Behind the photo: All you need is a little light

"The way to deal with darkness is not by hiding, but by lighting another candle - by adding one more light."

Rabbi Mendel Shemtov, who directs Chabad Jewish Center of Elgin, said those words to me shortly before we headed outside for a ceremony to light a nine-foot tall steel menorah on the first day of Hanukkah in early December.

Shemtov wasn’t speaking literally at the time; he was talking about the importance of publicly celebrating Hanukkah amid a growing wave of antisemitism around the world, specifically in the context of the war between Israel and Hamas.

"The beauty of fire is that it gives warmth and light to those around you, and it doesn't diminish the warmth and light you receive from it,“ he told me. ”On the contrary, the more people there are, the warmer it gets."

There was definitely a feeling of warmth that night, despite the cold temperature, as about a hundred people gathered outside the Heritage Ballroom at the Centre of Elgin.

After telling the story of the Maccabees and the first Hanukkah, Shemtov and his family passed out candles to everyone in the crowd, who then fought the wind to keep them alight.

Candles can be a great source of light for photographs, especially in a setting like this when there was very little ambient light, not to mention the way it captured the mood of the event.

I looked for people who were holding the candle up high enough to illuminate their faces. Ultimately I focused on a woman wearing a hood that partially hid her identity, which I felt made the photo more about the mood and the scene and less about one person.