Tonight we light the seventh candle of Hanukkah.
I think that my love for “Les Miserables” is well-known at this point, and now I have passed it along to my son. And, if you ask him to name his favorite song from the show, he will tell you without hesitation that it is the finale, where (spoiler alert) Jean Valjean dies in his daughter’s arms. As he is dying, the spirits of his past life — those he helped, those alongside whom he stood and fought, those he saved — come forward singing the final version of the anthem: “Do You Hear the People Sing.”
Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
who are climbing to the light…
For the wretched of the earth
there is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
and the sun will rise.
Now, Victor Hugo was a devout Catholic — and I know we are not the wretched of the earth, but — it strikes me that this could be a Hanukkah anthem, an anthem for people living in darkness but climbing towards — and trying to bring — light into the world.
The final line of the stanza is, perhaps, an ultimate lesson of Hanukkah — far beyond the oil and even the Maccabees. Legend has it that Rabbi Yakov Yosef, a student of the Ba’al Shem Tov, determined through complex calculations that the night of the Hanukkah victory and the relighting of the Hanukkiah was, in fact, the night of the winter solstice — the longest night of the year. Whether that is apocryphal or true, it is an eternal lesson for us that, indeed, even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer