Photo Credit: Courtesy
Hanukiyah created by world famous Venetian Glass Blower Maestro Gianni Toso

The approach for this article is that lighting the Menorah is activism. It is activism because it dispels darkness. Not in some theoretical or abstract way, but in actuality. If you see a dark headline, dispel it with light, as in the Chassidic adage, “a little light dispels a great deal of darkness.”

The Torchbearers

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In public speaking they tell you to begin with a good story. Even if you have something very important to say, first engage your audience, and then elaborate. So even though this is a written essay, not an oral presentation, the story goes something like this…

I was on the bus last week with my family in Jerusalem. We were traveling back home to light the candle for the first night of Chanukah after delivering some Chanukah care packages to soldiers.

As we were riding on the bus, there was a large group of mostly teenagers carrying torches or flames to either side of us. As you can imagine, my first thought was that these were Arab rioters. But that didn’t make sense. Why would the police and army allow them to walk through the streets of Jerusalem like this? Then my wife opined that they were most likely promoting the first night of Chanukah… hence the torches. It was most likely a marketing campaign to publicize the first night of Chanukah.

A revolution is now taking place — between truth and falsehood, between good and evil, between light and darkness — and if you side with the true, good, and holy light, then we need to begin to think beyond the abstraction. To view light as activism.

Kindling your Autobiography

Recently there was an essay about the world of ba’alei teshuvah (returnees to God and His Torah) about the need to stay excited, to stay activism-oriented, and to keep that desire to change the world. In the article it mentioned that while learning is Israel, he felt this fervor and potential. To quote:

“The potential, we felt, wasn’t just in this world that we had discovered, but in us. We were coming armed with our vision of the world that had been instilled since we were young: that we had the power to change things, that we mattered, that if we embraced our inner core, we could do amazing things. And so when we applied that to a religious context, we couldn’t help but be excited.”

Then a seemingly unrelated essay was posted three days later on the same site. While it was a shorter, more extemporaneous piece, the core message remarkably matched perfectly with the essay from three days prior from another author. In short, she was explaining that she made aliyah to Israel because she believes that this is “where we can create the story.” What she terms the “work in progress” or what we can call “the running autobiography of our lives.”

There are two central points that connect these two essays, and which surprisingly also relate to the times in which both articles were published (19 Kislev and prior to Chanukah).

1) The first is that we change the world by accessing our inner core, and from reaching within, we can change the world without.
2) We need to keep the story going; this amazing running autobiography of our lives.

Since the first topic is more complex, and relates to the day when the “Baal Teshuva World: Wake Up” was published (as I noted in the comment section there), and since we are now in the days of Chanukah, I thought to focus on #2.

The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, taught that we need to listen to the story that the Chanukah flames tell us. As there are 36 total candles lit throughout all eight nights of Chanukah, one explanation is that the story that we are listening to is the story of the 36, lamed-vav, tzadikim (righteous souls) in every generation. But it doesn’t stop there.

Each of us can emulate this life running story of tzadikim by putting our lives on the “kindle” as it were. Meaning that as we look and listen to the story that the flames are telling us, deep within we should also feel this yearning to make our every moment memorable.

Taking Revenge with Light

Now that some background material has been presented, how do we turn these nice thoughts into a revolution?

The first lesson is that communal revolutions begin from personal teshuvah. Once an individual has begun to shine, then as light attracts light, the natural next progression is to seek out like-minded people. Thus the phrase “Baal Teshuvah Revolution” should be read as a construct of two phases– the individual teshuvah and the communal ingathering of individuals that have been “kindled” with the holy light of Torah and observance.

A friend, Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman, recently came out with a video entitled, “Chanukah: Turning Darkness into Light.” This is the story he brings there as an illustration for how to behave now since the Har Nof massacre, learned from a response given five years ago at a memorial service held thirty days after the Mumbai massacre:

“One of the rabbis got up and said: ‘We are going to take revenge!’ Everyone was wondering what he was going to say. And he continued: “We are going to bring so much light into the world that we are going to wipe evil and darkness out!”

