Did you know that Stephen Schwartz, the lyricist and composer behind “Wicked,” (and “Pippin,” and “Godspell,” to name but a few!) composed a Hanukkah song?
Cantors Azi Schwartz and Mira Davis of Park Avenue Synagogue and the New York City’s Children’s Chorus recently shared their moving cover of “The Hanukkah Song (We Are Lights),” composed by Stephen Schwartz and written by Steve Young, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer who has written for “Letterman” and “The Simpsons.”
The lyrics feel perfect for this bittersweet holiday season, which started with an antisemitic shooting in Bondi Beach, Australia, that took the lives of 15 people and left dozens of others injured. “A lamp that kept on burning/A miracle, they say/But the world has kept on turning/Are there miracles, today?”
Yet the song also serves as a reminder of why we keep lighting candles in the darkest moments: “Everyone who lights the candles/Has a bit of ancient spark/We are miracles, lighting up the dark.”
The song first premiered at the tree lighting at Lincoln Center in 2001. It has since become a choral hit and even been covered by Kristen Chenoweth in her 2023 holiday album. The song actually came to be because of synagogue elbow-rubbing, according to the website Behind the Music. Young’s fellow congregant at the time, conductor Judith Clurman, asked him to write some lyrics for a Hanukkah choir song, and liked them so much that she worked her connections to have Schwartz compose the song.
Schwartz was born to a secular Jewish family in New York. His family’s story of immigration inspired his 1986 musical “Rags.” He also notably composed the music for “The Prince of Egypt,” everyone’s favorite Passover watch.
In a 2022 interview, he shared that despite being secular, he feels that Jewish values are at the center of much of his work: “I think, philosophically, some of the themes about personal responsibility and what are our obligations as human beings and members of society to others and to our families — I think those are very much Jewish themes, at least as I’ve encountered them in literature.”
“I think that those interested me a lot and continue to interest me,” he continued, “I think ‘Children of Eden’ maybe most overtly deals with those themes, but even in a show like ‘Godspell,’ which of course is based on books of the New Testament, is dealing very much philosophically with how you treat others and how you behave as a member of a community.”
