If we are not to mourn

I am writing in grief, I wrote last Saturday 13 December 2025, the day before the start of Chanukah. We had witnessed eight prisoners move into an irreversible state of damage from their hunger strike, as the government ignored them. 

Nearly a week later, we are about to watch eight people die (I try not to mourn the living). 

I couldn’t bring myself to list more cause for grieving, then woke up on 14 December with a devastating imperative to continue, as 18 people celebrating Chanukah were murdered in Bondi Beach. A stomach drop couldn’t cover it. I prayed, in earnest. That by the time this was read, the week wouldn’t have rendered any more cause for mourning. 

It’s Friday now and the strikers are days closer to death and still not being met by politicians. On Wednesday, despite striker Qesser Zuhrah’s life-threatening condition, HMP Bronzefield refused to call an ambulance for 15 hours.

I have been writing in grief in the same way that I have been working in grief, meeting in grief, kissing in grief. It is not a desolate or focused grief. But not aimless either. The grief swallows all moments in between doing anything and makes me feel universes apart from anyone who seems not to know of it. It is a grief which, as of Sunday, I have tried to lay down. Just for eight days. As Chanukah instructs.

Chanukah literally means “dedication”, though it has come to be known as something like the Jewish “festival of lights”. But the actual asks of Chanukah invite a rededication to contradictions, to wrestling with them body and soul, and to a Judaism that knows itself well. Heeding such calls will save us from a dangerous and docile assimilation.

A very assimilated Chanukah 

A minor festival in the Jewish calendar, it is strange that Chanukah has become perhaps the most well-known. Or perhaps it is inevitable given its proximity to Christmas in the Gregorian calendar. And as the moon shifts the month of Kislev around, they often overlap. Indeed, in the West, Christmas has certainly shaped the way many observe Chanukah. It has assimilated it. 

Here I use assimilation in its most basic sense: the process of becoming so similar to something that it becomes absorbed into it (i.e. a dominant culture). I’m not necessarily referring to ways in which Chanukah has been framed as Jewish Christmas in popular culture (à la Holiday Armadillo and Chanukah Bush). More basically, I am referring to the machinations of capitalism converting religious festivals, with their myriad practices, roots and complications, into an automatic, indeterminate and all-but-secular “holiday”. The exchange of gifts; indulgence in food, gluttony, revelry; a nationwide understanding that at this time we ought to be nice to people as we pass them on the street; jollying; hopefulness. 

Despite this urge to merge with Christmas (or rather the ravenous colonising capacity of state-sponsored capitalism), Chanukah has carried an air, and sometimes explicit narrative, of anti-assimilation about it. I have known Jews who feel very strongly about doing Chanukah hard because Christmas is so loud. I knew families growing up who would intentionally go abroad so as not to be pummelled with Britain at Christmas. There is a Chanukah that is celebrated in opposition to Christmas. We are doing this because we are not doing that.

And the instruction to light your Chanukiah in the window, plainly visible to neighbours, continues to be an act of marking. In particular, in times of fear of anti-semitism, it is not for me to say that such visibility is not intentional and anti-assimilationist. And not just in these times. As Judaism is an inherently diasporic religion, the instruction of positive visibility in whatever place we are, letting neighbours know we are Jewish here, is an eternal imperative. We are supposed to be at home and celebrating in and among neighbours exactly where we are.  

But Chanukah’s ripeness for melding into general seasonal British jollying is really only heightened when we define it in opposition to Christmas. By defining only in negation, it necessarily relies upon – reifies itself as part of – this thing that it is not. This is a second and hungry absorption that we too risk; a docile assimilation into exactly what we are not or worse, are trying to oppose, because we cannot say what we are without it.

Good Jew, bad Jew, very assimilated Jew 

There will be real consequences of our being devoured by a dual assimilation. There is much momentum to reclaim our festivals from archaic, abhorrent stories of conflict through battle and harsh retribution, as well as from Israel, Zionism and right-wing Jewry’s reliance upon them to justify abominable acts. 

I theorise this “reclamation” as assimilation too – ultimately just an awkward, apologetic exercise in cherry-picking. It is emblematic of a wider problem, in my humble opinion, facing the Jewish left in particular. In which we identify ourselves by discarding what we are not. Indeed, saying we are not that type of Jewish has too often replaced the work of living and representing what we are. In doing so we start to belong to what we are not. 

We cannot define ourselves in negation. What future does that bring? What offensive will we use when all of those defences are broken through? Being on the right side of history is not about covering your back. It’s about being on the front line of the fucking picket screaming. 

When a Chanukiah is lit on razed Gazan soil by soldiers whose colonising directives contravene Judaism's ultimate obligation to preserve all human life, it is not enough for Jews to point out that that is not what Judaism says to do. Condemnation indeed for reprehensible sickening acts. But because they are reprehensible in the human realm. Not because we are trying to remind everyone that that is not our Judaism, which by negation, is a good one. 

