OpEd: Lighting Candles While the World Burns

By Shahar Masori

SAN DIEGO — This week, Jews around the world lit Chanukah candles while watching the news with a familiar knot in their stomachs.

In Australia, a place many of us instinctively associate with openness and safety, violence shattered that illusion. Another attack. Another reminder that antisemitism is not a relic of history but a living, mutating force, one that resurfaces whenever fear is rewarded and lies go unchallenged.

Chanukah was never about pretending darkness doesn’t exist. It was born inside it.

The story is not one of triumph through power, but survival through insistence, on identity, on memory, on light. A small flame, lit again and again, not because it guarantees victory, but because refusing to light it guarantees defeat.

That lesson feels uncomfortably relevant right now.

Around the world, antisemitism is rising not in isolation, but alongside something larger and more dangerous: the erosion of truth itself. When reality becomes negotiable, when lies are delivered with confidence and repetition, minorities are always among the first to feel the heat.

And nowhere is that erosion more alarming than in the United States.

In the past few weeks alone, we’ve witnessed a parade of behavior that would have once been unthinkable from the highest office in the country. From the grotesque politicization of the Kennedy Center, to the quiet rewriting of history through plaques and symbols inside the White House, to an 18 minute address to the nation that was less a speech than a fog machine, dense with distortion, grievance, and outright falsehoods.

None of it is accidental.

Spectacle is not a side effect; it is the strategy.

Our “Dear Leader”, has always understood something deeply dangerous: that chaos exhausts people, and exhausted people stop questioning. When lies come fast enough, truth feels optional. When outrage is constant, accountability feels futile.

This is how democracies don’t fall, but rot.

They rot when connection is replaced by division, when institutions are hollowed out not with tanks but with contempt, when loyalty is demanded in place of competence, and when reality itself is treated as a partisan position.

For Jews, this moment carries a double weight.

Because history has taught us, painfully, that antisemitism does not require official endorsement to thrive. It only requires permission. Permission granted when leaders flirt with authoritarian language. When violence is minimized if it comes from “our side.” When truth becomes tribal.

The attack in Australia did not happen in a vacuum. Nor do the threats in Europe, the harassment on campuses, the vandalized synagogues, the casual normalization of hate dressed up as political critique. These are symptoms, not anomalies.

Chanukah reminds us that light is fragile, but also stubborn.

A candle does not argue with darkness. It does not shout at it. It simply refuses to go out.

That refusal is what feels most endangered right now, not just for Jews, but for anyone who still believes that facts matter, that democracy requires friction, and that leaders should unite rather than fracture.

We are being trained to accept the unacceptable.

To shrug at lies.

To normalize cruelty.

To confuse volume with strength.

To mistake spectacle for leadership.

And once that happens, the darkness no longer needs to attack, it waits.

This is not a call to panic. It is a call to clarity.

Chanukah is not a holiday of miracles alone; it is a holiday of maintenance. Of tending the flame. Of showing up night after night to relight what could easily be extinguished.

That responsibility does not belong to politicians alone. It belongs to citizens. To institutions. To artists. To journalists. To anyone unwilling to let truth be swallowed by noise.

Light does not win because it is loud.

It wins because it is kept.

And in a world increasingly addicted to division, the most radical act may simply be this: to connect, to remember, to speak plainly, and to refuse the lie, no matter how confidently it is delivered.

Because once we stop lighting the candles, the darkness doesn’t need permission anymore.

It just arrives.

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Shahar Masori is an Israeli American freelance writer based in San Diego.