Stand Before It and Learn

It is Hanukkah 2025.

I’ve been feeling the weight of whats happening in a way that the world can no longer ignore. More hate. More violence. More moments where it feels like the ground under humanity is thinning. Not only through the events themselves, but through how people are carrying them. 

Conversations feel tighter.

Reactions feel sharper.

There’s more fear, more anger, more certainty — and less space to stay present with what’s actually happening.

My instinct in times like this is familiar. I want to understand what’s going on. I want to explain it. Because explanation gives a sense of control. If I can name something clearly enough, I feel less exposed to it.

But this is exactly where the teaching of Hanukkah keeps interrupting me.

It doesn’t meet this moment with explanation. It meets it with orientation.

It asks a different question: where am I standing when reality reaches me?

That question matters, because it shifts the work away from interpreting the world and toward examining the vessel through which the world is being received. With how WE are liable.

It’s important to be precise here, because this can easily be misunderstood.

This isn’t saying that disasters are happening because people are bad. It isn’t saying this is punishment. And it isn’t saying that if we were more spiritual, none of this would be happening. 

Those ideas don’t lead to responsibility — they lead to blame, guilt, or superiority. 

All of those harden the vessel rather than refine it.

What’s being pointed to is something subtler: the more inner material we haven’t learned how to process, the more violently reality appears to move.

From this perspective, hatred intensifies when connection is breached. Violence erupts when boundaries between people collapses. Even natural disasters are seen as expressions of imbalance, not moral failure.

And then there’s the hard core bottom line of spirituality: we have nothing that needs to happen on the outside.

This doesn’t deny suffering. It doesn’t dismiss pain. It doesn’t ask us to be passive. What it does is remove the false location of control. Because the moment we believe the solution lies “out there,” we disconnect from the only place where we can actually participate — the condition of the vessel itself.

The real danger of this time isn’t only what’s happening. It’s how quickly we misinterpret. And misinterpretation is never neutral. It turns fear into certainty, pain into ideology, and complexity into sides.

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, Hanukkah is described as the first thing we truly attain in spirituality because it marks the first encounter with a reality where the mind can no longer lead.

There is one constant reality — Creator, Light — and it does not change. What changes is only our perception, our absorption, our ability to receive. This is why Kabbalah is called the wisdom of reception. Not the wisdom of changing the world, but the wisdom of understanding how the world is received.

This is where the work becomes practical.

Prayer, in this framework, isn’t asking for circumstances to change. It’s judging oneself — examining where I am, how I’m oriented, what qualities are shaping my perception. Because if reality appears as a replication of our qualities, then what we experience as “external events” are also places where inner changes become visible.

That doesn’t make suffering imaginary. It makes our participation unavoidable.

Our Sages write that the light of Hanukkah must be extended “until all feet have vanished from the market.” In the teaching, those “feet” are called spies — inner forces that observe reality and immediately translate it through self-benefit, fear, or control.

The market is the public domain — the place where we’re exposed to the world, to noise, to reaction, to opinion. The instruction is very specific: stay with the light until the spies lose their influence.

In lived terms, this means learning to remain present long enough that our first interpretations don’t automatically become our conclusions. Because the spies don’t always sound destructive. Often they sound reasonable. Protective. Even moral. But they always pull us back into reception.

Hanukkah doesn’t fight those voices. It outlasts them.

This leads to the point that needs to be clear, not as an idea, but as orientation: everything depends on the vessels, not on the Light. The Light is in complete rest. The system’s governance doesn’t fluctuate. What fluctuates is the condition of the vessel.

This is why the teaching is uncompromising about where the work actually is. 

Trying to change yourself directly becomes psychology—Trying to change your connection with the environment becomes spiritual work. 

The spiritual vessel is built precisely on what happens between people — on the quality of connection, not on internal states alone.

When that boundary is breached — when justification, philosophy, or righteousness enters — clarity drains quickly. 

The oil becomes defiled. Vitality disappears from the work. Often what remains is very little. A single spark. Enough for one day.

The miracle of Hanukkah isn’t that the oil lasts. It’s that the lighting continues anyway.

This way of seeing doesn’t stay abstract for long. It moves straight into the places we actually live.

There are moments in relationships where someone close to us triggers something that feels larger than the situation itself. It’s easy to assume the problem is the other person. But often what’s being revealed is a new layer in the vessel between us. The work shifts from fixing a person to correcting a connection.

Intimacy accelerates this process. It brings inner contradictions to the surface faster than solitude ever could. Love without faith quietly turns into demand, and demand hardens the vessel. Seeing this doesn’t mean withdrawing. It means relating with more precision.

Conflict exposes the vessel very quickly. The breach usually happens at a specific moment — when being right becomes more important than maintaining the boundary, when explanation replaces responsibility. A small but decisive shift is learning to pause and ask what this conflict is revealing about the vessel right now. That question doesn’t eliminate conflict. It changes its function.

There are also moments where bestowal doesn’t feel rewarding. Giving creates emptiness rather than warmth. Continuing feels irrational. This is often where people stop. But in this teaching, that moment isn’t failure. It’s a threshold. When there is nothing to receive back, the vessel is tested for its true orientation. This is where faith above reason stops being a concept and becomes lived.

As this way of seeing settles, it spreads. It changes how we consume information — whether we absorb everything we see, or learn when to observe without feeding the will to receive. It changes how we relate to authority and leadership, noticing when explanation replaces responsibility and when guidance turns into control.

 It changes how loneliness is experienced — not always as absence, but sometimes as reduced interference. It changes prayer, from asking for outcomes to checking alignment. It changes how we understand collective responsibility, because no one corrects alone and private spirituality eventually collapses.

And it changes how we meet moments where meaning dissolves — when explanations stop working and knowledge fails. Those moments aren’t always collapse. Sometimes they’re where the next layer can finally be revealed.

I leave you with this, If this time feels destabilising, it may not be because something has gone wrong. It may be because something is being revealed that we haven’t yet learned how to receive.

Hanukkah doesn’t ask us to explain this moment. It asks us to hold it correctly. To stop misinterpreting. To stop demanding certainty. To stop placing control outside ourselves.

And instead, to do something quieter and more exacting: to stand before it — and learn.