“Light One Candle"

A menorah on the third night of Chanukah.

“Light One Candle”*

It was late in the summer season of 1967, and I was working in the young men’s department at a Sears store in central Rhode Island. I loved the job because I had great coworkers, and although Sears was not especially known for an avant-garde line of either young men’s or young women’s clothing, their inventory was quite nice from my perspective. The school I attended in Providence, Rhode Island, had a dress code, soon to be abandoned considering the times and the youth movement, but the sports jackets at Sears were really nice, and I got a great discount as a worker there.

One afternoon during the time when parents bought back-to-school clothes, a man accompanied by his young son got really irate about the fact that Sears’ line of white shirts had only one shirt out of about five or six shirts that was made in the US. The latter was of particular importance in the area where the Sears store was located because the area had been known for its textile industry. That industry had left the area for the US South, where wages and weather were better suited to that industry’s needs. Textile manufacturing would soon leave for the Far East in yet another attempt to reduce costs. I knew these issues personally because half of my family had come to this area of Rhode Island because of the textile industry. My maternal grandfather was the superintendent of his brother’s textile mill nearby that produced synthetics and some lace. The former would become important during World War II.

A few years after my Sears summer job, I first learned that Dow Chemical produced napalm that had first been used in World War II but was put into use routinely in both Korea and Vietnam. The photo of the girl running down a dirt road in Vietnam, her flesh burned by napalm, was one of the visual images that made the war come home in a powerful way. Of course, Dow, which soon abandoned its production of napalm, was not the only industry involved in the products used in war.

December 14, 2025, Sunday, is the first night of Chanukah. My family is made up of mostly secular Jews, and we are proud of our heritage. This year, the candles that burn in our menorah, the symbol of the resistance in the ancient story of the festival of lights, were not produced in Israel.

“Chanukah commemorates the Maccabean Revolt in the 2nd century BCE, where a small Jewish army, the Maccabees, fought against Greek-Syrian oppressors who had defiled the Second Temple in Jerusalem by outlawing Jewish practice and installing Greek idols” (AI).

Many Chanukah candles are produced in Israel. Although my family’s purchase of candles made elsewhere to mark this celebration is only the most symbolic of acts of resistance and of little impact on the Israeli government as it continues to wage war and repression on the people of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, that small act is at the heart of Jewish values in refusing to do to others that which a person would not want to be done to himself or herself.

In the spring, another major holiday in the Jewish calendar will take place, and we will use unleavened bread, what Jews call the bread of affliction, to mark the story of the Jews escape from captivity in Egypt. That holiday is Passover. The bread we use, called matzoh, will not be produced in Israel. This is not part of the formal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is a separate subject, but it’s what we can do in a very personal way to register protest.

Israel is not the only country producing goods that have a connection to doing harm to others. From the Vietnam War era, I learned what commonly made items are produced by companies that do one kind of harm or another and avoid those items in purchases. These acts might be called small potatoes, but they’re my small potatoes and allow me to live with at least a little less guilt at some of the horror I see around me.

“Light One Candle” (1982) written by Peter Yarrow.