Tonight we light the 7th candle of Hanukkah
Again, not the start of a stand-up routine, but what does a whale have to do with Hanukkah? While the timing is a bit off this year (this 7th night of Hanukkah coincides with New Year’s Eve, not the Winter Solstice), the rabbis of the Talmud have a vivid imagination of how the new month begins. On the Winter Solstice—and some say Rosh Chodesh Tevet—they teach:
God created in the sea big fish and little fish. The size of the biggest fish was one hundred parsangs, two hundred, three hundred, even four hundred. If it was not for God’s merciful repair [tikkun], the big ones would have eaten the smaller ones. What repair did God make? God created the Leviathan. On every winter solstice, Leviathan would rear their head and make themself great and snort in the water and stir it up, and the fear/awe of them would fall on all the fishes in the sea. If this were not so, the small could not stand before the great.
Jill Hammer, an author, teacher, and midrashist, explains further that Leviathan, according to the Zohar (the central text of Jewish mysticism and kabbalah), symbolizes the forces of the unconscious and the underworld. Sometimes, she suggests, it is our darkness that calls to us to wake us up. I like to imagine that is especially true tonight, as 2025 awakens.
In a rare coincidence—it last occurred in 2009 and won’t happen again until 2035—we celebrate the new month of Tevet as we prepare to say goodbye to the year 2024. Tonight, 7 candles (plus the shamash) will shine along with the streamers and fireworks welcoming a New Year around the world. And it is fitting, since Rosh Chodesh—the beginning of a month—is a time that needs light; the New Moon, of course, is not visible to the naked eye.
Hammer continues:
It is taught in rabbinic midrash that Tevet is one of the months of the year ruled by dark forces. Yet the darkness is a fertile one. As the vine of the year climbs upward, the month of Shevat arrives—the time when sap begins to run in the trees (usually corresponding to January or February). In Israel, flowers begin to bloom…” Or, in the words of Valerie Kaur, a Sikh activist: What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if, they suggest, that this is the darkness before the dawn, the darkness before a new beginning.
What if the act of lighting the hanukkiah tonight, on New Year’s Eve when the moon is dark, is our first act of the New Month—and for the New Year. Imagine that the first thing you do, the intention you set for 2025, is to bring light into the world.
Happy 2025 to you and your family!
(If you missed last night’s candle-lighting with Rabbi Ron Stern, click here to watch!)
–Rabbi Sari Laufer