Hanukkah is a festival of stubborn light, refusing despair. A festival that demands we hold a candle up to the darkness. A festival that asks us to dream of what is possible for us as Jews. Pharaoh’s dreams in this week’s parasha, understood by Joseph and the Torah to represent plenty followed by depletion, remain a stark reminder of the dangers of complacency—when we forget to care for ourselves and the need to plan for dark times.
This week, we hold the dreams that were violently stolen—lives mercilessly cut down at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. Their dreams did not wither naturally from a desert wind like the grain in Pharaoh’s dream; they were ripped away by hatred—supremacist, extremist hatred. And yet Judaism refuses to let even shattered dreams be the final word. Joseph’s wisdom is not only foresight; it is moral courage—the insistence that tomorrow can still be shaped by the light of Judaism.
Miketz demands that we do more than mourn; it asks us to plan, to protect, to store compassion and justice now, so that cruelty does not have the last dream. We cannot allow our dreams of today to be deferred. We must gird ourselves now, to light our lights in our windows and within us. Don’t let the light go out.