Chanukah 2025 will stay in the collective consciousness for many decades to come and will be much spoken of.  I have no doubt it will govern how events are planned and managed going forward.

Chanukah arrived this year carrying more weight than usual.

As Jews around the world prepared to light candles, news broke of the horrific events at Bondi Beach. Once again, a place of ordinary life — sun, sea, families — was ruptured by violence. Once again, Jewish grief folded into a global atmosphere already thick with fear, anger, and exhaustion.

And yet, something else was happening too.

Across cities and towns, Chanukah was being marked louder, brighter, and more visibly than I can remember. Public menorahs. Gatherings. Singing. Defiant joy. An insistence on presence.  Certainly driving around London, one sees more and more public Menorahs.

For some, this felt like resistance.
For others, survival.
For many, simply necessity.

This piece was shaped, in part, by my rabbi’s sermon this past Shabbat — the first delivered in our community after the tragedy in Australia. It was not a sermon that tried to explain away horror or rush toward answers. Instead, it acknowledged the rupture, the fear, and the disorientation that violence leaves behind, while gently returning us to the question of how Jews respond when the world feels unsteady. That framing stayed with me as Chanukah approached — not as a call to noise or spectacle, but as an invitation to think carefully about what our light is actually for.

Light does not begin in the street

Chanukah has never really been about........

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