Some Chanukah Thoughts

This year, the first and the last nights of Chanukah fall on Friday night. Twice we will be lighting double candles, those for Chanukah and those for Shabbat.

Chanukah candles are not like Shabbat candles. Shabbat candles are for use, for oneg, “pleasure,” to provide light to sit and eat by on Friday night. Chanukah candles, on the other hand, may not be used at all. V’eyn lekha reshut lehishtamesh bahem ela lirotam belvad. “You do not have permission to use them but only to look upon them.” If you want light to eat or read by, light another lamp as well. These candles are not ordinary lights; they are kadosh, holy.

This law about the use of candles expresses a basic theme of Chanukah – its emphasis on what is out of the ordinary, the supernatural, the miraculous. Shabbat celebrates the creation of the natural world in 7 days, but Chanukah has 8 days. It moves on into the realm of the supernatural -- the realm of the nes, the miracle.

Chief among such miracles is the very existence of our nation. On Chanukah we celebrate the ability of our nation to have survived a war with the Syrian Greek army against all odds. Rabim beyad me’atim. They were mighty and numerous and we were few and weak. By the normal order of things, we should have been defeated, defeated then, and defeated again in the many persecutions that preceded and followed Chanukah (see the Maoz Tzur song). That we weren’t defeated, that we are still hanging on, is indeed a miracle.

This survival theme is also the meaning of the oil story, the story of the jug of oil which should have lasted only one day but ended up lasting eight. We are the flame lit by that jug of oil, surviving and burning for all these years beyond all reasonable expectations. And the reason our flame keeps burning, the reason we survive, is that our jug of oil, the Torah, will never run out. We are fueled by the Torah, fueled by precisely this kind of story. You see, the story is actually speaking about itself, about its own future, its own tenacity to live and keep burning in us.

For here we are, not just alive, but lighting Chanukah candles, carrying on an ancient tradition. The Hebrew word nes means both “miracle” and “sign-post.” When we light candles, we are simultaneously commemorating a miracle of the past and creating a sign-post for the present and the future, a sign-post of our commitment to this memory, our heritage. While we are busy marking a miracle of the past, we are also creating a miracle in the present, the miracle of the past’s survival in ourselves and our children.

On Shabbat we thank God for creating the world with all its physical lights -- its sun and its moon and its stars. On Chanukah we thank God for the miracle of another kind of light, for the miracle of a light which burns within us and can never be extinguished.