15 December 2025 / 26 Kislev 5786
Once again, a Jewish festival and a massacre. On the first night of Chanukkah (Sunday, 14 December 2025), Jews gathered on Bondi Beach in Sydney for “Chanukah by the Sea”. They came to do something ordinary and ancient: to light flames against the dark and to rejoice in the bosom of the community. Instead, they were met by an antisemitic terror attack that killed and wounded many.
I write this from the other side of the earth, and I cannot escape the irony of that phrase: the other side of the earth. The sheer madness of it. Jews in Australia were attacked as if they were combatants in a war thousands of miles away, as if lighting candles were a provocation, as if children and elders were legitimate targets. None of this advances peace in the Middle East. It does not save a single Palestinian life. It does not build a single bridge. It only exports fear, and it imports hatred.
Today, I am angry.
Not the negative kind of anger that feeds the algorithms of social media and disappears tomorrow, but this profound moral anger that says, human beings are not symbols. A synagogue is not a battlefield. A Jewish festival is not a political statement. A child holding a candle is not “the other side” of anyone’s argument.
Anger for me is a form of clarity. It tells the truth about what has been violated: the dignity of human life, the safety of gathering, and the basic promise that a minority should be able to exist without being punished for distant events and ancient stereotypes.
But anger has a shadow. If we let it, it hardens into contempt. It tempts us into declaring whole groups irredeemable. It makes cynicism feel like wisdom. The attackers win twice: first by spilling blood, and then by recruiting us into their brutal and deadly logic.
Alongside the anger, I feel gratitude: for those who reached out, mourned, donated blood, offered protection, and said clearly that Jews should be safe where they live. In the aftermath, many voices, from political leaders to faith communities, neighbours, named the attack for what it was: antisemitic violence aimed at Jews.
Gratitude is not denial. It is not “look on the bright side”. It is the refusal to let cruelty be the only story. When support arrives, it matters—not because it fixes everything, but because it breaks the isolation that terror tries to instill in our souls.
Let us say this plainly: these attacks will never deter Jews from being Jews. It’s the complete opposite: Jewish resilience is real. It is the result of our history.
That is not bravado. It is history. It is the simple fact that Jewish life has survived empires, expulsions, pogroms, and attempts at genocide, not because Jews are invulnerable, but because Judaism trains us to turn survival into meaning and meaning into responsibility. Chanukkah is the festival of that stubborn fidelity: the insistence that identity is not surrendered to intimidation. Every year, we had one light each evening, until the Chanukkiah glows on the eighth night, as an eternal cycle of rekindling these candles over and over again.
The tradition even frames Chanukkah light as something meant to be seen, not hidden away in private fear. The Talmud teaches, “It is a mitzvah to place the Chanukkah lamp at the entrance to one’s house on the outside (Shabbat 21b).” We are asked to “publicise the miracle” and acknowledge that darkness can always be defeated. To light Chanukkah candles is to declare, quietly but publicly: we are here, and we are not going anywhere. Light is not a weapon. It is not domination. It is not the triumphalism of “we will crush our enemies”. Chanukkah light is moral: it insists that the human being in front of you is not disposable.
That is why attacks like this are so obscene: they strike at the very possibility of ordinary decency. They attempt to turn the public square into a theatre of fear.
If we do not want the world to spiral into violence and fear, we cannot treat this as “just another incident”. We need a harder, more honest public conversation, one that refuses both cynicism and simplification and goes straight into the roots of this evil. And it starts with questions that cannot be eluded: can our society still tell the difference between legitimate political critique and ethnic hatred, and are we willing to enforce that difference in law, media, and education before scapegoating replaces argument and corrodes democracy itself?
Why are Jews being treated as proxies for a conflict they do not control, when, whatever one’s views on Israel/Palestine, attacking Jews in Sydney (or London, or Paris) is not activism but collective punishment? This form of essentialism proves that this is antisemitism. Nothing else.
What is the responsibility of leaders, political, religious, and cultural, when rhetoric becomes a solvent that dissolves empathy, normalising dehumanising language until some people feel licensed to act out its logic?
How do we rebuild the moral capacity to disagree well: the discipline of arguing robustly without turning neighbours into enemies?
And what does solidarity look like when it costs something, when it is no longer a slogan, but the courage to confront hatred not only “out there”, but in one’s own camp, one’s own street, and one’s own social media feed?
Because here is the truth we avoid: hatred spreads when it becomes socially rewarding. The antidote is not only policing (though protection matters). The antidote is cultural: making antisemitism shameful again, making conspiracy thinking ridiculous again, and making human dignity non-negotiable again.
This Chanukkah, I want to make a quiet and stubborn pledge to myself. I refuse to accept a world in which Jewish festivals are marked by massacres. I will not let fear shrink Jewish life, and I will not let anger harden into hatred. I will receive solidarity with gratitude without slipping into naïveté. I will assert that any human suffering, be it Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Israeli, Palestinian, or any other, represents a breach in the moral foundation upon which we all rely. And I will keep lighting the candles, because light is what we owe the living and the dead.