Light a Candle for Gilad and Remember Our Shared Humanity

This Friday night, the Hebrew date of the 29th of Sivan, will mark five years since the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted by the terrorist organization Hamas. It has been five years since anyone besides Hamas, not his family, government or even international aid organizations such as the Red Cross have seen him. It is a travesty of justice that Hamas has not allowed their prisoner to be examined by, at the very least, competent medical professionals, to assess his health and well being.

To mark the five year anniversary of his capture, Rabbi Avi Weiss has called upon all Jews to light an extra candle for Gilad on Friday afternoon prior to sunset. The hope is that all these candles as Rabbi Weiss describes will help "dispel the darkness of Hamas' terrorism."

My family will be lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday afternoon but before we do it is important to reflect further on what we are doing. In a world where casualties from wars across the globe reach staggering numbers and where close to 4,000 crimes were committed for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2009, what does it mean to raise world consciousness about the fate of a lone individual? The heartbreaking stories of suffering and despair cry out from every corner of our planet, why focus in on the misfortune of one person?

The Shulchan Aruch (Y"D 251:3) lays out an order of prioritization for the giving of charity. The vast majority of us have limited funds to distribute to the needy and therefore it becomes essential to understand where to begin. First one begins with their own needs, if you are not properly taken care of you will not be able to help anyone else then the Shulchan Aruch expands to one's family, moving next to one's neighborhood then one's city and ending with the rest of the world. While this intuitively makes sense, the idea that underlies this halacha is critical in understanding what we will be doing when we light a candle for Gilad this coming Friday.

True love and care for others is possible when I truly love and care for myself. When I have a positive self-image then I can incorporate other people into my orbit of concern and love. Thus a healthy respect for one's self is essential. The people that one is most intimately connected to is one's family. A person is born into their immediate family and later in life many will make the choice to commit themselves to a single person and by doing create an entirely new branch of that family. These are people that you know better than any other people on the planet. Their faces, voices and personalities are etched into your mind in a way that no one else is.

The combination of a healthy self-respect and self-care with a genuine love and concern for one's family creates the foundation for which sustainable and long-lasting giving can be accomplished. The roots need to be firmly grounded before a tall and confident tree can emerge. It is after these roots of self and family are solidly established and continue to be nurtured that one's network of care reaches out beyond to one's community and on from there.

In other words, I can most care for the world when I care for myself and my family. My love and concern needs to be directed and focused so that when the cries of people throughout the globe reach my ears, I can hear it and respond accordingly. When my family lights a candle for Gilad Shalit this Friday we will be reaching out our hearts and souls to a single individual who is suffering and in tremendous pain. We will zoom in on his face, his name and his story out of the thousands and thousands of other stories of misfortune that cry out from all over the world. All of the numbers and the statistics of casualties of war and casualties of crime have names and identities, they have stories and personalities, they are unique lives, people created in the image of God. By lighting a small flame for one of these numbers, transforming him from a statistic to a person, we can begin to feel the humanity of all the others. Lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday is to affirm our shared humanity, which begins at home and reaches out from there.

I hope you will join us in lighting a candle for Gilad.