The month of Kislev brings us into the heart of winter, right up to the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. The Talmud (in Avodah Zarah 8a) shares a story that when Adam, the first person, reached his first winter and saw the days getting progressively shorter, he feared that the world was descending back into the darkness that preceded creation, that the light would never return. How could he have known what was happening?
Having grown up in Southern California, the darkness of Boston winter was something of a shock when I first moved here, though thankfully I had more context than Adam did and didn’t think it meant the end of the world. Still, a kind of dread would sink into me every time I walked out of my office at 5 pm into the cold night. While I slowly got used to it, it wasn’t until last year that I had a full shift in my relationship to winter.
I realized that the winter darkness is natural. It sounds obvious, because on one level it is, but some part of me had continued to read the shortening days like Adam did, that it meant that something was going wrong.
This embrace of the darkness has completely changed my experience of winter. I can delight now in leaning into the rhythms of the season. While humans don’t hibernate, some ancient animal part of us feels the cold and the dark and wants to cozy up and slow down. When I let myself lean into that instinct instead of pushing it away, I have been finding great joy – in lighting candles (not just on Hanukkah!), in cozying up with a cup of tea and a blanket, in inviting friends over for soup.
In modern Hebrew, the word Kislev can, with some creative spelling, be broken down into the words kis, meaning pocket, and lev, meaning heart. Kislev, the pocket of the heart. It feels right, cozy and tucked away.
May we learn to welcome the darkness, trusting that the light will return.
Hebrew College Rabbinic Intern Carrie Watkins
Monday – Thursday, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Friday, 8:30 am – 3:00 pm
