There’s nothing like becoming a grandfather. Normally pulled in all directions by the endless jobs on my to-do list, I forget all about them every time I hold my three-month-old granddaughter and stare into her eyes.
This was their undoing. A culture that values inner truth and substance can never merge with a culture that places the highest premium on external form. And a society that worships itself will never suffer a people who affirm loyalty to a Higher Power.
Moshe was 11 years old in July 1941, when the Nazis marched into Lvov and tore him from his home and the Chassidic court of the Grand Rabbi of Bobov. The warm comfort of Torah study and Sabbath melodies vanished amidst the cold misery of the Mauthausen concentration camp.
“I didn’t hit you, did I?” asked the waiter in response to the alarmed gasps and cries from the people who shared my table, several of whom assured him that he had, indeed, scored a direct hit.
The incomparable 18th century genius, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, explains G-d’s reply with this allegory:
The waiter returned, contrite and apologetic, perhaps more shaken than I was. “In twelve years this has never happened to me,” he said. Evidently, he also had a date with Providence. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“The Jews started it all – and by it I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings … We would think with a different mind, interpret all our experiences differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.”
Raise your glass of champagne to toast the new year. And then, before you take your first sip, ask yourself this question: where do the bubbles come from?
There is a story of a prince, a true prodigal son, whose antics and excesses taxed his father’s patience until the king, with no other recourse, sent his son penniless into exile to learn responsibility and humility.
But when the days are shortest and the nights are coldest, just then can a little light shine forth and dispel much darkness. Like a lighthouse guiding a ship home, the lights of the Chanukah menorah can draw us back from the abyss of spiritual oblivion. And as we add candle upon candle and light upon light, the growing radiance of the menorah reminds us of the divine flame that has guided us through the darkness of exile and saved us from the darkness of assimilation for generation after generation.
T.S. Eliot may have denounced April as the cruelest month, but most of us are far more likely to feel pangs of depression beginning to stir sometime around December.
As the days grow short and gray, and the nights turn cold and dark, that is the time we find our spirits truly starting to wither. We mourn the passing of those slow, sticky summer afternoons, long buried beneath the frost. As the threat of snow looms, we reflect sadly that winter will only grow crueler before we can begin to hope for the thaw.
It may be natural to attribute our mood to the inexorable cycle of nature and the change of seasons. But in this, as with all things, Jewish tradition offers a deeper insight into the spiritual torpor that descends upon us each year with the onset of winter.
The Talmud describes how, after eating from the forbidden fruit, Adam noticed that the days began growing shorter and the nights longer. Adam despaired. “On account of my sin,” he conjectured, “the Creator is gradually returning the world to the state of Primordial Darkness.”
With the passing of the winter solstice, however, the days began to lengthen once again, and Adam realized that the changing of the seasons was just part of the natural pattern of creation. He rejoiced, inaugurating a festival of eight days to celebrate the renewal of the world.
In this same season, 2,180 years ago, the Jewish people inaugurated the eighth-day festival of Chanukah, celebrating the victory of light over darkness.
CULTURE OF THE GREEKS
The number seven symbolizes perfection in nature, the complete, ordered system brought into existence through the seven days of creation. As such, it also symbolizes the culture of the Greeks, which then weighed heavily on the backs of the Jewish nation.
Greek culture worshipped physical perfection, artistic expression, and unblemished aestheticism. It exalted the physical form and physical prowess in their art and their architecture, in their Olympics and in their philosophy. It honored and revered all that the physical world represented.
In their aspiration for aesthetic idealism, however, the Greeks denied the transcendence of the human spirit and rejected the notion of any metaphysical reality. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that we find the gods of Greek mythology to be mere caricatures of men, with exaggerated human desires arid contemptible human shortcomings.
Neither should it surprise us that the Greeks fought so desperately to uproot the Torah, the spiritual compass that has kept the Jewish people pointed toward the light through the darkness of exile.
Judaism teaches that the potential for human greatness is achieved not through the ascendancy of the physical, but by subjugation of the physical to the spiritual. The symbol for this spiritual transcendence is the number eight, representing that which breaks through the bounds of physical limitation (symbolized by seven) and aspires for a higher reality, one that lies beyond materialism, beyond superficiality.
EIGHT DAYS
For this reason do we circumcise a Jewish boy on the eighth day after birth, to signify the covenant charges him with conquering his physical desires and redirecting them in the pursuit of spiritual goals.
For this reason did Adam celebrate for eight days, in recognition that the spiritual design behind the workings of nature is even more complex and wondrous than nature itself.
And for this reason do we light the Chanukah lights for eight days: to push off the dark and cold of winter and to remember that we must all see ourselves as lights amidst the spiritual darkness of the physical world, no less than the stars scattered across the heavens.
Only by igniting our own cultural enthusiasm with the flame of our tradition and our heritage will we inspire ourselves and our children to strive toward achieving the spiritual greatness that lies within every one of us.
Originally published in 2002 by Aish.com
Once upon a time there were three little pigs. One built a house of straw, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. One built a house of sticks, until the big, bad wolf blew it down and gobbled him up. But one built a house of bricks and was safe from all the huffing and puffing of the big, bad wolf.
A sukkah may be built of virtually any material: wood, brick, steel, canvas, or even string may be used to construct its walls. But no matter how stable or how precarious its walls, the roof of a sukkah must be composed of s’chach, thin strips of wood or leaves, through which the light of the stars can shine at night. And when one sits in the sukkah and looks up at the s’chach — the barest representation of a roof, which will not protect him from even the lightest rainfall — he is inspired by the recollection of his ancestors who trusted in the protection of the Almighty, the One who took them out from under the rod of their oppressors and guided them through the inimical desert before bringing them safely home.
Yet for all that, the Jew sitting in his sukkah will look up at the heavens and be at peace. He will recognize that the best laid schemes often come to naught and that, after doing all that can be done, we are best off leaving our fate in the hands of the One who placed the stars in their courses, the One from whom protection ultimately comes for those who trust not in their own strength, but in the source of all strength.
Yonason Goldson 