Advent 23: Small is Beautiful

Last night for the first night of Hanukkah, we made dinner for two friends. Howard’s friend, Rich, whom he has known for 39 years, was here for his annual Christmas visit. My friend, Karen, was the maid of honor at our wedding nearly 36 years ago and a friend even before that. They feel like relatives.

Howard lit the candles and then the two men – both Jews – sang the Hanukkah blessing and it was sweet and clear and sung with the merest hint of joyfulness. They sang what they learned in synagogue and at their family tables. They had probably sung it eight times a year every year, once for each night of Hanukkah, and so now the blessing seemed engraved on them, indelible, invisible, and small.

After the blessing, my husband put the menorah in the front window. It’s what Jews do. He reported that all the drapes were pulled open at the rabbi’s house across the street and there were two menorahs blazing. So it felt good to have ours in its place on the window ledge where some of the melted candle wax from last year and the year before can still be seen. We may have a Christmas tree but fundamentally we are believers in light, the small light.

I am turning more and more to the smallness of life. I am turning away from big lights and big things. When they are offered as my goals or my responsibilities, I live constantly in a state of not having done enough. The steady, almost invisible drip of guilt and inadequacy, just makes for more lists and assignments and comparisons. I should do more, I think. More than what? More than whom? Is everything a contest or a competition? Why have only four people for the first night of Hanukkah? Why not fourteen like we used to have? Because when there were fourteen people, I never talked to any of them. I was too busy working. I want to have a conversation, I said to myself, a good conversation. And so that is what we had, the four of us. It was small. Unimpressive. Beautiful.

I want what I do to be enough. I want there to be leftovers. I don’t want to find new ways to come up short by thinking everything I do needs to be big and difficult. Writing this, I think of a very cold night last year when I took twenty cups of chicken soup to Street Angels to be given out to homeless friends. “I wish it was more,” I said to my friend, Shelly, and she answered in the kindest way with words that I remember more often than she would imagine. “It’s enough.”

I pass those words on now to other people I sense are swimming in a sea of obligation. It’s enough. Do these small things. Make twenty cups of soup and trust that someone else will make twenty more. You don’t have to make all the soup. Have just four people for a Hanukkah dinner. Put your small menorah in the window. Let things be small. Make them small.

Small is beautiful for a reason. It lets you breathe. That’s what I’m learning right now.