Fear is contagious. Look for the light of courage.

You are supposed to celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah publicly. The menorah is supposed to be visible to the street from your window. But in a world where you’re Jewish and you consider not putting out the menorah out of fear, that should tell you everything about the times in which we live. I read about a lot of people from Los Angeles who feel they need to keep Hanukkah to themselves this year. That’s wrong. That’s deeply wrong.

The idea is that you need to share your light. With everything that’s going on, if you see somebody with a menorah in their window, that’s a person of courage. But many are afraid — and justifiably so.

Fear is often a friend. It is what keeps us alive in many cases because the world is a really dangerous place. If you had no fear, you would have walked off the roof as a kid or any of those other asinine things you did all the time because you would have had no fear.

Fear and the avoidance of danger are wired deep into us. We recoil from a snake before we even consciously identify it as a snake. We know we're in the presence of danger because that reflex is embedded so deeply in us. It's almost impossible to train yourself out of it, and it's a good thing.

We need more light. Each candle burns from within, but it's lit by a spark from without — shining out against the darkness but always reaching up.

Fear is also contagious. Now, that can be a good thing and a bad thing. A scream, tone of voice, posture, facial expression, all those things will communicate fear from one person to the next. Again, that's a survival mechanism. Someone in your group is afraid, and you think, “Maybe they know something that I don't know. Maybe they've seen the tiger and I haven't seen it yet.” And the smart thing to do is react before asking too many questions. You just shut down and wait a minute. Then you can ask questions.

Because we are animals — social animals — and we’re constantly informed by one another and constantly calibrating against each other.

This can be negative as well as positive. Crowds can turn into mobs and do horrible things way beyond what one individual in that crowd could or would do. Anybody who has experienced this knows a mob gets out of control fast. Anybody who has been to church knows the power of being in a crowd of people.

The family and I went to a large church here in Dallas the other weekend, and it was really uplifting — a truly intense, exciting concert. With the congregation, it's not just you experiencing the music being played. At a football game, you're just part of something greater, and you can't really put your finger on it. The presence of people transforms music and sport into a transcendent experience.

Ideas are also contagious. Gad Saad, the Canadian marketing professor who applies evolutionary psychology to business, defines bad ideas as “mind pathogens,” and he says they pass from one mind to another, infecting greater and greater numbers. This fuels social crazes from the tulip mania to self-harm or transgenderism among teenage girls. (See Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage” if you want to know more about that.)

Obviously, in many cases, contagious fear is disastrous. In our world, this is obvious. Just think of the pandemic and panic over COVID-19. How many people just stopped thinking? Think of the countless stories of people dying when a crowd panics and stampedes. This is why you don't cry "fire" in a crowded movie theater when there's not a fire. You don't do that because you know how the crowd will react.

The Bible's view of fear in combat and its contagious effects is nicely summarized when priests are instructed to tell the Israelites: Let your heart not be faint. Don't panic. Don't break. For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight your enemies for you. But also, who is the man who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and return to his house. Don't let him melt the heart of his fellows.

The flip side of fear

Positive emotions are also contagious: kindness, love, joy, and even laughter. Ever wondered why there’s canned laughter in sitcoms? Go back to the worship service, or the concert hall, or a baby laughing, or people laughing. It’s the same for courage. We always tell ourselves to reach deep within to find strength and courage.

But courage is often sparked, at least initially, from without — because courage is also contagious.

War is a classic scene to study for obvious reasons. Studies of the Lincoln Brigade and the American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s are considered classic investigations of courage in battle. Peter Carol in 1994 wrote an article that related to panic that could become dangerously contagious, jeopardizing everyone, yet the veterans observed that courage too had become infectious. Donald Horton’s book on the same subject, “Fear in Battle,” identifies leadership along with devotion to causes as key enablers of courage in combat: something to fight for. A recent example of courage is the Israeli combat officers who are trained specifically to lead from the front.

There are all kinds of these examples. The only fear we have to fear is fear itself. At the bottom of our hearts, we've always known that. That's why we have heroes and statues. That's why we have stories that are meant to inspire us, both fictional and historical, from movies to the Bible. We look to our heroes to teach us. They teach us how we should behave when the world goes dark and scary. We look to those in the past to kindle the light of courage in us so we can choose to face the darkness.

But what happens when a country has all of its real heroes taken down? What happens when all the statues, good or bad, are taken down? What happens when we don't remember our history? That's what Hanukkah is really about. It's what Christmas is really about.

Remember who you are. The world is dark and scary. That's the truth. Many play on our fears, and that makes us more afraid — including afraid of each other. When that happens, we cry out for a savior to make us safe.

There's only one Savior that I know of.

But if we are rock-solid, if we have the light of courage and laughter and hope and truth within us, if we light it up in ourselves and put it in the front window, it not only lights us up, it lights up others. We need more light. Each candle burns from within, but it's lit by a spark from without — shining out against the darkness but always reaching up.

Look up! Look up! This holiday season, forget about everything else. Look up. Find courage, and even better, pass it on. Light the candle in yourself so that you and yours can face the darkness.

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