The solstice, Christmas and Hanukkah align for more light

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Despite this week being the darkest of the year, there’s been a focus on light.

In one prominent example, President-elect Donald Trump took to social media to call on his fellow Republicans to “eliminate” daylight saving time, which he wrote was “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

In another case, darkness and light — or enlightened artistic expression — was the subject of a compelling piece in the Washington Post titled “The Hidden Science Swirling in ‘The Starry Night’: The famous painting from Dutch postimpressionist Vincent van Gogh has sparked controversy among physicists.”

Indeed, with winter solstice on Saturday and Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah happening on Wednesday, there’s an emphasis on the celestial and sacred meaning of light.

And secularly, the need for light amid dark times is a key component of the global, national and local news narrative.

Especially when secular events intersect with the sacred, as happened on Monday morning, when Temple Israel in Minneapolis was desecrated by swastikas.

The temple, the largest in Minnesota, was built in 1929, a time of “high levels of antisemitism in the city of Minneapolis,” said Marcia Zimmerman, Temple Israel’s senior rabbi. The edifice echoed the Lincoln Memorial, she said, because that landmark was “all about freedom and the vision to live where everybody’s voice is heard, and everyone has civil rights.”

Over the doors “we use an Isaiah quote that says, ‘May this house be a house of prayer for all people.’” And so, Zimmerman continued, “the very place that we wanted to open the doors and really stand for the freedoms of this country is the very place where a symbol of hate was spray-painted on Monday. And so the dichotomy of that feels so complicated and hurtful and heartbreaking.”

And, tragically, it also feels familiar. At synagogues and Jewish institutions across the country and worldwide, including in Montreal, where a synagogue was firebombed on Wednesday.

Recent years are replete with attacks at other houses of worship worldwide too, said Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Hunegs listed infamous incidents at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston; mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; Catholic churches in Sri Lanka; a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis., and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, as well as attacks at multiple Minnesota mosques (or threats of them, one of which recently canceled activities at a south Minneapolis Islamic center).

And internationally, many governments that should promote the freedom to worship prevent it, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis issued on Wednesday reporting that “Government restrictions on religion stayed at peak levels globally in 2022″ (the latest data available).

Regarding the spiral of violent attacks, Hunegs said that “The degree to which society must sink, attacking people who worship or who are going for pastoral care or for a lifecycle event in the very place people can expect sanctuary — bringing murder, death, carnage — unfortunately sadly reflects something about our society and beyond, and it’s something we need to address in our country and globally, too.”

Welcomingly, many Minnesotans did quickly address the Temple Israel incident, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, and particularly poignantly, since it’s where they worship, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Secretary of State Steve Simon.

The outpouring of support from all sectors secured the spirits of many shaken by the swastikas, including Zimmerman herself.

“This is the time of year that we shed light in this time of darkness — that’s very much what Hanukkah is,” said Zimmerman, speaking of the holiday often called the Festival of Lights. It’s also, she added, “very much what Christmas is — and very much what Ramadan is in its time of year, and Kwanzaa. It’s all of the traditions that recognize that we have to go through the darkness to get to the light.”

Her hope, Zimmerman continued, “is that out of a dark moment of a hateful symbol being sprayed that the outpouring of support, which has really been breathtaking from my Christian colleagues, from my Muslim colleagues, from elected officials everywhere, from city leaders everywhere, from friends and family across the country — I’m overwhelmed by the support; to me that is what that hate symbol is trying to destroy.”

The “aftermath of this,” she said, “is that all communities are coming together to fight hate, and that is the best Hanukkah gift our community can receive.”

And while presents predominate the secular celebration of Christmas, the sacred centrality of Christianity is tied to the concept of light, too.

“Ultimately,” said the Rev. Christopher Collins, vice president for mission at the University of St. Thomas, “it’s the light of God coming into the world, in the flesh, from the person of Jesus, and the light of God, who is love itself, coming in, that brings light into the darkness of sin and injustice and oppression — that’s the deepest theological way of talking about it.”

That Christmas comes amid the darkest time of year reflects “the proposition that light is coming; we’ve got to have hope that disposes us to receive that light too, and so hope is very much tied into this.” Within the Christian tradition, Collins said, “hope is one of the virtues, and it’s a virtue that has to be practiced; it’s a habit that has to be cultivated.”

That practice and that cultivation can be difficult at any time, but particularly now, a time of rising antisemitism and other religious intolerance, and amid bitter domestic divisions (often even within households in a riven America) and a fraught if not frightening geopolitical era.

This time of year, said Collins, is a good time “to be attentive to where there are places of light; to me it’s an invitation to practice hope, especially when it’s not easy to do, to keep my eyes open for little glimpses of light and kindness and mercy that people show each other in particular ways, maybe especially in small ways, especially when we get overwhelmed by macro problems of evil, of violence, of hatred.”

One way to give glimpses of light and kindness and mercy is to build interfaith relationships, as Zimmerman said she and other rabbis have, “in order for us to be there for others when they need it.” Now, she said after the vandalism, “it has come back to us tenfold.”

Hunegs, whose advocacy encompasses secular and sacred communities, concluded that “as an existential, theological, philosophical point, I always believe in the power of good and light to triumph over darkness and evil.

“That is the American spirit. That is the Jewish spirit of life.”

Indeed, it’s the spirit of humanity, regardless of what faith tradition, if any, one adheres to. So it’s essential to remember that whether one looks toward heaven or the canvas of the heavens’ starry night — or both — that after Saturday, the daylight slowly grows longer.