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This is the D’var Torah I shared on Shabbat, December 13, 2025, for Parashat Vayeshev just before the first candle of Chanukkah 5786.

On Thursday, I spent a good part of an hour staring at images of specific chanukkiot. It’s a bit early to be doing that — Chanukkah doesn’t start until tomorrow evening — and thus I was looking at images without any candles or wicks. But I chose these particular ones to meditate on, because of a reflection I was having and because of something textual.

The reflection was about hope this year. Chanukkah is fundamentally about hope — that is what the story of the oil unexpectedly lasting eight days is all about — and I was thinking about how hard hope is right now for a lot of people. Hope about this country; hope about the situation of Am Yisrael, the Jewish people. And thinking about many people in our community for whom hope is hard personally right now because of things going on in your lives or the lives of people we care about.

And this reflectiion revealed something new to me in the text of the parasha we read today, a connection between the Torah and Chanukkah. A connection between something in each story that is hidden underground — the cruse of oil, the פַּךְ שֶׁל שֶׁמֶן pach shel shemen of the Chanukkah story, and Yosef hurled into a pit by his brothers. That juxtaposition threw me, because it captures something of this moment — the low, the pits as we actually say.

And I found myself with these two dueling images, of the פַּךְ שֶׁל שֶׁמֶן pach shel shemen and יוֹסֵף בַּבּוֹר Yosef ba-bar, the cruse of oil and Yosef in the pit, one an image of hope and one decidedly not.

So that’s what led me to start looking at chanukkiot that actually aren’t my usual favorite type, like the ones on the handout. And if you’re at home on Zoom I’ll just describe that these are chanukkiot where the light is itself very low down, on the base, usually these are oil and wick menorahs. Most of us use chanukkiot where a base holds up the lights and sometimes very high, like the iconic menorah that stood in the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple itself.

I wanted to get a look at light from down low, an angle on hope from the pits. That’s why these were the pictures I was starting at a couple days ago.

What is hope? We get confused about it for two reasons. One is that we mix up hope and optimism, as though hope would be a prediction that things are on the right track, if not immediately than fundamentally and soon enough. That a healing is around the corner, for you or someone close to you or me. That what is wrong in our nation or what is wrong about what’s facing the Jewish people can’t go on like this for too long. If hope means that, then we can let ourselves off the hook for figuring out what to do, because things will work themselves out. Or more likely, because of things that we’re not optimistic about, it’s tempting to say I don’t have hope.

The second confusion is that we think of hope as something primarily inside, a way we feel. And it’s hard to feel that way when things have been difficult — if you’ve experienced a loss, if you’re going through hard times, emotionally or physically or financially. Or if someone you care about is in a hard time like that. And we know that this time of year brings difficult feelings, when the weather is cold and daylight is short and the culture is big on images of joyfulness and easiness. Or looking outward at the world, there can be a big disjuncture between all of that and the bigger picture.

So it’s more than understandable if hope is a feeling inside, to have a crisis of hope right now. To feel like Yosef, alone in a pit while everyone else you think should care has left you and is up there with each other, cluelessly enjoying a feast.

But hope isn’t optimism, and hope is not a feeling. Hope is a conviction that there is a version of life, your life or someone else’s or society’s, that is worth caring about and worth being inspired by and worth being heartbroken about when it isn’t here yet. The writer Rebecca Solnit says that hope is “the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same.”

Hope is how we live and act, and the ways we plenish ourselves. It’s not an optimistic prediction and isn’t contradicted by obstacles. It’s not sometihng inside us but among us — one light kindling another, showing up next to one another like candles in the menorah.

And I am tempted to say that hope is even a mitzvah. Because hopelessness has a cost, that falls on your own soul and also on others who really need your hope, who need us to keep showing up and caring, to keep weeping and to keep forging ahead.

So when we are low, when hope is hard, we have to get that image of Yosef in the pit out of the way. When we feel buried, we have to look around not for the snakes and scorpions down there, but the cruse of oil that must be here somewhere.

How do we do that? The Talmud says that the Chashmonaim, the Maccabean family, went looking around the Beit Hamikdash and found a single cruse of oil that had been hidden away with the seal of the High Priest on it. Placed there at an earlier time, squirreled away under the supervision of a special guide, a special leader or teacher.

When we need to replenish our hope, that’s one of the most important things to look for — something left to us from a few years back, or maybe even from generations ago. Something we don’t have to fashion by ourselves just yet, but keeps us going until we can make it again on our own.

