My wife and I have a running joke that on a night we can cobble together dinner when we seemingly have no food in the house, it is a Hanukkah dinner—a small miracle. When our first child was born, one of his first words was light. Henry would spend hours flipping the light switch, marveling how he could let there be light. When his first Hanukkah arrived, he stared in wonder at the candles burning bright.

We joined BJ when Henry started Kadima, and midway through his second year the pandemic fell upon us. Celebrating Hanukkah while sheltering apart, I remember Rabbi Becca describing it as a moment to bring light into the darkness. During those dark times, we lit our menorah as Jews had done before us—just as my grandmother had done when my grandfather was imprisoned in two concentration camps, and just as my family did when they arrived in New York as immigrants, afraid to speak German during wartime.

This fall, Henry was called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah. While I’d been preoccupied with the darkness of the last year–from the war in Israel to immigrants being rounded up in the US–I was unprepared for the emotion of the weekend. I was moved by the young family celebrating their newborn child’s naming and the gentleman turning eighty who mouthed his old parsha as Henry read from the Torah. What came into relief were the cycles of life embedded in every Shabbat service: welcoming babies, marking transitions into adulthood, praying for the sick, mourning the dead, and the joyous blessing for the children under BJ’s giant tallit tent.

As Hanukkah approaches, I think of all the miracles that brought us to this day and how we collectively persist and continue to bring light out of the darkness.

This kavannah is part of the Hanukkah Illuminations series.