kind of speech?)

What I loved most about Chanukah as a kid was the candle-lighting -- how the candle for each of the eight days was on the stand, even if it would remain unlit till the last day, how the candles for the earliest days burned farther down, with blacker wicks, than the pristine latecomers...best of all, though, was the shamash: the ninth candle without which none of the candles would be alight; the candle that wasn't even counted, that didn't have its day, but that you could hold alight in your hand, and pass on light to others. Shamash is server, but to me, shamash was the one who got to work all the magic. I wanted to be that one! (Day unto day, light unto light.)

from: http://socialtimes.com/

Back in England, I was familiar with Chanukah, Christmas, Diwali, Eid-ul-Fitr (that one was puzzling to me, because my Arabic-speaking Israeli grandmother calls every holiday "Eid," including those at the opposite end of the year). From my reading of novels set in Roman times, such as Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth, I knew then about the pagan Yule festival too. I loved the synergy between all these religions, that each held a festival of lights around the same time each year, although it did not yet occur to me to wonder why places like India, with far less dark, needed a festival of lights, or whether the southern hemisphere needed to have these in June. (The candle passes from faith to faith to faith.)

And yes, all these faiths, and secular non-faiths too, use candles not only as naked, direct light in darkness, but also as a drawing-in of energy and attention; the visual equivalent of a ringing bell.

I now don't know why it made me so happy, as a little kid, to feel assured that all religions were ultimately the same act of praise to the same God. I don't know why, rather than studying the matter deeply and seeking how to bring people back together, I chose instead to turn my face away when I began to learn of all the divisions among believers, among humans. So many cherished beliefs are shattered in the teens.

The tailspin from which I'm now emerging is the most malignant phase in an attitude of steadfast turning away, toward passage into a different plane of existence entirely. As I emerge, dodging shame; as I accept the various crutches of lifestyle, medication, friendships, foods, upon which I have to lean, I begin to gaze into candlelight, trataka meditation. Gazing into the light, feeling the air around me fill with sound beyond my ears' own ringing, I think of my family in Israel, where it is tomorrow; of who I was yesterday, of how candles and festivals and hand-holding across race and creed and space show those subtle connections, those ulterior harmonies, that might just win out over being separate, heads turned away.