A Small Light in a Heavy Week

A Small Light in a Heavy Week

After what happened at Bondi Beach this past weekend, you could almost feel the mood of the city shift.

Not in some dramatic, cinematic way, generally Sydney doesn’t usually do melodrama unless it’s about parking, but in that quieter, heavier way. The kind where you notice people scanning the news a little longer than usual. The kind where conversations start with “Did you see…” and end with a sigh. The kind where the air feels tight, even when you’re outside.

And in moments like this, we’re confronted with something that sounds simple, yet it is anything but: We get to choose what we do next.

Not in the sense of denying what happened, or rushing past it, or shaming people for feeling rattled. I mean the deeper choice, the one that sits beneath the headlines and the hot takes: whether we let the darkness do what darkness always tries to do (divide us, harden us, shrink us), or whether we move, deliberately, toward the light.

That’s why I keep thinking about Hanukkah.

Not as a “look how wonderful this tradition is” moment, and certainly not as a way to claim moral high ground for any one community. More as a human lesson, sitting there in plain sight: when it’s dark, we don’t win by arguing about the darkness. We win by tending the light.

In the Jewish tradition, Hanukkah candles are lit and placed where they can be seen, often in a window. Not for performance. Not for applause. It’s an act of sharing. A small flame, held up against the night as if to say: We’re still here. We haven’t given up on each other. Hope still counts.

It’s a deceptively practical teaching.

When fear rises, when the world feels brittle, when people are tempted to retreat into suspicion or anger, the instinct is to pull the light inward protect it, hide it, ration it. Hanukkah does something else. It puts the light where others can see it.

Not to make a statement, rather to make a difference. I love that, because it speaks to the real spiritual challenge of a moment like this: the task isn’t to feel nothing. The task is to feel what we feel without letting it turn us into someone we don’t want to be.

Although we have in Sydney this weekend, but global these past months witnessed darkness, maybe more then we like, because this is what happens in a heavy week.

We watch a terrible thing unfold, and the nervous system does what nervous systems do. We become vigilant. We become reactive. We become hungry for certainty. We want someone to blame. We want a clean story with neat villains and tidy solutions. We want to believe that if we say the “right” thing loudly enough, it will make the world safe again. But the world doesn’t get safer because we become sharper. It gets safer when we become steadier. And steadiness often looks… almost boring.

It looks like speaking softly when everything is trying to bait you into shouting. It looks like refusing to forward the rumour that makes your side feel righteous but makes the situation worse. It looks like choosing language that doesn’t turn your neighbour into a symbol. It looks like checking on the person who’s gone quiet. It looks like apologising when you’ve snapped, even if you had “reasons.” It looks like taking your kid’s questions seriously, without feeding them fear. It looks like remembering that social cohesion is not a vibe, it’s something you practise.

Feel the hope for tonight, in homes across our towns and cities, someone will strike a match. A small flame will appear. A tiny, stubborn glow that doesn’t pretend to solve everything. It won’t erase grief. It won’t undo harm. It won’t magically make people wise, or kind, or self-controlled. But it will remind us of the direction.

Light doesn’t argue with darkness. It doesn’t negotiate. It simply shows up and does its work. And the work, for us, is not abstract. It’s relational. It’s civic. It’s daily.

If you want to “choose light” in a way that isn’t sentimental, here’s what that might mean in a week like this:

It means keeping your empathy switched on, especially when it would be easier to switch it off. It means remembering that fear is contagious, and so is calm. It means holding onto complexity without turning it into paralysis. It means refusing the cheap thrill of division, even when division is dressed up as “strength.” It means noticing the people who are most likely to feel unsafe or targeted when public tension rises and letting them feel seen, not alone. It means being a little more generous in the supermarket queue, a little more patient in traffic, a little more human online.

Because social harmony doesn’t collapse in one dramatic moment. It erodes through a thousand tiny withdrawals: a sneer here, a stereotype there, a casual cruelty, a cynical shrug, a comment that dehumanises, a joke that teaches people it’s okay to stop caring.

But it’s rebuilt in the opposite way: a thousand tiny deposits. A message. A smile. A “are you okay?” A decision to soften. A commitment to keep the common things common.

This is the part where someone usually says, “But isn’t that naïve?” No. It’s disciplined.

Optimism is not pretending the world is fine. Optimism is choosing to act as though repair is possible and behaving accordingly.

In contrast, there’s a form of pessimism that masquerades as intelligence. It says: People are awful. Society is broken. Nothing changes. Everyone is hypocritical. It’s all going to hell.

It feels worldly, doesn’t it? But it’s also a trap. Because once you decide nothing can be repaired, you stop repairing. And that becomes the proof. The better question is this: what does repair look like now?

Not in slogans. Not in grand performances. Now, in the neighbourhood. In the workplace. In the school drop-off line. In the way we speak about “them.” In the way we protect the dignity of “us.”

For everyone who feels unsettled I get it. Your feelings are real. This is a time to be gentle with yourself and generous with others. Not because we’re ignoring reality, but because we’re meeting it like adults. We can hold grief and steadiness in the same hands. We can be honest about pain without worshipping it. We can feel fear without letting it become a blueprint for how we treat each other.

And the beauty of land blessed by many cultures is we can learn from any tradition, including Hanukkah, without turning it into a trophy.

One small flame. Not for show. For sharing. For direction. For the reminder that in our darkest moments, we still get a choice: to go deeper into the darkness, or to move, deliberately, toward the light.

Let’s choose the light. And then let’s do the unglamorous work of keeping it lit.

 

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