As Chanukah Wanes: Guest Post by Debra Shaffer Seeman (Written on the 8th Day, Inspired by Previous Post on the "Beyond")

If creation is 7 days, the perfect completion. And Chanukah is 8, למעלה מן הטבע - that which goes beyond the natural world - then here we find ourselves on that day. That 8th day of Chanukah; the day that goes beyond. That day when boundaries melt and worlds conflate and being created into the perfect world isn't quite enough anymore. This is the day of completion plus one. It's the day when the Divine sparks within each of us dance freely and join up with their Source under the cosmic disco balls of the worlds. It's the day when the fire, the heat and light and warmth and scorch and potential for both building and destruction, when the flames no longer visible to the naked eye take root within us to be accessed during the darkness of the seasons to come. It's the day when we transition the light, the totally and completely non-utilitarian light, the light which may be used for nothing except to teach us to truly see, the "new ray of peace uncalled (which) illumes my inmost mind" - it's the 8th day when we transition that light from "beyond" into the rest of our lives.

Some Chanukah Thoughts

#1: Chanukah and the "Beyond"

There is more to us than flesh and bones. There is more to the world than its physical appearance. There is something “beyond” – beyond nature, beyond our physical limitations, beyond this world.

Chanukah reminds us of the existence of this “beyond.” It is a holiday of 8 days. The world was created in 7 days – that is the simple physical truth of nature. But 8 – that is “beyond” creation, beyond nature, beyond the normal workings of the world.

For the Jews to have won against the Syrian Greeks was a piece of this “beyond,” as was the miracle of the light lasting so long – “beyond” its normal natural physical limitations.

We are more than we think we are, and there is more to the world than we see at all times. Light, fire is a symbol of this divine spiritual energy, felt yet difficult to hold or explain, effervescent yet extremely powerful.

We are not allowed to “use” this light we light on Chanukah for normal physical purposes, to count coins, for instance. And women have a custom not to do any practical work during the time the candles are lit, laundry or cooking, for instance. Why? Because Chanukah is not about the practical in this world. It asks us to take a step out of our normal selves and see that we are more than physical bodies needing to count coins and do laundry and cook meals. Yes, fire is practical – it helps us see and cook and be warm. But there is also a spiritual fire – kodesh hem – these candles are sacred – they partake of the divine light of our spirit, the part of each one of us that is from the “beyond.”

We often feel so daunted by our limitations in this world, so weighed down by mere survival and getting through our daily routines. Chanukah asks us to remember the spirit, to remember the “beyond” that is inside us and all around us, to feel the spark that is not limited by the normal workings of the world.


#2: Chanukah: An Education in Miracles

Chanukah is related to the word chinuch, education. On Chanukah we educate ourselves, we train ourselves in the ability to see miracles in the world.

Daliya Wallenstein, one of my high school students, had a beautiful explanation for Bet Shammai’s Chanukah candle-lighting opinion. According to Bet Shammai, we begin with 8 candles and light one fewer each night until on the last night we light one. Why? This student suggested that it is a matter of spiritual training.

When we begin Chanukah, we are not yet adept at seeing miracles in the world. The only type of miracle we can acknowledge is the really big one, the kind that has 8 candles with all their sparkling fireworks, the kind that hits us over the head with its magnificence and clarity, like the miracles of Chanukah itself, the uneven battle and the oil that kept lasting. We can look back on history and marvel, and acknowledge that God’s hand is in this world through such miracles. So that’s the starting point – we are turned on to thinking about miracles through a jolt to the system of 8 candles and great miracles.

But gradually the point of this exercise is to learn to see the smaller miracles, too. It is a training in our eye-sight. At first we can only detect the light that is really bright, but gradually we learn to see light that is a little less bright, too, 7 candles worth, then 6, and so forth, until on the last night we are able to see the light of a single candle; we have learned to see even the smaller miracles of this world. Now we are ready to return to the everyday world and see the hidden miracles there, too.

Another support for this conception of Chanukah as a training specifically in “seeing” is the strange halakhah, not often put into practice, that if one will not be able to light candles that night, and one “sees” someone else’s lit menorah, one can say the brachah of she’asah nissim on the simple act of seeing the light. This is the brachah in which we acknowledge that God did miracles for us. Lighting the light is important, but there is also here something key about the ability to see, to learn to see and witness God’s miracles in this world.

Though we don’t follow Bet Shammai, may we learn from him to train ourselves to “see” even the smaller lights of the miraculous in this world, perhaps, like Bet Hillel, learning to see more and more of them over time.

Parashat Vayishlach: The Sun Rose For Him

I was taking a walk the other day, feeling a little glum, when I noticed the ginkgo tree up the street. The sky was blue and the sun was shining on it just so, making its yellow leaves radiant and aglow. I stopped in wonder and thought, “Thank you, God, for this gift today.” I felt a tiny sliver of warmth enter my system. At that moment, it seemed that that tree’s beauty was created just for me, to give me joy and remind me of God’s care.

