Day One: Each Moment is a New Moment
If we would take a moment to look at the beautiful flames of our Chanukiah with a child’s eyes, then that single flame of the first night will appear to be one, continuous entity. The reality, however, is that a flame does not exist in the way a table does. Instead of being a continuous entity, a flame is a continuous burn. At any given moment, the flame we see is not the flame that was there a moment before. The fire of a moment ago, and the oil that sustained it, is now gone. And the fire we see now will burn out in a moment, making way for the fire of the next moment, which has not yet arrived. A single flame is actually a continuous series of flames. Its endurance is an illusion.
This flame is a visual lesson about the nature of our world. Like a flame, our world gives the impression of existing and enduring. That, in fact, is exactly how the Greeks perceived our world: as a circular, never-ending series of cause and effect. They believed fully in the idea that “There is nothing new under the sun (Kohelet 1:9),” and if we could fully know and understand all the natural causes in the world, there would be no surprises. There was no room for a Creator or his miracles in their eternal, ever revolving world.
We do not view life this way. Life is like a wellspring, which the Torah calls “living waters.” Living waters are constantly welling forth, without rest and without oldness. To be alive in a Torah sense is to be in a state of constant renewal. In contrast, the Torah compares life lived in a state of habit to sleeping. Sleeping, as we know, is 1/60 of death. Rav Shapiro goes so far as to compare a person sleeping through life to an animal convulsing in the throes of death. It is moving, but the question of whether it is really alive or dead is very much on the table.
On Chanukah we emphatically reject the Greek vision of life as a never-ending continuous cycle, with each moment just more of the same. The Chanukah lights teach us that each moment is a moment of recreation. The life that Hashem gave us is a life of living waters. It is newness, and it wells forth constantly. We are invited to be awake to the infinite possibilities of every moment. Each moment is a new, separate, gift from Hashem. And each breath we take is a statement that Hashem wants us to be here, right now.
To explore this idea further in the sefer, see pages 36-37, 44-45, 70-71, and 129-130.