Hanukkah and Miracles

By Stan Schroeder

We associate the holiday of Hanukkah with several aspects of the celebration:

   The eight nights in which we light an increasing number of candles in the hanukkiah

   Reading the Book of Maccabees

   The latkes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts) we eat because both are cooked in oil

   The dreidl games we play

     Giving of gifts

   Singing Hanukkah songs.

These all stem from the story in the Talmud of the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabees defeated the Syrian-Greeks, written hundreds of years after the events. The story emphasizes that they found only a single container that was still sealed by the High Priest, with enough oil to keep the menorah in the Temple lit for a single day. They used this, yet it burned for eight days (the time it took to have new oil pressed and made ready). Thus, the rabbis of the Gemara attribute the burning of the oil for eight days to a miracle by God. There is no mention of the eight-day oil in the first book of Maccabees written in Hebrew by a Jewish author about 30 years after the event, or by Josephus who wrote a history of this period about 170 years later.

The dreidl is a four-sided top with the letters Nun, Gimel, Hey, Shin which stand for the sentence: Nes Gadol Haya Sham, "A great miracle happened there", referring to the miracle of the oil that took place in the Temple. In Israel the Shin is replaced by a Pe, and the sentence is: Nes Gadol Haya Po, "A great miracle happened here". Many of our Hanukkah songs are about the miracle of the oil or the symbols and traditions derived from it.

There are two definitions of “miracle”. The first is “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is considered to be “divine”. This is the Hanukkah miracle from the Talmud. The second is “a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment.” This type of miracle is often attributed to coincidence. A life may be saved by someone being at the right place at the right time. Or it may be attributed to technology, as when a new drug or surgical technique saves a life that wouldn’t have been possible a month or year before.

Then there are everyday occurrences that may not be lifesaving, but change the direction of our lives or the lives of someone we know. Each of us leads life in a forward direction, not knowing the consequences of our actions. Later we may be able to look back and see how someone we helped became a better person or led a better life.

I suggest that this Hanukkah we think about these “minor miracles” and look for ways we can create “miracles” to celebrate the miracle of our own life.

My other suggestion is to remember the miracle of the State of Israel in our lifetime. Those of us who remember back to the joy of the creation of the State in May, 1948 following the historic United Nations vote 6 months earlier, have lived through many celebrations and many traumas. With a population of about 650,000, many of which who were survivors of the Holocaust, the Israelis defeated six invading Arab armies leading to cease fire agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in 1949. Over 6,000 Israeli men and women, including 4,000 combatants, were killed. Israel now has over 9 million inhabitants, about ¾ Jewish, and is prosperous as the only democracy in the Middle East. Despite all its security and political problems, Israel has a vibrant diverse society that contributes miraculous technological, medical, agricultural, and cultural benefits to the whole world. As commanded in our Torah, a Light unto the nations. A miracle in every sense!

On October 7, 2023, Simchat Torah (in Israel) and Shabbat, the terrorist government in Gaza, Hamas surprised Israel with a barbarous attack on a music festival and southern Israel kibbutzim, murdering 1400 (mostly civilians, many children and elderly) using paragliders and land and sea forces. They also took about 240 hostages (mostly civilians) into Gaza. The war has now gone on for over 13 months and there are still around 100 hostages in Gaza, probably half of them dead. It has been a bloody terrible year, almost 1200 Israeli soldiers and civilians killed.  As Hanukkah approaches, let us pray for a victory eradicating Hamas. The IDF soldiers are our Maccabees.

See my Hanukkah poem in the right-hand column.

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Board Meeting Dvar Torah (October 2, 2019)
By Owen Delman

“Blind obedience without the restraint of reason or morality is dangerous.”

“Abraham should not be honored for willing to kill his child because of a command from God.”

“The key word is blind — this is the stuff of fanatics and terrorists.”

These are some of the concepts regarding the Akedah discussion today. There are rabbis who refuse to include the Akedah in their Rosh Hashanah services because the concept is unacceptable. They reject any of the interpretations which attempt to justify the basic premise of God commanding a sacrifice. Given the holocaust with the murderers using as a defense that they were “just following orders” (an example of ‘blind obedience’) they condemn the whole concept.

Bringing it into our present day, they say if there had been a trial of Abraham he would have used the defense of “God ordered me to do it” and that this is quite similar to the defense stated by the assassins of Yitzhak Rabin who claimed that to give any part of Israel back would be a denial of God’s plan for Israel.

So how should do we deal it?

In Stan’s Torah study group we often hear the refrain “but that can’t be true” or “but that doesn’t fit with something in another part of the bible.” The questioner gets reminded that these are stories, parables used for teaching concepts.

After services yesterday, (where I had posited a number of theories of what the Akedah meant) a friend came up to me and asked me which one was the correct interpretation.

I asked him with which one he felt most comfortable because there is no one answer.

The Bible is not history, not an accurate accounting of past events

Let me stop for a moment: I’ve studied history and literature. Let me explain the differences.  History is a written account of past events based on the author’s examination of events and documents to back up his conclusions. Literature is a creation of an author perhaps based on fact or wholly conceived by the author. The Akedah is a story in the Torah meant as a lesson; a piece of literature. In the study of literature it is accepted that it is less important what the author meant as opposed to what the reader sees in the work — how it affects him. There is no correct answer, only how the viewer is affected by the piece.

Once a piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.) is given to the world, it matters little what the artist meant. What is important is how it is perceived and how it affects the contemporary viewer.

When you understand the Akedah for what it is to our day, to us, it becomes much more understandable. Those rabbis who won’t even allow the Akedah to be part of their Rosh Hashanah story may be missing a wonderful teaching lesson for the sake of political correctness.