Was I wrong? Wasn’t the whole world created for each and every one of us? At all moments this is true; the world was created and continues at each moment to be created and to exist for our sakes; it runs off the energy of divine love. This is true at all moments, but we only perceive it on rare occasions.

Yaakov had such a moment in this week’s parsha. After his struggle with the angel on the night before he meets Esav, the Torah says vayizrah lo hashemesh, “The sun rose for him” (Gen 32:32). What does that mean -- “the sun rose for him”? Didn’t the sun rise over that whole part of the world and all the people in it? Why “for him”? Rashi explains that a miracle occurred and the sun literally did rise for him -- a little early that day – because God wanted to heal him from his limp injury.

God wanted to take care of Yaakov in his time of need, and the expression of that care was the shining of the sun. Miraculous sunrises don’t happen for most of us, but maybe this miraculous one is a symbol of all the regular everyday signs of God’s continuous care of us – the daily rising of the sun and blooming of the trees and flowers, the daily gifts of life and nurturing in us and around us.

Did Yaakov feel taken care of? Did he notice the sun rise early and think, “God did that just for me?” We don’t know. We only know that it was intended “for him.” So much may be intended “for us” that we don’t notice or appreciate, not just God’s love, but also the love and care of those around us. Sometimes we are in a place where we can take it in and sometimes, often when we most need it, we don’t see it and we don’t feel it; we are alone in our neediness. This sunrise of Yaakov’s is a good reminder in those low moments that there is always love and care “for us” available in the universe; it is always there; we just have to remember to notice it and feel it.

Parashat Toldot: Rivka's Love

The Torah says that Yitzhak loved Esav ki tzayid befiv, “because” of the hunting that Esav used to bring him to eat, while Rivka loved Yaakov. There is no reason attached to Rivka’s love; she simply loved him. The rabbis cite this love as an example of ahavah she’einah teluya badavar, a love that, unlike Yitzhak’s, is not dependent on anything.

The rabbis explain that while love that is dependent on something fades easily, as soon as the thing is gone, love that is not dependent on anything lasts forever. For this reason the pasuk uses the present tense to describe Rivka’s love, ohevet, instead of the past tense as it does for Yitzhak. Rikva’s is a love that is ever present, ever growing, ever constant, not capable of becoming past tense.

The Sefat Emet connects this model of love to God’s love for us. It is forever. It is constant. It is not capable of being annulled because it is not dependent on anything. As he says, God loves us just because we are His; there is no reason; His love is not dependent on a single thing, af lo bema’aseyhem, “not even on their deeds.” Not even on our deeds, not even on the doing of the mitzvot He commanded us to do. Yes, God wants us to live a good life, so He gave us the Torah and advised us how to live, but we need to know that His love for us does not depend on our following His command. We are simply loved.

Do we feel this love? Do we feel its constancy, its unwavering stability, the way it holds us in whatever place we are? Do we feel its present tense – like Rivka, God is ohev – He loves us right now, at this moment, whatever the moment. Do we feel its unconditional nature – how we do not need to earn it or deserve it in any way? We don’t have to measure up. We are simply loved.

Yes, yes, God also has expectations of us and wants us to be good in the world and follow His mitzvot. But it feels to me that the only real way to spread love in the world – our ultimate goal – the only real way is to first of all feel that you yourself are loved totally and unconditionally. It is only out of this place of love that we can let that love spread out in streams to all those who need it. Change, goodness, fixing only happens in such a loving embrace. May we love and feel loved in this Rivka way.

Parashat Haye Sarah: On Pittsburgh, Yitzhak and Love

In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, what I feel and what I think many of us feel, is vulnerable, insecure. We are suddenly acutely aware of what has always been true – that there are people who hate us and want to kill us, that we may at any time be killed for being Jews.

Looking at the end of last week’s parsha and this one through this prism, I am struck by the realization that Yitzhak must have had a similar feeling of vulnerability. He would have been the first martyr, the first to be sacrificed for the sanctification of God’s name. He was saved from the knife, yes, but that experience of being under the knife, of being so close to mortal danger, surely must have inscribed into his psyche the constant spectre of being killed as a child of Avraham.

But of course he doesn’t die, and nor do all of us at any time. What we are left with is, like Yitzhak, to figure out how to live with this spectre of the knife hanging over us.

When we next see Yitzhak after the akedah, he is standing in a field, “contemplating.” Perhaps he is contemplating precisely this question – how does one continue to live in such a world, where God seems to sometimes want Jewish souls as sacrifices, how does one face the constant fear of danger and annihilation?

The answer comes soon afterwards, as the camels carrying Rivka rise on the scene. The Torah tells us that Yitzhak takes her into his mother’s tent; she becomes his wife; he loves her; he is comforted over the loss of his mother.

The loss of his mother. Sarah, in some ways, ended up being the real sacrificial lamb of the akedah. Her death is told to us immediately after that story, and she dies young – almost 50 years younger than Avraham when he dies. The midrash says she dies when she hears the news that Avraham had gone to sacrifice her son, not knowing that he would be spared.

