Rabbi Neil Sandler’s Chanukah Message for 2025

I used to love my “four – eyes” conversations with Rabbi Arnold Goodman, of blessed memory, when he would return to Atlanta as Senior Scholar of Ahavath Achim Synagogue. We could hardly have had conversations like these when I was Rabbi Goodman’s teens – old congregant in Minneapolis.

This particular conversation took place a few years prior to my own retirement. We were talking about the “big retirement question” – What do you plan to do in retirement? Rabbi Goodman taught me something that day, something I have never forgotten. Retirement, he said, amounted to a redirection in energy.

Sure, a new time with the possibility of new opportunities would invariably lead to new outcomes – both interests and activities. But even more so, this new period called “retirement” enables us to discover something new and perhaps challenging about what we have previously been doing for a long time.

I thought about the notion of “redirection in energy” when I considered the candles of the Chanukiyah. For some people, the multi – colored candles symbolize the great variety of people who kindle the Chanukiyah. Not only do their personalities differ from each other. Their priorities and interests also differ from each other. In the sense of sheer beauty, it takes all kinds (or colors) of people to fully share the greatest brilliance of the Chanukiyah when we light all eight candles on the last night of the holiday. On the other hand, it takes very little variety of candle colors to light the Chanukiyah on the earliest nights of the holiday. Those nights may bring much excitement as our children and grandchildren focus on the gifts they will soon receive, but the few candles in the Chanukiyah are often the drabbest.

Reflect on the words of Hillel as he explained why he felt we should light all eight candles on the last night of Chanukah (parallel to the duration of the holiday) and not just one candle (parallel to the smallest amount of oil left in the Temple Menorah). Hillel said, “We increase (the awareness of) holiness and do not decrease it. When we light the eight candles of the Chanukiyah on the final day of the holiday and see it illuminated in its variety of brilliant colors we can most value the variety of people those different – colored candles represent. And be we of retirement age or not, we may recognize an important task – to redirect energy toward recognizing richness in the variety of people we meet and in the ways we and they illuminate our world.

Chag Urim Sameach from Susan and me, our children, Ariel and Jamie, Aliza and Matt and Josh and Rachel and our grandchildren, Remi, Avery, Bennett, Caleb and Noah!

Rabbi Neil Sandler is Rabbi Emeritus of Ahavath Achim Synagogue and Rabbi of the Fitzgerald Hebrew Congregation.