בס''ד
2nd Day of Hannukah
Parshat MiKetz
26 Kislev, 5772
December 22nd,
2011
You’ve got to wonder what our Rabbis were thinking. Oil? Eight days? That’s
the miracle? What about that other miracle, where the Jews won their freedom from
an enemy better armed and more powerful? A lamp burning for eight days seems
like one of those stories where somebody sees the face of a religious figure in
a bowl of Cheerios: as miracles go, this one just doesn’t seem to cut it.
As with understanding anything of past years, imagination is everything.
So, imagine for a second. Imagine that you, battle-scarred, grime-smeared, and
battle-weary, stand inside the Temple in Jerusalem . When you got
there, the place was a disaster: torn to pieces, the sacrifices of pigs to
pagan gods still evident. Imagine that you have fought in a particularly
vicious, bloody guerilla war. Imagine that the war was not just against a
foreign invader, but also a kind of civil war, against Jews who allied
themselves with the Greeks. Imagine that you have fought even against your
brothers.
In these circumstances, I imagine this question: will God come back to this
place, or are we abandoned forever? After this war, has God forgotten us?
And as the light burned steadily,
night after night, we knew that we were not alone.
חנוכה שמח
Happy Hannukah
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