Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks |
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Yitzhak Perlman, one of the world's greatest violinists, contracted polio at the age of 4. Ever since, he's had to wear metal braces on his legs and walk with crutches. Once when he was giving a concert, a string on his violin broke. Instead of calling for a new violin he continued to play on three strings. When the concerto was over, the audience gave him an ovation and called on him to speak. He did. He said one sentence that everyone there knew referred not only to the broken string but to his disability and much else that is broken in this world. He said: "It's our task to make music with what remains."
That's as good a description as any of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights that begins tonight. For eight days we light candles in memory of the time, 22 centuries ago, when Jews fought for religious freedom against the Alexandrian empire. They won and were able to reconsecrate the Temple that had been defiled. Amongst the wreckage they found a single cruse of oil with its seal intact and with it they were able to relight the menorah, the candelabrum, that stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. Ever afterward that light became a Jewish symbol of hope: hope that after the worst catastrophe something will survive that allows us to begin again with what remains.
2006 has been a bad year. We've seen Iraq and Afghanistan come close to chaos. The killings continue in Darfur. There was the terrorist atrocity in Mumbai, India, and the tragic events in Lebanon and Israel over the summer. This week the President of Iran, who's repeatedly threatened to wipe Israel off the map, convened a conference of Holocaust denial. Instead of standing together to face the real problems of the 21st century - poverty, disease, global warming - in too many parts of the world people have been intent on killing one another. I shudder to think what future historians will make of our age.
What can any of us do? To that my answer is that we can, every one of us, by acts of generosity or kindness, light our own equivalent of a Chanukah light, a candle of hope in a world dangerously close to despair. As the Jewish mystics used to say: a little light drives away much darkness. Much lies broken in our world, but out of even the worst tragedies something survives. Our task is to make music with what remains.
Copyright 2006 BBC