Lights Out for Chanukah

The holiday calendar is one of my life’s great pleasures. It’s the essential reason I became a rabbi. I wanted to bump out my experience of Jewish celebration and bring private joy into the public sphere. It was as if there was too much to contain at our dining room table. I wanted to send my excitement into the larger world.

Now, again, that joy has been diminished. The slaughter of Jews is hardly a commonplace, but it happens often enough so that it’s a persistent feature, not a bug. Until this week, I associated it with the High Holidays. Hamas crossed the border on Simhat Torah, part of the postlude to the fall holiday season.

On a day given over raucous celebration, of dancing in the streets with flags and Torah scrolls, mothers tried—and failed—to shelter their children in saferooms. Blissed-out young adults at the Nova Festival on the border tried—and failed—to outrun would be rapists and murderers. In the two years since, Simchat Torah has been shadowed by the memory of violence perped by implacable enemies.

Now it is all happening again. Bondi Beach in Australia is a great natural playground. It’s where residents of Syndney go to cavort in the water. Nothing bad is supposed to happen except an occasional sunburn or a dropped dollop of ice cream. Now 15 Jews are dead, with dozens of others wounded and in treatment. The Prime Minister of Israel is blaming the government for voting to recognize a Palestinian state. This feels more like red-hot anti-Semitism to me, but we will not know anything until more details are released.

One thing we can talk about is an astonishing act of heroism. You have probably seen the video yourself. A man crouches in the space between two parked cars, fixing his gaze on one of the assassins. He suddenly leaps forward to disarm the gunmen, taking shots to his own body in the process, but he succeeds in driving the assailant back. The other apparently continues to shoot, but the one in the video is effectively neutralized.

The name of the hero is Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim fruit seller who was at Bondi at the time. My heart tells me that he’s a person of quiet goodness who decided to move toward personal danger in the name of defeating radical evil. We will know little about him until the inevitable interviews and tributes, but I hope we come to know his story. I don’t believe in the myth of the redeeming detail, that this is the part of the story that somehow offsets the rest. But I also don’t believe that we should dismiss goodness when we see it.

The lights may be out for Chanukah this year, but the soul of Ahmed al Ahmed is shining brilliantly.