We are all of us afraid of the dark. At night, anxieties suppressed or repressed come swimming to the surface of consciousness: am I safe? Am I loved? Am I needed? Is there meaning in the world, or is it all, ultimately, just a swirl of chaos?...

Judaism does not ask us to ignore this darkness and the sense of doom it might educe in us. On the contrary, it asks us to face them squarely, and then, ultimately, to defy them. But how?...

"The soul of man is the lamp of God," the Book of Proverbs tell us (20:27). What this means is that ultimately, our task is not to light candles, but to be candles. We have the potential to be the bits of light that help bring God back into a world gone dark. As the Sefas Emes puts it in discussing Hanukkah, "A human being is created to light up this world" (Hanukkah, 1874).

All of these brief quotes are from Lighting Up the Darkness by Rabbi Shai Held. His whole essay is beautiful and I commend it to you.

Tonight we'll enter into the fourth night of Chanukah. Chag urim sameach -- wishing you a joyful continuation of the festival of lights! And Shabbat shalom, too.

Photo: fourth night of Chanukah. From my flickr stream, taken a few years ago.