Hanukkah: A Jewish Re-education

This evening we take up the festival of Hanukkah — the festival that, in truth, closes the calendar of the Jewish festivals, and that invites us to a re-education of our Jewish identity. That identity can in no way be separated from our whole history and our antecedents, because we carry in our spiritual genes the patrimony, the inheritance of our fathers: Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. It was with them that a sifting took place — between Yishmael and Yitzchak, between Yaakov and Esav. Consequently, the entity of Israel that we represent is not that of a people which, in addition, adopted another way of life, a belief; it is the people which, throughout its history, carries the identity of its fathers. And this is why there is indeed a wall separating this Jewish entity from the entity of the nations. Let me be clear: there is no discrimination of any kind here, still less racism. There is simply the fact that whoever enters and joins the Jewish people — for we are a people of converts — joins at the same time the whole past of the people, the whole history of the Jewish people, beginning with its Patriarchs and its masters, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov.

Therefore, when we refer to the G-d of the Fathers, we have no need to say “G-d, Master of the universe.” No: Elokeinu ve-Elokei avoteinu — “our G-d and the G-d of our fathers” — is enough for us. Our G-d is the G-d of our fathers, and that reference is sufficient in itself. For when we say “G-d of our fathers”: Avraham is the one who founded the belief in a G-d who created the universe. Yitzchak is the one who brought forth faith in the Torah, in the service of G-d, in a covenant concluded between man and his Creator. And Yaakov is the one who founded the house of Israel, the intimacy of Israel. Now, there are three foundations of Jewish faith: three times the text states that the people believed in the Eternal.

At the time of the Exodus — of the preparation for the Exodus — when Moshe comes to announce to the people that the Eternal has taken pity on them, that He has heard their cry and is preparing to free them, the people understands that it is not arbitrarily delivered into the hands of history: there is a Creator of the universe who governs history, even there, in Egypt. And they are told in advance that the Exodus leads to “ta’avdun et ha-Elokim al ha-har ha-zeh” — “you shall serve G-d upon this mountain.” That is, there will be a revelation of G-d on Mount Sinai; there will be a giving of the Torah. Now, after the Exodus and the giving of the Torah, is the people left to itself, obliged to manage its own history?

No. There is the desert, which is the prototype of exile, the witness to this divine Providence that never leaves the Jewish people, that watches over its destiny — and watches not only over the Jewish people as a whole, but over every single individual within it. And this is how Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot represent these three foundations of faith. Pesach is the creation of the Jewish people, parallel to the creation of the universe. Shavuot is the giving of the Torah, parallel to the Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Yitzchak — to Yitzchak’s unconditional service of his Creator. And on Sukkot we leave the intimacy of the home for the sukkah, and place ourselves in the hands of divine Providence.

To these three festivals, which make up the three regalim — the three legs on which the whole Jewish edifice rests — two further festivals were added: Purim and Hanukkah. What happened? There is a principle that every celebration of a festival brings back into force all the elements of the events it marks. That is to say, every day a person must consider that he is leaving Egypt: the Exodus is permanent. It did not happen once in history; we go on living it, and with greater vigor at every Pesach. The same holds for Shavuot and the giving of the Torah: the commandments of the Torah should be for you as though you had received them this very day,

with the same freshness, the same life — and that is the festival of Shavuot. We relive it all the time, and with much greater intensity on Shavuot. The same holds for Sukkot: “So that you may know that I sheltered you in booths” — I protected the Jewish people when it came out of Egypt, with the cloud that covered it throughout the crossing of the desert. And history is there to attest that, just as the Torah has never been forgotten in Israel and we can reinvigorate it and relive it every day, so too the very existence of Israel is a miracle in itself. Only, what happened is this: all of this was of very great intensity from the Exodus until the arrival in the Land of Israel and the building of the Temple. And the building of the Temple is indeed the bayit, the house — the place where G-d attested His presence in the midst of the Jewish people, and within each one of us:

“I will dwell in them” — in each one of them, in their midst. The model of the bayit, of this intimacy of life between the Jewish people and G-d, is the Beit HaMikdash. It is there that the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem meet. But after the destruction of the Temple there was indeed a loss of substance, as though a wearing away had set in. Why a wearing away? Because in the confrontation of the Jewish people with other cultures, there is a lack of unity. Just as the people is condemned to exile, to fragmentation, to dispersion, so its Torah too is dispersed, its Torah too is fragmented. One can no longer find a halakhah clearly stated, a mishnah clearly stated.

