Chanukah - A Holiday That Lights Me Up! But What Really Lights You Up?

It seems that the most symbolic action and the most significant mitzvah we perform on Chanukah is lighting the candles. For this mitzvah, we bless to light the Chanukah candle.

King Solomon says in Proverbs, 'The candle of Hashem is the soul of man,' and our sages have taught us that 'as long as the candle is burning – it is possible to amend.'

Each of us is a candle that shines, and to shine with its power to its surroundings, it must first light within, for itself and from its own essence.

We can light a candle using another candle, as long as the candle we hold for lighting the other candle is lit and shining. First for oneself, first for oneself.

We approach lighting the candle with joy, but none of us likes being lit.

He 'Lights Me Up'

Social and interpersonal interactions are an inseparable part of our lives. Starting from a fetus communicating with its mother and external environment, seeing, hearing, and experiencing what is happening inside and outside it, through its communication with its parents and siblings, and when it grows up – with its external surroundings and all its acquaintances. And we will not refrain from mentioning the relationship a person has with their Creator.

A person is a social being. They are born into relationships, develop, grow, and get taller in them.

Communication difficulty starts when communication becomes challenging and complex. In such a situation, to protect himself, the person desires detachment and prefers moments of solitude over exposure to the environment.

Often, during an interaction, someone says a word, or sentence, or behaves in a way that simply 'lights us up' and makes us lose our calm.

This lighting up is, in fact, a kind of trigger that activates our nervous system, causing all the activation buttons, or if you prefer, the lighting, to simply 'light up'.

What Are Lighting Buttons?

Our magical brain is a processor, and therefore it engraves every event that passes us, with all the interpretations we gave it and all the sights, people, and smells, as well as the conclusions that jumped into our heads at that moment. It encodes, engraves, and saves everything as memory.

It actually links an event to a response, and thus is programmed to react ahead of time whenever that stimulus or something that reminds it appears.

It does this to protect us when we encounter any detail, even the smallest, from the previous event again. More so, if the conclusion or experience engraved from the situation was gloomy for us.

Thus, we find ourselves responding automatically when we are in a certain event, even though we wanted to react differently and cannot even explain to ourselves why.

The lighting buttons are actually the triggers. They are the moments when this nervous system activation takes place. A trigger is the unique moment the system shifts from a safe mode to a danger mode.

The shift from a safe mode to a mode of threat to the self is expressed in emotions, arouses my inner world of interpretations, and dictates how I should react.

If it really succeeded in lighting me up, then even my body will participate in the reaction, and I will feel a rise in blood pressure, a lump in my throat, sweat, etc.

There is often a huge communication gap between my response to the actions or words of the other person and what the other person attributed to their actions. But once the trigger has exerted its effect on the system, and we reacted according to the signal that passed within us, the likelihood that we will come out of the interaction clean and calm is very low.

When Does Lighting Not Make a Mitzvah?

In this context, the lighting does not 'make a mitzvah'; on the contrary. It simply extinguishes every good part of patience, selfhood, and love towards the other in me.

It causes me to lose control and composure, to anger and rage, to the desire to escape and disconnect.

When someone, unconsciously, lights those buttons for us, we are trained – thanks to the brain's function to respond automatically, without control.

For a moment, do not fool yourselves that you are not engaged in lighting someone else's buttons - we are definitely lit, light up, and light others up.

Really spreading a lot of 'light' around us...

When we can also identify a vast gap between the response we expected from the other and the one actually received, it means that we definitely lit the other's buttons without noticing.

When Does Lighting Make a Mitzvah?

To manage interactions at their best level, to achieve the mitzvah of 'loving your neighbor as yourself,' to truly illuminate ourselves with our unique light, and to shine with it upon others, it is very advisable that we are able to identify our lighting buttons, to identify and trace what truly lights us up.

Such identification will increase our self-awareness and allow us to pause our reaction. It will help us understand that we are not our lighting buttons, and allow us to respond from a calm and balanced place, and control our 'automatic.' Manage our emotions, and not be managed by them.

High self-awareness will allow us to respond from a chosen place, and bring us back to the center of ourselves, to the light within us.

This is not work only for ourselves, for when we engage in lighting our inner light and take control of ourselves, we bring some of this light to our surroundings. Self-work of inner lighting is a moral obligation, as it allows us to perform our role in this world in a more illuminated, clear, and understandable way. The purpose of lighting the inner light is to exhibit it to the surroundings, in the sense of 'spreading the miracle' (as done with the Chanukah candle lit in our inner house, but visible to all externally), which is not possible when we are lit (literally). In such a case, we quickly forget who we are, who our true selves are, and why we came here. Our inner light is lit and carries within internal pollutants.

Because losing our light is essentially losing ourselves, who and what we are.

Identifying the buttons that light us up allows us to pause our reaction to the other, as well as continue focusing on the light emanating from them, because often, during this lighting moment, we are busy seeing how their 'light' burns us from the inside, and it is very difficult for us to find light points in them.

The inner dialogue we conduct with ourselves without anyone hearing is a very critical and judgmental conversation toward that person, so by pausing our reaction, we allow more responsibility for our emotional world and understand that the other is not really related to that. Their behavior evoked something ancient in me that was there, sometimes since childhood, but it definitely did not create it.

In a state of response pause, the interaction is at its best, and the light spreads from me to the other, and back from them to me.

Here - lighting makes a mitzvah.

These high understandings and awareness allow a respectful conversation to take place, a conversation that sees the other in a positive light, and the other, in return, warms me with their light.

How to Identify What My Activation Buttons Are?

The following steps will help each of us look within and identify what truly triggers us.

Recall a recent event.

1. Remember who the person was with whom the situation occurred and what it was.
2. What was the criticism I had of them? Let judgments run free.
3. Choose one sentence among the criticisms that really 'lit you up' (e.g.: 'He doesn't see me') and rate how 'lit' / activated you are on a scale of 1 to 10.
4. Repeat this sentence several times, and observe what happens in your body at that moment. At this stage, you already have the answer to which button the other 'lit' for you.
5. Ask yourself – how did you want them to behave towards you? And if they had behaved that way - which part of you would have been addressed?
6. Formulate a sentence like: 'How I love it when...'.
7. Repeat it several times and see what happens in your body.
8. Now examine what changed in the rating you gave to the sentence in section 3.

The change from a high to a low rating indicates that you identified the trigger that 'lit' you up, and took responsibility for it.

From this moment, you can no longer be lit (both literally and metaphorically). You are clearer, purer, and clean, worthy of being enlightened by it, and using it to light others.

You are freer than ever to live who you are.

Have a bright and especially illuminating holiday.

The guidance for identification is based on tools from the 'nonviolent communication' world.

Inbal Elkhayani, M.A, is a certified therapist in-nlp, mindfulness and guided imagery, writer and lecturer in the field.