January 2009

THE REAL MIRACLE OF HANUKKAH

(Reprinted from the Los Angeles Jewish Journal 12/26/08)

This coming Shabbat, together with Jewish communities around the world, we will celebrate the joyous Festival of Hanukkah. Most of us are quite familiar with the story of Hanukkah and the miracle that our tradition recalls. We learned as children that, when the Maccabees rededicated our ancient Temple in Jerusalem, they found enough oil to light the Menorah for only a single day. God’s miracle, we learned, was that the oil that should have lasted but one day lasted rather for eight days.

The rabbinic sages, explaining the ritual lighting of Hanukkah, recounted in the Talmudic Tractate of Shabbat the miracle noted above. We might wonder whether this miracle actually occurred. And, if it did not occur, we might question whether we should continue to observe the ritual lighting associated with this non-event.

In order to understand the original and continued significance of the lighting of Hanukkah’s flames, we might explore the manner in which we light the Hanukkiah – Hanukkah’s eight-branched Menorah. We can thereby gain a deeper and enduring appreciation of the lighting, one that chronicles a miracle that we live today as much as it commemorates a miracle of long ago.

The Talmud instructs us to observe Hanukkah's ritual lighting in accordance with the sage, Hillel’s practice. We are to kindle one additional flame for each successive day of the holiday. On the first day we kindle one flame, on the second two flames, etc. According to the sage, Shammai’s dissenting opinion, we ought eliminate one flame for each successive day of the holiday; on the first day eight flames, on the second day seven flames, etc.

At first glance, Shammai’s approach seems compelling: In recounting the miracle of the single jar of oil that lasted eight days, we should acknowledge that, despite our rational conclusion to the contrary, there was in actuality enough oil on the first day of Hanukkah to last eight days, on the second day to last seven, and so on. In other words, Shammai suggested that the proper way to recount the miracle is to recall what once occurred from the perspective of one who knows how the story ends.

Still, the Talmud rules in accordance with Hillel. I believe that Hillel's view prevailed because it reflected a belief that the ritual lighting of Hanukkah is more than commemorative; it exists very much in the present tense, experientially. Standing outside the miracle, remembering it historically as Shammai did, the focus is simply on how much oil remained each day. However, when we use the ritual to relive the miracle in our present, when we experience each day of it anew, we are not certain that our oil will last yet another moment. We cannot be sure that the lights that we revisit from our ancient Jewish past, or even those which we strive to preserve and nourish today, will endure. Will the Jewish flame of our era burn forth unto our children and our children’s children? Are we any less at risk of losing our light than the Menorah in the Temple was so very long ago? Might it have been the case for the rabbis long ago, that the miracle of Hanukkah was a metaphor for our People’s unlikely but persistent survival and flourishing, against all odds? Is it possible that the miracle that we celebrate in our own era, when kindling our own flames of Hanukkah, is the ever constant miracle of our presence in this world, altogether, as Jews?

The flames of Hanukkah, as Hillel had us kindle them by adding one more flame each day, express our enduring faith that our flame of today will grow ever-stronger, in our own generation and beyond it. The flames that we kindle on Hanukkah represent our commitment to the work that we must do to enhance and clarify the light of our People and the beauty and depth of Jewish meaning and purpose. Ultimately, from within the annual and ongoing miracle of Hanukkah, we might even come to recognize that we, ourselves, are the flames; we are the enduring miracle of Hanukkah, if we make it so.

B’Shalom

Rabbi Isaac Jeret
Spiritual Leader