One must search here and there for its various components in order to restore that lost transparency. Then come the events of Purim. What do the events of Purim do? They reinvigorate the process of the Exodus and of the giving of the Torah, since the Jewish people regained its unity under the pressure brought to bear on it and the threat of Haman and his sworn antisemites, who sought its total extermination. The miracle of Purim lies in this regained unity of the Jewish people. And this regained unity is followed by a spiritual awakening of the whole people — hadar kibbeluha bi-yemei Achashverosh, “they accepted it anew in the days of Achashverosh” — a new taking-up of the Torah by the Jewish people.

This time it is not G-d who reveals it at Sinai; it is the Jewish people, of its own accord, that takes this Torah in hand and adopts it, as it is written: “kiyyemu ve-kibbelu ha-Yehudim aleihem ve-al zar’am” — the Jews undertook, for themselves and for their descendants, to obey the precepts of the Law. So, just as Pesach and Shavuot, joined by the link of the Omer, form a unity — the going-out of the Jewish people, which celebrates its creation, and the giving of the Torah on Shavuot are one unity in themselves, which is why Shavuot is called Atzeret, “the closing” — so these same domains, these same parameters, are found again in the festival of Purim: first, the miracle of the survival of the Jewish people; and second, the renewed taking-up of the word of the Torah, the adoption of the Torah.

That leaves Sukkot and Hanukkah. In Parashat Emor, which deals with all the festivals, right after the laws of the festival of Sukkot comes a passage, and one wonders what it is doing there — what the relationship is, what the connection is, what the transition is. The Eternal, through Moshe, commands the Children of Israel in these terms to take pure olive oil, crushed, for the lighting, to keep the lamps burning continually; outside the curtain that shelters the Testimony, in the Tent of Meeting, Aharon shall tend them from evening until morning before the Eternal — a perpetual statute for your generations. And […] the link between this commandment and Sukkot means that the festival of Hanukkah is already recorded here, in parallel with the festival of Sukkot.

Why? Because, he says, there are many points in common. The festival of Sukkot lasts eight days; the festival of Hanukkah lasts eight days. On Sukkot we bring offerings on behalf of all seventy nations, and their number keeps decreasing. And in fact even Shammai holds that the Hanukkah lights should be kindled in decreasing number; only [we do not follow him,] because it is held that in matters of holiness one should keep ascending rather than diminish. So here too there is the opening of the light of the Torah toward the whole universe, toward all of humanity. And just as during the eight days of Sukkot we recite the full Hallel — because no day resembles another — whereas on Pesach we barely recite it on the first day, so too on Hanukkah we recite the full Hallel all eight days. But there is something particular about Hanukkah.

Everyone is obligated to light the Hanukkah lights at home. For what purpose? Pirsumei nisa — to publicize the miracle: “she-asah nissim la-avoteinu ba-yamim ha-hem ba-zeman ha-zeh,” “who performed miracles for our fathers in those days, at this season.” A miracle that goes on perpetuating itself: it is not only “in those days”; it is an uninterrupted succession of miracles. So this miracle of the Jewish people — of the existence of the Jewish people, of the Providence watching over its destiny — surely, one would think, ought to be publicized, spread abroad, broadcast. But wait: you can light the hanukkiyah only if you have a home. If you have no home, you are exempt from lighting. To light the hanukkiyah, to celebrate Hanukkah, you must have a home of your own.

And if you are traveling, you are exempt as well, since they light the hanukkiyah for you at home. If you wish to take part in the festival with your host, you give a small symbolic contribution and you light with the others. Why, then, this notion of bayit, of a home? If, in the end, it is something a person must lean on, as with Sukkot, then one need only light [wherever one is] — no? Why not? Because the particular character of the festival of Sukkot is this intimacy we find with Hashem, to whom we entrust our destiny; we believe in His Providence, and we live in this intimacy […] — the sukkot are ananei kavod, the clouds of glory that protect us.

Well, the light of Hanukkah proceeds from the same movement of thought. We were on the point of losing our footing, of becoming ashamed of our identity, of breaking our affiliation with our fathers. And it tells us that what allowed us to live and to go on overcoming every trial is that at no moment were we embarrassed by our belonging to our history and our culture; we proudly carried the inheritance of our parents and continued to make it bear fruit. But when the voice of prophecy fell silent, the Greek world, Greek culture, sought to take the place of that prophetic voice. It decided on its own authority that, in the end, there was no difference among the men and women who make up humanity, that all should be regarded in the same way, and that it is only the religions that have dug the gulf between them. And so one would turn to other oils, to other sciences. What was at stake is truly the essence of the culture — the one revealed by Hashem to His people — which the Greek world sought to cut off from its root and reduce to a philosophy of life.

