“Occasionally, the light is revealed to you
In the most unexpected places if you perceive it correctly.”
This line from Scarlet Begonias (lyrics by Robert Hunter, melody by Jerry Garcia) has accompanied generations like a blessing veiled as a song lyric. Released in 1974 on the Grateful Dead album From the Mars Hotel, it has evolved into something beyond poetry. It embodies a philosophy of attentiveness, a reminder that significance does not always present itself with formality. At times it comes quietly, indirectly, masquerading as coincidence or contradiction.
Medicine, especially in these times, craves that reminder.
We live in bleak times. The daily news resembles a continuous differential diagnosis of despair: war, antisemitism, Islamophobia, political violence, ecological worry, institutional distrust, and a health care system that often appears as fragile as it is overwhelmed. Physicians and other clinicians absorb this turbulence both in a professional and personal sense. We witness it in our patients’ expressions, in the silences of the exam room, in the moral weight we carry home after yet another unsatisfactory day.
Yet, now and then, we are illuminated.
The Hanukkah narrative can essentially be viewed as a medical tale. A small, vulnerable group facing insurmountable odds. A refusal to concede extinction as inevitable. A dogged insistence that light, however scarce, still holds significance. One candle on the first night, not eight. No grand spectacle at the beginning. Just enough to commence.
This year, that symbolism collided painfully with contemporary reality. A lethal antisemitic assault at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Australia reverberated through Jewish communities globally. In communities across the nation, rabbis and organizers reacted not by shrinking back, but by amplifying security and lighting menorahs anyway (publicly, defiantly, purposefully). As one rabbi remarked, “Darkness does not conquer through force; it falters when light emerges.”
That declaration deserves to be engraved above the entrance to every medical facility.
What caught the attention of numerous observers, however, was an ironic twist that felt almost scripted by Robert Hunter himself: The individual who confronted one of the Bondi Beach assailants and saved countless Jewish lives was Muslim. In a world increasingly entrapped by rigid identity narratives, the light emerged in a manner that many had been conditioned not to acknowledge.
This is the essence of Scarlet Begonias. Not naive optimism. Not a denial of peril. But the art of perception.
In the song, the narrator is not in pursuit of enlightenment. He’s traversing Grosvenor Square, slightly uncomfortable from the “nip in the air,” not anticipating revelation. The encounter that transforms him is brief and ambiguous: “I had to learn the hard way to let her pass by,” he shares. Yet, the irony, seldom recognized, is that in life she did not pass by at all. The woman with the scarlet begonias became Robert Hunter’s wife, Maureen, a subtle reminder embedded in the line preceding the famous one: “It seldom plays out the way it does in the song.” The wisdom surfaces nonetheless, not through deliberate pursuit or anticipation, but through recognition, retrospectively, and by seeing it correctly.
Medicine operates similarly. We are conditioned to relentlessly seek (for diagnoses, for explanations, for solutions). However, light is not always uncovered through pursuit. Sometimes it manifests through presence. Through awareness. Through the willingness to reconsider the narrative we believe we are part of.
Does the light come to us? Must we search for it? Or is it merely serendipitous?
The response is: Yes.
There are instances when we must proactively seek the light (advocating for patients, opposing dehumanizing systems, speaking up when silence would be easier). There are moments when searching too intently blinds us to what is already present: a quiet act of bravery by a trainee, a patient’s unexpected kindness, a colleague’s moral clarity in a meeting where others simply shrug.
And then there are instances of pure serendipity, when goodness emerges uninvited, inconveniently contradicting our assumptions.
The Muslim man who rescued Jewish strangers on an Australian beach did not wake up intending to become a symbol. The rabbis who lit menorahs after a massacre did not eradicate the darkness. They merely refused to allow it to dictate the conclusion.
This holds tremendous significance for medicine.
Health care has become fixated on outcomes while disregarding meaning. We assess burnout, yet moral injury deepens. We discuss resilience as though it were an individual characteristic.