Indeed, if a Judaism is cited, it is our Judaism. It is the same story of Chanukah that we say is about miracles and light in darkness that is in fact about a bloody battle over historical territory and the desperate consecration of a temple on the rubble of mass death. It is not enough to claim only the parts of these texts that pre-excuse us as inalienably good. 

There is no future to a Jewish practice built on negation or on reclamation from itself. There is no future to a Jewish identity revived simply in opposition to nationalism and to Zionism. Lest we want to become them; though Zionism is not Judaism, Anti-Zionism cannot be Judaism, either. When, b’ezrat Hashem, Zionism falls, and nationalism eventually crumbles, we have to know what Jewishness is then.

What does it look like to rededicate ourselves to this cause? To heed a call to what we (humanity also, not just Jews) are is to heed a call to know. To be learned. To have wrestled and to know we have wrestled. I find the answer in the exact pain and complication of holding difficult texts and ancient practices, and in voicing and performing them amid devastation. In adhering to the full, wretchedly self-contradictory breadth of Chanukah’s obligations. 

Light in the darkness

To remember what Chanukah truly is (and in turn to reach further into knowing what Judaism truly is, not simply what it is against), requires willingness to know parts of our texts and practices easier to ignore. 

As with most of Judaism, the origins of Chanukah are too long a story to tell here. Not least because Judaism’s modern and multi-denominational practice derives from oral tradition. To cut this very long story short, the tale we now associate with Chanukah, where by some divine miracle, oil that should have lasted for one day burned brightly for eight, is a tale amalgamated and curated by the Rabbis of the Talmud (c.200 CE - 600 CE). 

There is no mention of the miraculous oil in the original story – which derives from documentation detailing the Maccabean revolt against Syrian-Greek rule and the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (c.100 BCE, so written at least 300 years earlier). This ancient text is not part of the Torah, but part of the Apocrypha (dubiously authored texts outside the accepted canons of Judaism and Christianity but drawn on by both still).

In fact, Chanukah is just a festival marking the dedication of the altar in the rebuilt temple. I say “just” because a festival was held every time an altar was dedicated anew in these ancient temples (which far from resemble synagogues of today). Chanukah is just the one that stuck – precisely why, scholars continue to debate.  

It was the Rabbis of the Talmud (conversing and arguing to deep ends to establish Jewish law and practice) who curated the story of an oil-based miracle and with it the practice of lighting the Chanukiah one night at a time to commemorate it. But many of the original obligations of the ancient dedication festivals remain. Most surprising to me when I first learnt it was the fact that during these days you cannot mourn. You can sit shiva if someone dies – but with alterations to the practice that lift it away from embodied grief. Mourners do not tear their clothes, and nobody is permitted to eulogise. 

I look back to what I wrote a week ago, as I grappled with the prospect of not grieving this Chanukah.

Tomorrow night, I will text my love across seas as I say shehecheyanu. There is a particular red-hazed light pollution hanging over the crawling-skywards tip of a private housing development out my window. It’s a hue that sometimes obscures the ravenous skyline. As the night draws in, I think of how I would love to have the Chanukiah lit tonight, to use its light to glare out the red, and the white of my laptop screen. Knowing that we are not permitted to use the Chanukah candles for anything, just to see them, I burn a different, ordinary, candle instead (watching as it takes its time to brighten) and am glad to have one night left in which to grieve in this particular way.

Dedication, rededication, and davening

Judaism itself, it occurs to me often, relies upon the somatic. Upon embodied feelings. It is somatic in its rituals (demanding movement, attentiveness to sounds, smelling sharp spices, immersing), in its recurrent symbolic foods, in the semitones of its chant notes, in its obligation to pray with nine other people minimum, close around you, in its instruction to bend and raise on certain lines to ensure presence of and in the body.

But it is perhaps most somatic in its contradictions. In what we are directed to say, daven, and mark from deep within the world’s havoc – and in the recalling of tragic stories designed to lead us again and again to do justice. Judaism is so designed to feel like wrestling with yourself, descending as we do from the Israelites, or from “those who wrestle with G-d”. 

If we are not to mourn, what are we to do? Making ourselves light the cumulative candles every single night, left to right, while reciting a blessing to thank and commemorate “the saving acts, miracles and wonders” in our pasts. I wonder this year if such a dissonance is at all bearable, let alone worth framing as productive. 

I choose to accept the coupled instruction to light candles in gratitude and hope for miracles while not mourning, though my body yearns to. It is not that mourning interrupts hope or gratitude. But if we confront the obligation to shift mourning away from our bodies, we will be forced to get up (however that may look) and use them for other things. Indeed, if the miracles we desperately need are going to happen, they will have been of our making. ▼