And so Yitzhak is left with a double burden post-akedah. Like us, he has on the one hand to mourn those that did die, and on the other hand, to figure out how to continue to live in the face of the knowledge of such tragedy and perpetual danger.

The answer is LOVE. I believe that this is the first time in the Torah that the root ahavah , love, is used. Through his encounter with suffering, Yitzhak discovers love. Yitzhak discovers that the only comfort in such a situation, the only way to move forward is to focus on love. He loves Rivka and that love is itself a comfort.

Love is more than a comfort. It is an anchor and a purpose in a tops- turvy, inexplicable and occasionally miserable world. Connection to others – whether in synagogue at a memorial service, in school teaching Torah to students, or at home with my family – these connections, these places of love are indeed what comfort me and give me hope. Not hope for myself, necessarily, but hope for our people and for all of humanity. Love lifts us out of ourselves. We are attached to something beyond ourselves, to other humans and to a force that is stronger than hatred, stronger than death, stronger than any individual’s life. There is nothing that can destroy love.

Viktor Frankl famously recounts how, on one frozen miserable forced march from the concentration camp gates to the inmates’ working trenches, a fellow inmate whispers to him: “If our wives could see us now!” Frankl tells how he is reminded of his wife and completely transported by this thought and his intense love for her:

"My mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

Yitzhak knew this. The salvation of man is through love. Having seen the knife, he knew that love was the only answer.

Parashat Lekh Lekha: Purity of Heart

Intention matters. Most of our mitzvot we fulfill through physical action. But our heart, our intention, our deepest kavannah, when we do them, also matters.

Avram was already on his way to the land of Canaan with his father. When he continued on his journey at God’s command, he could have thought of it as a continuation of this original journey, an ordinary change of location done for whatever human reasons originally initiated the move.

But the Torah tells us that Avram did it kaasher diber elav Hashem. Literally, this phrase means “as God had told him.” In other words, Avram carried out the command in the way that God had said it should be done. The Sefat Emet, though, reads it differently – he explains that kaasher diber elav Hashem means that Avram did it only because God had commanded it; he abandoned all other reasons for going. Even though he had had his own reasons for taking this journey, now that God commanded it, he did it with the sole intention of fulfilling God’s will.

That is what we mean when we say in the brachah before we do a mitzvah asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu, “as He sanctified us with His mitzvot and commanded us.” What we are saying is essentially what the Torah says about Avram – we are here, doing this mitzvah, shaking this lulav, lighting these Shabbos candles – we are here right now doing this solely because God commanded us to. We have a pure heart of service, a heart directed not in a million directions as it normally is, but in one direction only. We are here fulfilling Your command.

What happens when you do even one mitzvah in this intense way, with total purity of heart? You become a vessel for divine energy to enter the world. The world is uplifted and you are uplifted. We are normally so distracted and so full of complex motivations for every action; when we stop and direct our hearts, there is a power and intensity that we barely dreamed of, and there is light and there is peace. Doing a mitzvah with total intention, we walk the path of Avram, at one with God and the universe and ourselves.

Parashat Lekh Lekha: To the Land that God continues to Show Us

What God wants from us is continually unfolding. There is not a set, fixed destination point.

That’s why, when God tells Avraham to go on his journey, He says, go “to the land that I will show you.”

The Kedushat Levi asks –how could Avraham have taken the liberty to endanger his life and Sarai’s life by going to Egypt when he was not commanded to go there?

His answer – Avram was commanded to go there. The initial command “to go to the land that I will show you” meant “that I will continually show you.” It did not mean a one-time showing of the land of Israel. What God was saying was that He would provide Avram with guidance on his journey, continually show him the way. Initially, this meant entering the land of Israel – that was the first destination point – but as time and circumstances unfolded, a famine occurred, and Avrahm understood that God was now showing him the next land, the next move on his journey – Egypt.

When we read the story of Avram, we may feel a little distance – well, yeah, if God actually spoke to me and told me where to go and what to do, I would do it, too. But no, it turns out that God’s directions even to Avram, are more subtle than that. Yes, there are direct communications, but there is also a continual “showing” or unfolding. Even the first step is not explicit – how did Avram know that God meant the land of Cannan when He said “the land that I will show you.” How did God “show” him where to go? The text doesn’t explain it, I think, because it was intuitive. Avram searched out what God’s will might be by the signs and circumstances around him, and through his own reflection on what those signs might mean for him.

We are not so different from Avram, then. After all, we know we have a generalized duty to go on some journey in this life, to leave our (childhood) baggage behind and go to a place that God has in mind for us. What, where, this place is – what God really wants from us – that is for us to inuit, for us to search out based on what God “shows us,” based on the clues that continually unfold in our lives.

And at different points we may be led in different directions. Sometimes it may even seem that we are being led to “Egypt,” to the wrong kind of place, in the opposite direction of our destiny. What we learn from Avram is not to hold on to the original destination point or to some idealized notion of what our destination point should be, but to allow ourselves to be continually led, to allow ourselves to be continually “shown” – through all the seemingly random happenings of our lives – the next step and the next step on our divinely guided journey.