It is a fact that the Greeks succeeded in translating the Bible. You know that Ptolemy gathered seventy-two Sages of Israel and shut each of them away separately. He did not even prepare them by telling them what mission he was entrusting to them; only after shutting them away did he give them the Bible to translate. And it turned out that this Bible translated into Greek, the Septuagint, was exactly identical in every version. The seventy-two Sages had not consulted one another, yet they had produced the same thing, with thirteen nuances. These thirteen nuances are the thirteen points, the thirteen breaches that were made in this wall, in this enclosure around the Temple, which did not allow those who did not belong to the Jewish people to cross over and approach the Temple. So there were these thirteen breaches, and these thirteen breaches are the thirteen ways of interpreting the Law. [For the Greeks,] there is no interpretation of the Law; there is the text as it stands. As for the Oral Law —

it is not revelation, it does not stem from the holy spirit; it stems from a culture proper to each person, proper to each rabbi, to each sage, and it is within everyone’s reach. There are no sacred boundaries: there are the thirteen breaches, thirteen paths — the thirteen attributes of G-d as well — which are, so to speak, popularized, reduced to their simplest expression. And as a result there is no longer any continuity. The Gaon of Vilna says that when we recite the blessing over the Hanukkah lights, we must say “lehadlik ner Hanukkah,” not “ner shel Hanukkah.” Why? Simply in order to preserve, within “lehadlik ner Hanukkah,” the notion of nachal — nachal, which means a river.

That is to say, this river is what carries the waters of the spring from a given point toward distant lands. It is living water, pure water; it is not standing water, not static water. Now, Greek thought set boundaries to thought, and those boundaries are tum’ah, impurity. For the moment you put a stopper somewhere, you have halted the flow, and that water will now accumulate impurities. It is no longer fit for a mikveh. It must be in constant motion […]. So this approach, Greek thought, won over the minds of a portion of the Jewish people — for it is in that era of Mattityahu, that is, of the Maccabees, that we witness a war within the Jewish people.

It was not a war waged against the Greeks, because the Greeks did not destroy the Sanctuary, as the Babylonians had done, for example, or as Edom would do later. No — they kept the Temple standing, on the simple condition that other beliefs could be associated with it; that is all. What they would not tolerate was that the Jewish faith, in its very essence, should remain exclusive to the people of Israel. And unfortunately a portion of the Jewish people was won over by this group, and we witness the birth, within the Jewish people, of the mityavnim, the Hellenizers. The mityavnim are Jews who adopted this Greek way of life, this way of thinking, who embraced reason and who, in a movement of openness toward the other nations, renounced the exclusiveness of the destiny of the Jewish people. And they said: from now on we will approach the text of the Revelation with other criteria, with other data.

And they did have a basis on which to rely, since it is said: “Yaft Elokim le-Yefet ve-yishkon be-oholei Shem” — “May G-d enlarge Yefet, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem”: may the beauty of Yefet dwell in the tents of Shem. Shem is indeed the bearer of the heritage of the Jewish people; but beauty is that of Greece, the beauty that gathers into one bundle all ideas, all approaches, all currents, and which says that, all things considered, this Jewish heritage could be held in higher regard if it were no longer exclusive but became the domain of everyone. That means taking the Torah out of the private domain into the public domain. It is popularization. And from this there was reason to fear that the Jewish people would indeed lose its identity entirely, would lose everything gained through the Exodus and the Revelation.

And this is the miracle of Hanukkah: “masarta gibborim be-yad chalashim, ve-rabbim be-yad me’atim” — You delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, and the many into the hands of the few, a numerous army into the hands of a tiny one. In reality there is a repetition here, for it would have sufficed to say “the mighty into the hands of the weak.” No — what our Sages wished to convey is that these few who remained firmly attached to the essence of the Law saw themselves as the exclusive bearers of the heritage of the fathers, and what they carried within them they refused, under any circumstances, to give up. And this because they believed in this intimacy of life with G-d, whether the Temple exists or not — since the whole purpose of the Mikdash, the Sanctuary, is to attest that the Eternal dwells in the heart of each person, in the intimacy of each person.

And this is why whoever has no home — whoever does not live this intimacy, whoever remains exposed to every passing wind — is exempt from lighting the lights of this festival. First one must live this intimacy with Hashem intensely. In this way the Hasmoneans prevented the transfer. There is a physical transfer of the Jewish people […], but there is a far graver transfer: that of identity. Remember what we say in the passage of prayer that we add to the Shemoneh Esreh and to Birkat HaMazon: it speaks of malchut Yavan ha-resha’ah, “the wicked Greek kingdom.” “Wicked,” the godless — that is the epithet given to Greece. Why?

