Rabbi Charley Baginsky lights the Chanukah candles, last year, at the first ever lighting to be held in Westminster Hall
The Talmud teaches that ner ish u’beito, the light of Chanukah, belongs to each person and their household.
It is a small line, easily missed, but it tells us something lasting. Faith begins close to home. Not in declarations or institutions, but in the steady work of tending light.
That feels especially true this year. The world feels unpredictable. News moves quickly, and meaning takes longer to form. The Talmud reminds us that our task is not to control the world, but to decide how we will live within it.
The rabbis who taught this knew that light and darkness are never neatly separated. They did not imagine perfection. They imagined perseverance. The miracle of Chanukah was not the oil that lasted, but the decision to light the lamp when it probably would not. Judaism has always lived in that space between what is broken and what can still be made whole.
The story could have been told differently. It could have been a story of battle or victory. But the rabbis reimagined a story of resistance as a meditation on endurance. They moved the question from history to ethics, not what once happened, but what we choose to do when certainty is lost.
Lighting the chanukiah offers one kind of answer. We light one candle, then another; we increase in holiness. Hillel taught that light should grow, not fade. Each night we add rather than subtract. The act teaches patience. It reminds us that transformation rarely happens all at once. Faith, too, is built in increments, in the quiet decision to begin again.
Progressive Judaism holds to that same pattern. We do not move on from the past, we speak with it. Every generation interprets the story differently, bringing its own questions to the same ancient light. To think deeply is itself an act of faith. To question is to keep the flame alive.
When we place the chanukiah by the window, we make the private visible. The light belongs to the household, but it is meant to be seen beyond it. It is a simple statement: what we believe still matters, and it can still be shared.
Many of us reach Chanukah feeling tired, unsure what hope should look like. Lighting the candles does not remove that feeling, but it steadies it. For a few minutes each night, we stop. We watch how the light moves, how it softens faces, how it draws us together. We remember that time can be shaped not only by what happens outside, but by what we choose to notice.
When all eight candles are burning, the room is full of light, though the world outside is unchanged. Yet we are changed. The act has worked on us. It has reminded us that faith is not certainty; it is the willingness to kindle again when the future is unclear.
Jewish life has never promised that darkness will disappear. It promises that we can live with purpose inside it. Perhaps, that is the real miracle of Chanukah, not that the oil endured, but that imagination did. That people kept lighting, kept thinking, kept believing that renewal was still possible.
May the candles we light this year bring warmth to our homes and clarity to our hearts. May they remind us that faith is not perfection but persistence, the courage to keep asking, to keep hoping, and to keep lighting. And may that light, shared among us, help us see our way forward.
- Rabbi Charley Baginsky is Co-Lead of Progressive Judaism