Though this season feels steeped in darkness, we must find the light to take us forward

A few weeks back, I attended a dinner in London for Magen David Adom, the Israeli national emergency service. I’d been out to Israel shortly before to make a film highlighting the incredible work that they’d done after Hamas’s attack. One man I met there, Ophir, told me in detail about October 7 and the days that followed. He meticulously took me through the crime scenes where the terrorists struck and explained to me everything that had happened.

As a barrister, I’ve heard any number of stories of violence and cruelty and I’ve visited any number of places where it has happened. But it wasn’t until then that the breadth of the horror emerged. Yet when I spoke to him about the events of that day, what stuck with me wasn’t the things he experienced - it was when he said that MDA is, for him, “the Jewish and Israeli spirit.”

I also spoke with Sharon, who works in her spare time as an emergency dispatcher whilst she trains to be a doctor. On the morning of the attacks she’d been off on her first holiday for years - she was en route to the airport when she saw the first red alert and immediately turned her car around. There were, she says, so many alerts on dispatchers’ screens that every screen was “blood red”. She spent part of the day on the phone to a terrified little boy hiding under a bed, a boy whose entire family had been murdered. She stayed on the line with him till he was rescued. At the MDA dinner, Sharon told us why she volunteered for the MDA: “We are the spirit of Israel”. Through the revolting butchery and cruelty of October 7, she too was able to remember that this work still showed the very best of what we can be.

Over these unspeakably painful months, I’ve been struck by a connected feeling across all the communities that I’ve visited – from the most progressive groups to the most orthodox (and particularly on the March Against Antisemitism) – that within our shared pain, being alongside one another, spiritually holding one another, has never been more important.

In our mourning, the Jewish community has never, I think, had greater determination, not just to carry on but to be resilient and to be together.

It felt particularly poignant during Chanukah. We can’t help but sense it when we watch, night after night, as the miracle grows from a single candle and amplifies to fill a room with light and warmth. So might joy grow, so might hope.

The late Rabbi Sacks once addressed the miracle of Chanukah’s first night. All the other nights, he said, we celebrate that the oil lasted longer than it should have done, but on the first, where’s the miracle? The oil, after all, was meant to burn that long. But Rabbi Sacks posits that the first miracle could simply have been locating that single jar of sacred oil with its seal still intact. Initially, the Maccabees hadn’t been able to find any, but didn’t stop looking. They searched until they did. That’s the miracle: their faith that something would survive the destruction by the Greeks, “that something would remain with which to begin again”.

So it’s always been in Judaism. “They gathered what remained,” said Rabbi Sacks, “rebuilt our people, and lit a light like no other in history, a light that tells us and the world of the power of the human spirit to overcome every tragedy and refuse to accept defeat.”

This is the message we need to take now into our hearts: that though this season can feel steeped in darkness, we must find the light to take forward into 2024...and beyond.