Chanukah Day Three

Posted on by Rebecca

Day Three: The Tragedy of the Tamei Oil

Chazal tells us that the miracle of Chanukah was born from a tragedy. The Greeks made all the oil in the Beit HaMikdash tamei, impure, except for one small container. This physical destruction reflected a much greater spiritual destruction.  Oil is connected by Chazal to the light of wisdom. Being tamei is the state of being closed off or darkened. From a spiritual perspective the Greeks brought tremendous darkness to the world. Greek philosophy closed our minds and constricted our ability to perceive our world correctly.

The contention of the Greek philosophers was that we can understand the source of the world examining the world as it appears now. The Rambam in Moreh Nevuchim 2:17 goes to great lengths to negate this idea, bringing as a mashal the fact that a human being, as he is being formed, spends nine months in an environment that would kill him in five minutes if he returned to it after his birth. Just as it is impossible to understand the conditions in the womb by looking at a grown person, it is impossible to understand the origins of our world, or the point of origin of the self, by looking at the way it exists today.  

Nevertheless, the Greeks were convinced that the world is eternal, and that all we need to know about our world can be understood and determined using the logic of our intellect and the evidence of our five senses. While this might seem like an abstract philosophical debate, the reality is that it cuts to the very nature of who we are. Greek philosophy denies that that point of origin of the world is Hashem. In doing so, they also deny our connection to our own personal point of origin, the essence of who we are, our soul.  

Through the stories of Alexander the Great in the Talmud, our chachamim gave us insight into the true appearance of a person who does not grasp his point of origin. In Tamid 32a Alexander finds the spring that emanates from Gan Eden, and follows it all the way to the entrance of Gan Eden. Once there, however, he finds the gates locked. Explains the Maharal, this is the story of Alexander’s life. He wanted to conquer everything, understand everything, and get to the root life. He succeeds tremendously. But there is a point at which he can get no further. He can smell the sweet smell of Gan Eden, but he can’t get in, because he has no connection there.

The Gemara continues that Alexander, not realizing this, raises his voice and demands, “Open the gate for me.” From inside the locked gate, a voice responded, “This is the gate of G-d; the righteous shall enter it.” (Tehillim 118:20). Frustrated, Alexander exclaims, “I too am a king; I am eminently important. Give me something.” He was asking for was some insight, some understanding about the point of origin of a person. And so, from inside the gate, they threw him a human skull with eyes of flesh and blood.

Wanting to know it’s worth, Alexander uses the tools at his disposal. He tries to measure it by  weighing it against all his gold and all his silver. The skull was heavier than it all. Needing answers, he goes to the Rabbis and asks, “What is this?” They answer, “A skull with an eye of flesh and blood, can never be satisfied.” What they meant was, since the human eye is insatiable, it outweighs all the gold and silver in the world. He says, “How do you know this?” They answer, “Take some dust and cover the eyes.” He does, and the skull is immediately outweighed.

The skull was meant to give Alexander insight into the nature of his own soul. He had searched the entire world, looking for the source of all things, and when he arrives there, what does he find? He finds a distorted mirror image of himself. Even though he has basically the entire world at his disposal, his eyes want and want and can never be satisfied. This is because he has done nothing to satisfy his point of origin.  The point of origin of a person is not of this world. It cannot be satisfied with gold and silver. Nothing outweighs what his eyes seek, because his eyes seek something different entirely. A person’s soul is from a higher realm, and can not be satisfied with the things of this world. The only way to satisfy it is to arrive back at our source, Gan Eden. Unfortunately, with no connection to his source, Alexander is left outside the gates.

The darkness of the Greeks is that they deny our connection to our point of origin, to our essence. Our response is the Chanukah lights. The lights of true wisdom are lit with shemen, oil. Shemen is connected to the number shmoneh, eight, the number that moves us out of the natural order of seven days a week. Just as when oil is mixed with other liquids, it always floats above them, so oil allows us to surpass our natural limitations and rise beyond them to perceive something higher.

Our soul comes from an eternal source, and it seeks eternality. The Kohen Gadol’s essential function was to connect our world to the higher, spiritual world above. When we light our chanukiot, we continue the task of the Kohen Gadol. Looking at the light of the menorah gives us the chance to connect to our point of origin and strengthen our connection to our higher selves.

To explore this idea further in the sefer, see pages 106-117 and 144-146.

Chanukah Day Two

Posted on by Rebecca

Day Two: The Burning Tower

Imagine a burning tower. The Midrash (Bereisheit Rabbah 39:1) tells us that this is the image that brought Avraham to his perception of Hashem. What is the deeper meaning of this image?

When something burns, it itself is the cause of its own destruction. Since it sustains the fire, it serves as the very energy that consumes it. For Avraham, the burning tower was a mashal for the entire world. Avraham saw the world as if it were on fire. Everything in the world, from the moment it is born or created, begins the process of its own demise. We burn our own resources in order to stay alive. The world, to Avraham, appeared to exist, and yet at the same time be in the process of consuming itself and transforming itself into nonexistence.

Faced with this contradiction, of a world that pursues its own destruction, Avraham came to a conclusion. There must be more to existence that what we can see. It’s true that the fire of life is constantly burning resources. But the purpose of that fire is not just to burn. The purpose of this fire is to burn resources in order to produce light. Existence does not end with our presence on this planet. We transform the world as we proceed toward a destiny beyond this world. 

Avraham’s vision was of a world unconstrained by the natural system of cause and effect. He understood that there is a system above nature which pushes the world to its destiny, and which uses the physical resources of this world to create spiritual light. Rav Shapiro tells us that the fundamental aspiration of everything in this world is to depart from itself and illuminate, to transform into light and revelation.

This is the driving force within each of us. Our nefesh, our soul, the life force of our body, is an acronym for Ner, lamp, Petilah, wick, and Shemen, oil. The function of our soul, which connects to the body, and exists together with it, is to draw upon the powers of the body and transform them into light, much like the wick draws the oil and transforms it into fire. When we look at the flames of the candles, we can think about how every physical aspect of our bodies and our world, is another resource we can use to create our beautiful, illuminating flame.

To explore this idea further in the sefer, see pages 40-41, 45, 134 and 224-225.

Chanukah Day One

Posted on by Rebecca

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.