There are moments in Jewish history when words collapse under the weight of what the eyes have seen.
The footage released yesterday of six hostages lighting Hanukkah candles inside a Hamas tunnel is one of those moments.
For months, the world has debated abstractions: proportionality, cycles of violence, context.
But when you watch this video, all the noise falls away. There is no “context” that justifies abducting human beings. There is no “cycle” that explains forcing Jews underground and starving them of light, air, and hope.
There is only a single, unbroken truth: This is a battle between light and darkness and the line between them is absolute.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the footage shows Hirsch Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lubanov, and Almog Sarusi exhausted, thin, hollowed by captivity striking a match and insisting on bringing light into the blackest pit on earth.
It was their last Hanukkah.
They didn’t know it.
But we do.
And yet, what did they choose?
Not despair.
Not silence.
Not surrender.
They chose to light.
They chose to sing “הנרות הללו קדש הם”, the same words whispered by Jews for centuries in Europe’s camps, in Soviet basements, in far-flung corners of exile where Jewish existence was a crime. And now, impossibly, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza.
What does it mean that the same melody our children sing at home was sung by captives in the pits of hell? It means the world has underestimated us again.
Jewish strength has never been measured only by armies or weapons. Those matter, and Israel must wield them unapologetically. But our deepest strength is something else, something Hamas can neither understand nor extinguish.
It is the strength to declare, even in the darkest place on earth: “These candles are holy.”
You can hold our bodies, but you will never own our souls.
The terrorists who filmed this footage believed they were documenting humiliation. Instead, they recorded Jewish eternity.
The world will analyze this moment through political lenses whose narrative it confirms, whose arguments it bolsters. But the truth is simpler. The footage is a mirror held up to humanity. Who are we, if we can watch this and remain on the sidelines?
What does it say about us if we treat this as just another headline in a long conflict?
Those six hostages lit candles underground.
They carried light into a place engineered for darkness.
And for that alone, we owe them not only memory, but action.
We must stand because they could not.
We must speak because they were silenced.
We must fight morally, politically, physically if needed because they were murdered.
And we must bring home the body of the last remaining hostage without apology and without hesitation.
The footage from that tunnel is not just a record of what happened. It is a command.
A command to resist moral fog.
A command to reject the world’s pressure to “move on.”
A command to carry their light forward publicly, unapologetically and relentlessly.
Six Jews lit Hanukkah candles in the belly of hell.
This coming Sunday, the Jewish people must light up the rest of the world.