Rabbi Charles P. Rabinowitz on dealing with winter's darkness

A Winter Meditation

In the midst of illness, depression, caregiving or bereavement, this winter season presents challenges to anyone who accompanies people spiritually. The other members of our clinical care teams are challenged as well. As the days turn shorter and colder, we go to work in the dark, and return to our homes in the dark. Is it our imagination or the heavier stresses at work that makes it seem that everyone else around us is more joyful than ourselves?

As families gather together, emotional baggage triggers, past losses and grief may resurface, which need to be reflected and reframed. During our drives in darkness, we recognize painfully our broken life stories and psychosocial pieces. We have a deeper and warmer need to be healed, repaired, and made whole once again.[1]

On each continent, it is interesting how religions and cultures have found a means to deal with the winter darkness and its psychosocial and spiritual aspects: Jews with Hanukah, Christians with Christmas, African Americans with Kwanza. All bring light to turn away the darkness inside and outside our homes. On NPR I heard a wonderful story about end-of-year visiting rituals that are performed all around the world.

As a communal event, each culture goes from house to house with song and a strong sense of covenantal community. Each visited family is expected to bring something to eat out to their neighbors at their doors. In Africa, South America, Europe and here, when those families don’t have something to share, the community brings to them in the days that follow gifts of food and drink that are left anonymously at the door. These holiday rituals celebrate the rays of hope and light that are found even on the darkest of days. The physical darkness of the year becomes a metaphor for the darkness that envelops individuals at times of illness and loss. These simple rituals produce little acts of loving kindness, world repair, and unrecognized miracles that touch our inner warmth of hope and light.

My friend Rabbi Simkha Weintraub teaches us so well that:

“Rather than curse the darkness,
we seek to fan the sparks of light-
to find blessing where we can,
locate community where it may exist,
to treasure moments of joy where we may.
A person can’t be asked
to suddenly ‘jump’ to 8 lights of joy,
but we can help each other build from 1 to 8.” [2]

As the modern Psalmist Debbie Perlman, who used her own suffering to reframe the world, wrote:

“Almighty and Marvelous One.
You call us to take up the light,
To push aside our spirits’ darkness
For Your Name’s sake.

At this season, the miracles appeared.
At this season, we must work for miracles.

You open Your hand
Not to pour the light upon our heads,
But to offer it as a beacon
That we might grasp it and move forward.

You open Your hand in this dark season
As we warm each other and praise Your Name.” [3]

So as we celebrate our multifaith and multicultural strengths together, may we be able to conclude our prayer as Rabbi Alexandria did each day:

“May it be Your Will,
O Eternal our G-d,
To station us in an illumined corner,
And not let our heart be sick
Nor our eyes darkened.” (Berakhot 17a) [4]

AMEN.

[1] A rewording and reflection based on the opening paragraphs in The National Center for Jewish Healing’s Hanukkah: Lights in the Darkness. 2004, 1.
[2] Ibid, 4.
[3] Ibid, 4. See Debbie Perlman, Flames to Heaven: New Psalms for Healing & Praise, Wilmette, IL: Rad Publishers, 75. She was a modern psalmist with a powerful voice.
[4] Ibid, 2.

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