Some often say that the reason our people have survived persecution for so long is that we use our brains, not our hearts.

That we can read the signs earlier than most, and that that is when we leave. Flee. Resettle. Stay quiet and close in case they catch us again. They say that our intellect precedes our emotion.

And perhaps after so many years of devastation, this is true, but today I cannot understand, I can only feel. I feel panicked, fearful, enraged, but most depressingly, I feel the eery sensation of being unsurprised. This unspeakable act was not unprecedented, it was not out of the blue, and, of course, it was not random.

On the first night of Hanukkah, my mother brought a little aluminium menorah to my share house in Fitzroy, in Melbourne’s inner-north. Along with it she brought a few small non-religious gifts; moisturiser, a notepad, body scrub, and a white tote bag for my groceries.

We lit the first candle together and said our prayer in unison while the sun was still high. The prayer rolled off my lips without thought or attention, “asher kid’shanu …”, just oral muscle memory, a few words from language I do not understand, but have spoken my whole life.

We were hasty with the whole procedure, failing to wait for the sky to turn orange and for the sun to dip lower toward the horizon. I had places to go and people to see. The wax burnt quickly for the candles were thin and cheap.

My Christmas-and-Easter housemate asked what was Hanukkah all about anyway and so I sat on the floor and humbly explained: “It is a festival of light. We celebrate resilience after the destruction of our sacred temple and the occupation of Jerusalem. It sounds grim but its actually one of the few fun ones”.

She laughed a bit. “Sounds fun.”

I had plans that evening not to celebrate with community or to visit shul (a synagogue), but instead to go drinking with my non-Jewish friends, like we do almost every Sunday, Wednesday, and most Fridays. My mother dropped me at the pub, after first a brief stop at a bar for one of our own.

We talked about work, a little politics, university, writing, hair, my relationship. We both smoked one cigarette each. We did not talk or think about the candles burning back at home. We did not talk or think about Hanukkah because we did not have to. We knew somewhere between practicality and symbolism, that we needn’t have to worry, because the candles would still be there when we returned. I figured that that was the gift we were given with at the summit of Sinai, the eternal path of return. It is always there, it is always pure and good, it is always waiting. There is no judgment, there is no shame. There is only........

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