How do we use the past to replenish our hope? For wisdom on this, I go back to a long-term project at Emory University known as the Family Narratives Lab. This project has been led by Dr. Marshall Duke and Dr. Robin Fivush, and it started with an observation by Dr. Duke’s wife Sara, a psychologist working with children with learning disabilities, who said to her husband one day that the children who were doing the best were the ones who knew a lot about their family history. Her husband and Dr. Fivush devised this unbelievably simple protocol of 20 items that came to be called the “Do You Know” questionnaire — things to ask kids like: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Or my favorite: Do you know about a relative whose face “froze” in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough?

And sure enough, the young people with higher scores on the 20 questions had more self-esteem, did better academically, had fewer behavioral issues and exhibited more resilience. They were, in a word, more hopeful.

When Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush probed more deeply, they discovered that certain types of family stories are particularly powerful. Stories fall into three categories — ascending stories, like immigrant stories of rags to relative riches; descending stories. You might think that the ascending stories were the key to more hope.

But actually what they found is that the stories that most correlated with resilience were what they called “oscillating family narratives.” Dr. Duke describes a parent saying to a child: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

In these stories not everything turns out well, and not everything that goes well stays that way all the time. But the researchers say that these stories help people build an “intergenerational self”, a longer perspective on their own life that gives them access to more of the highs than what they themselves have seen or felt. It’s not that people who hear these stories believe that the exact same good things that came to previous generations will happen in the same way; that would just be a setup for disappointment and demoralization. Instead this kind of storytelling yields a wider set of capacities for resilience and hope, for the new situations that come.

In fact in the Emory research, the first big test of their hypotheses came early on, when 9/11 happened. They went back to their subjects, and those who had more of these oscillating family narratives ingrained in them did better in the stresses and chaos of that time.

I think this is especially important knowledge to lean on right now. Now is the time to tell our family stories and to ask for more of them, and now can mean actually now, during Chanukkah and the new year gatherings.

And it’s important also on the collective levels, precisely because we are having a crisis about the past itself and what it means now. We have been too much telling the American story and the Jewish story and the Zionist story as descending family narratives. We have been hearing for instance too much that our American Founders were not visionaries of freedom but proponents of slavery or sellouts — scorpions and snakes rather than a cruse of oil with the seal of the High Priest.

But our collective stories, both American and Jewish, are in fact oscillating family narratives. To reclaim hope and replenish it, we ought to recognize them that way.

We have to tell the story of our American nation as founded in a revolution about liberty and equality, a vision sullied by slavery and vindicated by its end, which slid into Jim Crow until triumphs of civil rights, challenged again by backlash and brutality. Alongside the villains are incredible heroes of each inflection point, moral visionaries who saved lives and unleashed the promise of so many others.

We have to tell the story of the Jewish people starting with Pharaoh’s oppression yielding to divine liberation, exiles followed by return, Maccabees inspired by Esther and Moshe before then, catastrophes punctuated with creativity, a modern era for Jews in American and Israel of freedom and agency and alliances and power, challenged by enemies and our own divisions. Alongside the murder and hatred we have experienced are moral and spiritual and intellectual greats, who have helped us become makers of not only our own people but so much of the wider world.

And if the best parts of those stories are hard to retell, we might lean on another of Dr. Duke’s findings, which comes from talking to people who have coped with serious illness. He says the one form of the oscillating family story that seems to be part of those with the most hope in the face of illness is what he calls “voyage and return”.

These are stories often of displacement, whether in hospitals or at home but perhaps more isolated; often with obstacles and long periods of recovery, and the home at the end is not the same as the start, as the healed person may be different at the end in their capacities or their perspective.

Yet these kinds of stories, Dr. Duke says, are a kind of immunization for those who hear them. It’s not because they provide a specific roadmap, a perfect analogy from then to now. They teach hope. They are a cruse of oil hidden away for the times, God forbid, when you are the one who faces the challenge as an individual. And for us when our world too seems like it’s a long voyage with home still far off.

I have suggested before that in addition to telling and hearing these stories among ourselves, we look to one specific place in our tefillot (prayers) cto talk to ourselves. The Amidah begins always with Avot and Imahot, with ancestors. Don’t just read the paragraph, but add or even substitute a meditative question — What are the gifts of my ancestors, what oscillating and hopeful story do I want to bring to mind right now.

Now may be a time of year when we seek hope from a low starting point, whether that’s in our own lives or families or thinking about our country and our people. In the chanukkiot I have been staring at this week, that’s exactly where hope is kindled and rekindled, replenished and activated. The pit is exactly where the cruse of oil we need can be found. Chanukkah is about hope we don’t have to generate for ourselves, at least not just yet. It was put there for us, a few years ago or even generations ago, and we’ll know it by its special seal. May we find those stories in our own family and our heritage. May we be ready to tell them, back and forth to each other, and anytime someone comes to us, seeking more hope.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach, a Joyous Festival of Light!