*Holding the Edges | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | December 19, 2025*
This week I remembered how, when we had just moved to Vancouver, Canada, we discovered to our amazement that on Hanukkah there is a massive menorah parade across the city. A convoy of dozens of cars carry enormous, illuminated menorahs on their roofs, bright and striking, looking as if they are floating in the black sky. The Jewish community invited us to take part in the parade, but where would you even get such a giant menorah, and how would you attach it to a car? And besides, I was afraid.
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I was afraid in the same way I was afraid to send my daughters to the Jewish school, afraid of so many Jewish children concentrated in one place, afraid of the security car patrolling around the school. It felt too visible, too dangerous. The same was true for community picnics, gatherings in the park, Independence Day ceremonies, and many other events.
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But as our years in Vancouver went by, that fear weakened and eventually faded. I discovered, for example, that many non-Jewish families take part in the Hanukkah car parade simply because they love to be part of the Festival of Lights. Over the years I learned that quite a few Vancouver families converted to Judaism, simply because they wanted a Jewish way of life, Jewish familyhood. I discovered that many members of the Jewish community center are not Jewish at all.
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These discoveries surprised me every single time. I was so used to thinking about antisemitism, about threat and fear, that it never even occurred to me that there are also people who love Jews, and people who choose to convert even though they were not born into it. And two years ago, when we were traveling in California, a Mexican Christian woman literally threw herself at me with hugs and kisses on the street when she realized we were from Israel. That surprised me too. I realized how easy it is to fall into one-dimensional thinking. How hard it is to remember that everything has more than one side. And how challenging it is to hold contradictions together.
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This week, after the horrific massacre in Australia, those contradictions returned to me again. I once lived in Bondi Beach, for one year, back in 2000. I was in love with Sydney and with that neighborhood. I rented a sweet little apartment, worked odd jobs, wandered endlessly through the streets and coves. As I read the reports about the massacre, my eyes searched for the beach and the streets in the background. I always believed I would return to Australia one day. But this week I had to hold that love-filled memory together with grief and fear.
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This week I read many things written by Jews in Jewish communities around the world. Some were in Canada and the United States, far from Australia on the map, but very close in fear and in shared fate. They were afraid to hold their Hanukkah celebrations. Others insisted that they must hold celebrations larger than usual. They hired additional security services, increased the number of armed guards on synagogue roofs. and because there also was a shooting in the classroom of a Jewish professor at Brown University that very same day, and simultaneously a live ammunition was fired in California at a house that had put up Hanukkah decorations in its yard, Jews in many communities wondered whether they could even send their children to college, or whether they should hide their menorahs.
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It was a hard week for Jews all over the world, because how do you hold these opposing edges: on one side the radiant beauty of the menorahs, and on the other the images from Bondi Beach? On one side the story of the Hanukkah miracle, of light overcoming darkness, and on the other side fear and a very dark grief?
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In one of the most beautiful posts I read this week, this woman wrote that this year she lights the Hanukkah candles with open eyes. Her eyes are open to the fact that stories of heroism are not always beautiful. Sometimes they are extreme. Sometimes they are accompanied by very harsh acts done in your name. But when you belong to a people that has been persecuted for thousands of years, there comes a moment when you understand that it is not always possible to defend yourself through beautiful and noble actions. That sometimes, in order to survive persecution and hostility, you have to take extreme actions. Sometimes our survival is in the hands of extremist groups, even ones like the Maccabees, whom many of us would not identify with today, but thanks to whom we survived. Sometimes terrible things are done in our name. In other words, she said, when she lights the candles this year she will remember that every light inevitably casts shadows as well.
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This week I understood that being Jewish today is deeply confusing, because it means holding contradictions together. Light and shadows. Holding a lofty moral vision together with the understanding that self-defense can sometimes slip beyond noble morality. Holding the holiday and holding the mourning. Loving the world and, in the same breath, feeling not very loved by it. Fearing antisemitism and, in the same breath, suddenly being loved.
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And this week I found myself holding my longing for Australia together with an inner door that slammed shut inside me.
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I once wrote about that door. I wrote a poem about Australia and about how I left it and promised myself I would return. That poem, too, speaks about holding two edges, two worlds at the same time. Your actual life, the reality of your life, and at the same time the fantasy of who you were when all possibilities seemed, supposedly, open. Who I was when I lived in Bondi Beach. In the year 2000. When it felt as though something new and big was beginning in the world.
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I am ending with that poem, from my book “Wherever We Float, That’s Home”. And I am sending condolences and love to the Jewish and Israeli community of Sydney. And strength and love to all of us, everywhere in the world. May we hold the edges. May we remember that.
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*Australia / by Maya Tevet Dayan
[Translated from the Hebrew by Jane Medved]*
I’m telling you about everything I managed
to get done when you weren’t home -
I planted basil in the garden, as two pots
simmered on the kitchen stove, all the while
the baby in my arms. How long will we continue
with these heroic stories? Perhaps you remember
where we put the horizon?
I haven’t seen it for a while. The most beautiful,
sunny day of the year, I spent in the Supermarket
chasing the girls with my eyes
as they ran down the aisles, and wondering
about our membership card, which had suddenly,
for no apparent reason, stopped collecting points.
Perhaps I’ll never know another summer
like the one when I circled all of Australia
in an old Subaru station wagon,
a tent and two boxes in the trunk,
one for vegetables, and one for fruit.
I shopped at farms. I stayed away
from crocodiles, all day in a skirt and bikini top,
the horizon was spread so far and wide
it actually seemed like the outline of the universe.
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How did I leave Australia? Wide open
as the door to a house, when you step out
for a moment to the garden, careless and free.
I promised myself I’d come back.
Everything I dreamt for back then, in single beds,
was about this family, this check-out line in the market,
this membership card, grated yellow cheese
sold by the pound, blades of grass
stuck to the clothes at the end of the day.
I never imagined that I would wander here
and remember those other vast skies,
a red desert, earth just like this, but different.
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Wishing us all a Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*