A Candle's Worth
Choosing a Narrative in an Age of Competing Stories
I spent a cold hour or so Sunday night at Congregation B’nai Emunah in what would have normally been a night of celebration and light. Yet the targeted and hateful attacks thousands of miles away, indirectly connected to other recent antisemitic actions across Australia, served as a grim reminder of the vulnerability of the very population gathered to share joy. I went with my pal, Aliye Shimi, CEO of Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, herself a faithful Muslim, to stand in solidarity and lift up what is always an important narrative. This kind of intolerance and hate will not speak for us. It is not who we are, first of all, and, second of all, that “we” is much bigger than the few who spout the hate.
There, amidst the bright blue and white glow, the massive menorah, and the jelly donuts, Tulsans came together to be warmth in the cold and light in the darkness. We listened as Rabbi Kaiman spoke from the rooftop of the Synagogue, spotlights and the flames of the menorah lighting his face. There he lifted up the joy of the season, sang a traditional menorah lighting song, Maoz Tzur, which is traditionally translated like this:
Rock of Ages let our song
Praise thy saving powerThou amidst the raging foes
Was our sheltering tower.Furious, they assailed us,
But thine armor veiled us.And thy word broke their sword
When our own strength failed us.
And as I heard him sing this along with the gathered crowd that last part resonated with me – thy word broke their sword. This is the theological point, that God’s word is one of peace and mercy, of understanding and community, not of rage or bitterness, hatred or bigotry. Even when our strength to deliver that word fails us, we must look for the places that light is still shining.
Bondi Beach represents the kind of failure we are having collectively at lifting up the proper narratives. In a society that does not have the access to weapons that we have in the US, this can still occur. And it can occur because we extrapolate our judgment, laying what may be just criticisms of individuals, or even governments, at the feet of entire populations. It is possible to condemn the actions of the Israeli government, for instance, and not hold an entire group responsible for their actions, just as it is possible to condemn Hamas and not an entire population.
Learning to confront awfulness directly and sincerely, and to unflinchingly condemn injustice and hate is a critical need in these days. Equally critical is having the maturity to place blame where blame is due, to avoid the lazy disregard for distinction and nuance, and to stop ignoring the reality that symbolic, rhetorical violence is often just rehearsal for actual, physical violence.[1]
How we address such injustice and bigotry matters at least as much as addressing it in the first place. If we meet hate with hate, we change nothing but our aim. In the struggle for human and civil rights here in the US one of the strongest voices was as steadfast in his rejection of injustice as he was his assertion that we had to fight against injustice with nonviolence, to resist evil with good, and hate with love. Until we learn this deep truth, no ideology – NO ideology – will change this world in which we live, no matter how much outrage or passion fuels it. As Dr. King wrote, “One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong.”
This is what troubles me, that so many work in such different directions to make the world work for them when the truth is that the way it was created to work was for everyone. Again, Dr. King reminded us that, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent, we are interdependent.”
In a piece written much better than I could, the Rabbi emeritus of the Synagogue, Marc Fitzerman, writes about how we don’t have to ignore the obvious awfulness of this event to also recognize the light that is still present. “I don’t believe in the myth of the redeeming detail,” he writes, “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.”
With those words, he speaks of Ahmed al Ahmed, a Syrian-born, Muslim-Australian citizen who was at Bondi Beach during the attacks and risked his own life to tackle and disarm one of the shooters. We don’t yet know the identity of the shooters, other than they are father and son and the father is an immigrant to Australia. What if we learn that he is also from a Muslim country, giving into the most common narrative we want to write about Muslim-Jewish relationships? Well, we’ll have to balance that with the reality of the story of Ahmed al Ahmed, won’t we? We’ll have to decide which narrative we want to believe – that we are inherently divided and evil, and this is a competition between sides, or that we are interconnected and, ultimately, my freedom is bound up in yours. I choose to trust in that latter narrative, though I will admit that it is much quieter than the former, just a whisper these days, like a candle against a winter’s night. Still, it is where I place my faith.
As I stood in the cold watching the Hanukkah gathering, my wife texted me to say that our power was out, like it was for several thousands of Tulsans because of a single accident and an antiquated power infrastructure due to decades of starving public needs, but that’s another article. I headed home, through miles of instant 4-way stops (boy, people don’t know how to do 4-way stops!) and dark homes. I arrived to find my wife wrapping gifts by candlelight, packaging joy for the days ahead with a tiny bit of illumination, like an act of hope, which I’m sure she would furrow her brow about. After all, she was just doing the practical work of wrapping a gift that needed to be wrapped.
Yet, maybe that is part of what getting our hearts right is all about? What practical work are we needing to continue doing in a world where Bondi Beach or Brown University can still happen? Can we focus ourselves on keeping up the good relationships, building the trust, being a good and faithful friend in dark times? Can we just do what ought to be done? Lord knows we see that need all the time right now. Returning the shopping cart from the center of a parking space, picking up a piece of trash from a neighbor’s yard, donating from our abundance to those in need may all seem like small things, and they are. But they also train us for the moments that we might need to risk bigger things. Who knows what the daily practices of Ahmed al Ahmed are or how they prepared him to be a good neighbor, a good person, when the stakes were much higher? Let’s not forget the small things.
The miracle of Hanukkah is that a little oil lasted a lot longer than it should have and brought light to such a dark moment. What if that’s what our practices do, too? It is worth considering. In the meantime, I hope that you are finding a little bit of light and knowing that sometimes all we can find is a candle’s worth. And that’s enough.
[1] David Frum, The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/bondi-beach-australia-anti-semitism/685256/