How to Share Your Light With the World Without Burning Out

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah celebrates the miracle of one day’s worth of oil lasting for eight days. We celebrate through the ritual of lighting the candles on the menorah for eight nights.

There are many customs and rules around the menorah lighting ritual. Among them are these:

• Additive Process: We light the candles in an additive fashion. The first night we light one candle, and each night we add a candle until we light eight on the last night.
• Visibility: The menorah should be visible to people passing by on the street. Ideally the menorah is placed in a window, so people walking by can see it. And the time for lighting the candles is early in the evening when people are most likely to pass by.

These two rules give us three key principles about how to share our light with the world in a sustainable way, without burning out.

(1) Start Small

First, in the midst of darkness, you need only a little bit of light. The Macabees had only one vial oil, enough for one day, but it turned out to be enough. We don’t light all eight candles on the first night of Chanukah. We take it one day at a time, slowly increasing.

(2) Light is Contagious

Second, the slow and steady increase in light reflects that light is contagious. You don’t need to share your light with the whole world in one day. We light the menorah using a “helper candle,” called a shamash. The flame of the shamash is strong enough to light one candle or eight. It is not diminished by lighting more.

In the same way, you can spread your light to the world by sharing it with one person at a time.

Also read How to Enlighten the World

(3) Visibility Helps

Third, visibility is important for our light to spread. People emulate what they see.

Research on kindness — a form of your light — shows that kindness is contagious seeing acts of kindness makes us kind to others, even if we aren’t the recipient of the kindness.

The positive effects of kindness are experienced in the brain of everyone who witnessed the act, improving their mood and making them significantly more likely to “pay it forward.” This means one good deed in a crowded area can create a domino effect and improve the day of dozens of people! — Jamil Zaki, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University for Scientific American, July 26, 2016

Kindness is Contagious

The visibility is crucial not necessarily for the specifics of the action, but for the underlying spirit of it.

The study showed that

people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them. This implies is that kindness itself is contagious, and that that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.

Although kindness is only one aspect of our inner light, the principles hold:

• We only need a small flicker of light to overcome darkness, because light spreads.
• Slowly spreading our light one person at a time will be sustainable and not burn us out.
• Light spreads most effectively when we allow it to be visible to others.