In just three days, after early evening absorbs a fading dusk, Jews around the world will light the first candle of Chanukah, chag ha’urim, the festival of lights. As all schoolchildren know, each night for eight successive nights, we will add a candle until at holiday’s end, the chanukiyah will be a robust, nine-armed, shining luminescence on the window sills of our homes.

Our children and grandchildren will take great delight in the  spinning tops, chocolate coins, songs, sufganiyot and incremental glow of the light of the holiday. But we, their parents and grandparents, will understand another, less playful aspect of the incremental light: that it carries specific historic and theological meaning. They attest to the terrible struggle, but ultimate triumph, of a people who refused to abandon their faith against egomaniacal despotism that’s determined to destroy it.

The glowing, candled commemoration of that triumph is itself an act of holiness and a public proclamation that the home in which the candles burn carries the values of the ancient-modern faith that our forebears fought to preserve.

In the deeply troubled times in which we find ourselves today,  when entire communities, family, friends and neighbours alike face increasingly uncertain economic futures, we must turn repeatedly to those values and to the faith from which they spring.

Who better than Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, to articulate for us how our faith compels us to respond during times such as these?

In To Heal a Fractured World, he tells us that “serving God and serving our fellow human beings are inseparably linked… Unless the holy leads us outward toward the good, and the good leads us back, for renewal, to the holy, the creative energies of faith run dry.”

Now more than ever, according to Rabbi Sacks, social responsibility needs reaffirmation. Not surprisingly, his formula for manifesting such responsibility is quite prosaic, indeed quite “down-to-earth,” as he puts it.

In essence, he proposes that we adopt the discourse of everyday kindness: a gentle word, a hand extended, a reassuring touch, a smile, a comforting embrace, an expression of confidence.

“If someone is lonely,” he urges, “invite them home. If someone you know has recently been bereaved, visit them and give them comfort. If you know of someone who has lost their job, do all you can to help them find another.”

In other words, Rabbi Sacks urges us simply to honour dignity and humanity.

This year in particular, the incremental glow of the candles of Chanukah bears the urgent, important message that we must not be indifferent to the travails and mounting insecurity and suffering of our fellow human beings.  

Like the light of  the candles that gives the holiday its special meaning, the message of Chanukah too must shine very brightly.