Every year, in the days before Yom HaShoah, members of Beth Tzedec’s Men’s Club deliver yellow yahrzeit candles to the doors of Jewish homes across our neighbourhood. Beth Tzedec helped found this practice. It is now observed by Jewish communities around the world.

The candle arrives in a yellow bag. On the bag: the word JUDE. A Magen David wrapped in barbed wire.

The symbolism is intentional and exact. Yellow — the colour the Nazis forced Jews to wear as a badge of humiliation. Jude — the label of dehumanization. Barbed wire — the camps. All of it reclaimed, transformed, repurposed into an act of memory and defiance. The same bag, the same candle, every year. We had pictured it in our weekly newsletter before the delivery went out.

This year, residents called the police.

Not one or two. Several. Jewish residents who came home, saw the yellow bag at their door — and didn’t register the newsletter they had read days before. They saw JUDE. They saw the barbed wire. And their minds went somewhere completely rational and completely devastating: Is someone marking me? Is someone telling me I should be afraid to be a Jew in my own home?

A bag designed to reclaim the symbols of our persecution was received as evidence that the persecution had returned.

That tells us something important — not about those residents, who responded entirely rationally given the world we are living in — but about what sustained, ambient fear does to a community over time.

Since October 7, 2023, North American Jewish communities have been living under a low-grade psychological siege. Antisemitic incidents have reached historic highs across Canada and the United States. Jewish students have been harassed and isolated on campuses that sold themselves as bastions of liberal pluralism. In my own city — Toronto — three synagogues were targeted by gunfire in a single week. Our children do active-shooter drills.

The people who called the police were not overreacting. They were applying the threat-assessment logic that Jewish communal life has — rationally, necessarily — trained them to apply. These are not paranoid reflexes. They are learned responses to a genuine and documented pattern of threat.

And that, precisely, is the problem.

There is a concept in trauma psychology called hypervigilance — the state in which a nervous system conditioned by repeated threat begins to scan constantly for danger. It is adaptive in genuinely dangerous environments. But it produces a predictable side effect: it erodes the capacity to distinguish between threat and care. Everything unfamiliar becomes potentially hostile. And the community turns inward — not in solidarity, but in isolation.

The candle was not sent by enemies. It was sent by neighbours, by fellow congregants, by Jews who wanted to say we remember with you. The message was: you are not alone. The message received was: be afraid.

This is not a failure of the recipients. It is a symptom of what years of sustained communal threat — layered on decades of accumulated historical memory — does to the social fabric of a people.

Passover arrives at exactly the right moment to say something about this.

The Haggadah does not suppress fear — avadim hayinu, we were slaves, is its opening confession. And it does not flinch from the darkest truth of Jewish history. It states it plainly, at every Seder table:

She’b’chol dor vador omdim aleinu l’chaloteinu —

“In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.”

This is not paranoia. This is liturgy. The Haggadah has known for millennia what the people who called the police know in their bones: the threat is real, it is recurring, and it must be named.

But the Seder refuses to leave fear as the conclusion. You cannot do Passover alone — that is not incidental, it is the point. The antidote to fear is not better information or tighter security. It is presence. The physical, relational fact of being together and saying out loud: we remember this, we survived this, we are still here. The Seder ends not with trauma but with L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim — Next year in Jerusalem. A horizon. A refusal to let the story end in Egypt.

The yellow candle incident is not a story about a communications failure. The real story is that we have reached a moment in North American Jewish life where a significant number of people, confronted with an unexpected Jewish symbol at their door, cannot assume it comes from a friend. That is a measure of how deep the fear has gone.

We need to talk about it. Not perform resilience over it, not manage it with talking points — but name it, sit with it, and work through it together. The Seder table is a model for exactly that kind of communal processing. So is Yom HaShoah.

The yellow candle was not a warning. It was an invitation — to remember together, to grieve together, and to refuse, together, to let fear have the last word.

The question is whether we are still capable of receiving that invitation.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)