Because “le-ha’aviram me-chukkei retzonecha” — “to make them pass away from the statutes of Your will.” Le-ha’aviram is not le-vattelam: it does not mean to annul, nor to alter. No — it is a transfer of thought from one register to another, from one essence to another. And this is the problem we still struggle with today within the Jewish people: not keeping this Jewish patrimony, this heritage, this nachal, in its original purity, but wanting instead to popularize it. So what do we do? We are conscious that “Yisrael af al pi she-chata, Yisrael hu” — Israel, even if he has sinned, even if he has committed faults, remains fundamentally, essentially, Israel. Why? Because one cannot disown one’s filiation.

What child will disown his father? When we say Elokeinu ve-Elokei avoteinu, we refer to our G-d who is the G-d of our fathers; and when we refer to the G-d of our fathers, we have no need to say Elokeinu Melech ha-olam, “our G-d, King of the universe” — that is enough. And yet this transfer threatens us at the door of the house. Not on the right side, where the mezuzah is placed, but on the left side; and through the left side there can seep in every deviation of thought, currents of imposture, of unbelief, of emptiness. So there, take care: let your small flame shine forth — the one that remained intact, which no one can take from you. It is the flame of the Kohen Gadol, of your father, of your grandfather, the one that has educated you for generations. And from this one — this jar, this flask of oil, this essence — no one can dispossess you, because you are not a slave, you are not a servant, you are not a shamash, you are not a man like all others: you are a son. “Ve-achar kach ba’u vanecha li-dvir beitecha.”

“Afterward Your children came into the inner sanctuary of Your House.” Into Your sanctuary — Your holy house is the one each person has carried with him for generations. And within it there is a tiny flask of oil from the parents which is never altered, because, as I said earlier, no one can disown his ancestry, his birth. That flask is intact, and it can indeed give forth more radiance, bear fruit again. For when we say Elokeinu ve-Elokei avoteinu, “our G-d and G-d of our fathers,” [we continue:] “zocher chasdei avot u-mevi go’el li-vnei veneihem” — who remembers the kindness of the fathers. An act of kindness is never lost. An act of kindness bears fruit throughout time; it multiplies. That is the kindness of the fathers; that is love.

“And brings a redeemer” — He who ensures redemption — “to their children’s children, le-ma’an shemo be-ahavah, for His Name’s sake, in love.” It is this bayit that he built, this intimacy. The man of exile, the prototype of the man of exile, is Yaakov: Beit Yaakov, Beit Yisrael. We do not say Beit Avraham, we do not say Beit Yitzchak; we say Beit Yaakov, Beit Yisrael. And in this lies absolutely everything, because Hanukkah is a reactivation of the festival of Sukkot — of this intimacy of life with G-d, this shared destiny. And you know, when one sees chachmei Yisrael, a sage of Israel, a king of Israel, one recites a blessing: “she-chalak mi-kvodo li-re’av” — “Blessed is He who has shared of His majesty,” His glory, His honor, “with those who fear Him.”

But if it is a genius of the other peoples, one does not say “Blessed is He who has shared of His glory with those who fear Him”; one says “Blessed is He who has given of His glory.” There is a difference between shared and given. When something is shared, one is associated, one is a partner — that is irrefutable. When one says given, I take something and pass it from one element to another, from one place to another. The same holds for the kings of Israel: one says “Blessed is He who has shared of His glory with those who fear Him” upon seeing a king of Israel. For the sage it was “of His wisdom” — forgive me — whereas here it is “of His glory,” with those who fear Him; but when it concerns someone from the other nations, one says “who has given.”

I made an error just now; let me correct it. So: when one sees a genius of the people of Israel, one says “Blessed is He who has shared of His wisdom with those who fear Him,” and when one sees a king of Israel, “Blessed is He who has shared of His glory with those who fear Him.” So this is the festival of Hanukkah: this small light by which we mark the barrier between the public domain and the private domain. We mark the frontier with this flask of oil, this small flask that remained intact throughout the history of the Jewish people, whatever happens — whether one observes the commandments or not, it is there. But as soon as one steps out of this darkness, this confusion in which other cultures want to dissolve us, because they want to force us to adopt their way of thinking and their way of life — for that is the choshech, “ve-choshech al penei tehom,” “and darkness upon the face of the deep.” The deep is the waters, and the waters have no form; you cannot give them a form. As long as the world is covered by the waters, nothing is created.

The word of G-d must truly come and draw out of the water the capacity to congeal and be transformed — as it did at the crossing, at the creation of the Jewish people, during the crossing of the Red Sea, and likewise for a sage who was on his way to redeem captives. A river barred his way, and he ordered it to congeal its waters and let him pass. He did as Yehoshua did when he halted the course of the sun. For when one has preserved this essence, one can intervene in the course of creation, in the laws of creation, and direct them as one wills.

That is the meaning of sharing, the meaning of the Covenant of the people of Israel with G-d — at least of those who are faithful to this Covenant. There, I will stop here. I have gone over time; if you have any questions, please ask.