Chanukah: Who Needs to Justify its Utter Delight?
Chanukah is utter delight. Why, then, examine the origin of the delight? Why tempt joy with analysis, especially when the analysis may cause some folks to bristle by philosophizing about the nature of miracles and faith. Regardless, let me take a chance of looking more analytically at Chanukah’ delight in light of spiritual integrity and the Torah’s truth eternal truth.
Some years ago there was an article presented locally that mocked the childish belief of educated adults in the possibility of miracles?
It asserted that faith ought not to be based on the naïve fantasy of candles burning miraculously for eight days. Rather, the celebration of Chanukah should be about religious freedom.
I disagree. Miracles happen around us every day. The rising of the sun, the changing of the seasons, the smile in my child’s eyes, or the breath we take every morning. Tell me, please, why a flame surviving eight days against all odds is any less a miracle than a ball of gasses many times the size of our earth giving light, warming our planet, growing our plants for thousands of years without changing course?
“Religious Freedom”? What does that mean? Freedom for what? To eat Challah? To go to shul? Do you think the Greeks really cared about Matzah balls or a bunch of Jews fasting on Yom Kippur? The Greeks persecuted us for our faith, the religion that says there is a G-d that transcends our day-to-day reality, yet who permeates it at the same time. They persecuted our right to believe in miracles and our right to live a life that is founded on those beliefs.
Why do we have a difficulty believing in miracles? Because it shatters our perception of reality and it challenges our source of comfort. That is precisely why we have no problem with the sun rising and setting each day; it has become a perception of reality with which we have come to feel comfort. But isn’t that what makes us unique as a people and as a religion?
Is it not that we are forever breaking out of our comfort zone to believe in something transcendent? It is to believe in the stories that have allowed us to outlive the Greeks, the Romans, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Nazis. Have those very stories not given birth to advances in Torah study, the establishment of the State of Israel, the miraculous rise of a people who repeatedly defied tyrants who were committed to turning us into a pile of ashes?
Most importantly, miracles give us the ability to move beyond out daily comfort to become a better example to the world around us. Not to be intimidated to do those things that the society around us might see as strange: eating kosher, keeping Shabbat, sending our children to Jewish schools.
That is not naive or childish, but the essence of the transcendent miracle of Chanukah!
More next week.
