I don’t want to go through the motions this year.
When Chanukah candles are kindled beginning Friday night, it is my hope that we will, every last one of us, make sure that our fellow community members are fed, sheltered, kept warm and given some sort of comfort. We talk a beautiful talk of the warmth of the lights and lighting up the dark, and all of that. It’s all good. But don’t just make it talk.
Last week my wife and I went out and purchased gifts for the JCS toy chest for Chanukah. Last year, some 120 families received gifts through this service.
But while it’s a wonderful gesture, I don’t want us to think, okay, we gave a gift, and leave the problems for someone else to solve.
Barbara Gradet of JCS told me that it’s not November and December or Chanukah alone that we have to worry about. I’ve heard that before.
We as a society do wonderful acts of community service between Thanksgiving and the New Year. But unemployment, hunger, homelessness, foreclosure, abuse and other issues are as difficult in March or July or September.
So it’s not a matter of dropping off a gift, and feeling, “okay I’ve done my part.”
No, our part is to stay concerned, to stay in touch to ask JCS and other agencies what it is we can do.
I don’t understand why we can work in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, and then not show up again until the following year.
Maybe the food you don’t use for your bar or bat mitzvah celebration or your family birthday party can feed another family.
Maybe the gifts someone gives you from the office can be given away to someone who could use them.
Maybe, just maybe, the job you’ve heard about isn’t beneath your unemployed friend. Don’t prejudge anymore. People need positions, even if it under-employs them.
And who are we to prejudge anything?
Indeed, a friend told me recently that she was sitting in County Social Services applying for food stamps, and she asked herself, “what am I, a Jewish woman doing here?”
Know someone like this? You’d be the same way if it happened to you. I know I would be.
Again, maybe we go with our friends to social services and sit there with them, letting them know that it is all okay. It’s all hopefully just temporary.
So when the candles are kindled and Chanukah is over next week. Put the menorah away, but don’t put the meaning in storage.
Keep it burning.