Anatomy of a Revolution

In summary, these are the parts of a Torah-based revolution:

1) In order to change the world, we first need to change ourselves, to do teshuvah and uncover our light-filled potential within.
2) Once we begin kindling our light within, then we can begin “publishing” our running “kindled” biographies to the world.
3) The place where we have this experience of “creating our story,” living a “work in progress” is in the Land of Israel. The preference is to physically live here, but if perhaps your shlichut, your God-given mission is presently to live outside of the Land of Israel, then at least your thoughts should be directed to the Land of Israel. The Ba’al Shem Tov teaches that a person is where their thoughts are.

Shining Light on Fiction

We just saw how a fictional movie in the realm of thought was combated by a real-life person. There is a lesson we can learn from this.

The first is that there are two sides to this story, and neither of them are correct because ultimately we should have neither inappropriate movies nor dictators.

The second is that since Chanukah is about overcoming Hellenism, Greek culture, and in the present headline this most represents the movie side of the story. To shine light in order to see beyond the external, secular view of reality.

As with the story of the movie vs. person, it’s important to ground our Torah-based thoughts into real-life activism. To view our act of shining light not in abstract terms, but as activism… to actively dispel the winds of Hellenism from the world.

This stage comes once we’ve hopefully worked on ourselves. And while the process of teshuvah is never-ending, at a certain point in our spiritual growth it is good to come to this realization; that my inner growth can and should lead to outward activism.

Responding to Matisyahu’s Interview

With these thoughts in mind, we can also appropriately respond to Matisyahu’s recent interview on Algemeiner.

First, the response is not to cast blame or speak against Matisyahu, a former classmate and friend of many common acquaintances. Instead, the first step is to educate the public on how not to make the same missteps. This is why I recently published the long-form essay, “The Jewish Approach to Fame.” Specifically, the fallacy of fame segments.

The second is to realize that while the interview doesn’t seem favorable to us “close-minded” religious folk, there is a shimmering kernel of light there.

I don’t want to go so much into the details of the interview. First because the preferable course would be for Matisyahu to respond to these articles. Secondly, because the antagonism and feeling of neglect was there from the very beginning, and the interview needs to be appreciated within the proper context. As someone who was nearly yelled at because they thought I was Matisyahu at first, and a someone who has been yelled at many times for my own out-of-the-box take of things, I appreciate where the anger and resentment comes from.

Instead, what I wanted to discuss was the statement that he felt “creatively” cut-off, and now as the “natural progression” he has left us “close-minded” and “judgemental” people behind.

Now indeed, there are some things that I am closed to. When I put on my gartel to pray it is to hopefully to guard my thoughts to think about holy things. I once lent Matisyahu my gartel, probably the same one I use to this day over ten years later, so this is my first response. That the havdalah, the separation stage can’t be circumvented. There is holy and profane, light and darkness, good and evil, and a person throughout their lives needs to stay conscious of the difference between the two.

But while this may appear to limit creatively and the freedom of expression, it enhances it. Joseph is called the “revealer of secrets” (tzafnat paneach) in the merit of standing up to the test of seduction. In our present context, seduction can and does mean many things, but we begin by “tying our gartel,” placing boundaries for all our interactions with the world.

My Own Challenges and Struggles

Aside from the very end, the interview concludes on a hopeful note. Now that Matisyahu has transitioned from “shiny upbeat music to make people feel better or feel stronger,” to “my own changes and struggles and things that I went through and real relationships,” the hope is that this progression will continue. The light that results from searching within oneself is called the light of Joseph, what Matisyahu called in the interview, “artistic extension of what’s happening in my life.”

Thus our hope is that the progression from attempting to outwardly influence the world, to confronting his inner struggles and battles, will lead him back to a life of observance where both the outward creativity and inner constraints can be experienced together.

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Yonatan Gordon is a student of Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh, and publishes his writings on InwardNews.com, a new site he co-founded.