Chanukah 5785
Because of the peculiar interaction between the lunar and solar calendars, whereas Chanukah coincided with Thanksgiving a few years ago, this year it began the day after Christmas. Which means that this year we began to celebrate our miracle the very night after Christians celebrated theirs. More than most years, this offers compelling reason to consider the miracle of Chanukah—a miraculous victory of the few over the many, of the pure over the impure—against the backdrop of the story of a baby boy being born to a virgin mother.
Those two miracles are fundamentally different in a way that demands our attention.
Despite the mitzvah of Chanukah candles falling into a rubric that women are generally exempt from—time-related, positive mitzvos—they are, nonetheless, obligated in this one. This is because, in the words of Chazal “אף הן היו באותו הנס—They were also included in the miracle.” Some explain that these words do not actually mean to convey mere inclusion alone, but something far more substantial. Women are not obligated in the mitzvah of Chanukah candles because they were included in the miraculous salvation, but because they caused it.
The point of reference is to Yehudis, the daughter of Matisyahu the Kohen Gadol who was the first to openly rebel against Antiochus and the Greek overlords. Despite the mounting religious and physical oppression the Jews faced—mitzvos forbidden and Jewish women violated—people were afraid to act. It was against this backdrop that Yehudis cunningly achieved an audience with the Greek governor of Jerusalem, got him drunk, and decapitated him. The site of his severed head spurred the Jews into rebellion, which coalesced around Matisyahu and his sons who were ready to take up arms against the Greeks.
Jewish women were not only included in the miracle; a Jewish woman helped to cause the miracle.
This is a major statement. Because it suggests that miracles—those acts that are beyond the pale of human accomplishment and transcend the natural world that human beings are trapped inside—are actually not the purview of G-d alone. In the case of Chanukah, Hashem was ready and willing to provide a miraculous victory, but He needed people to start the war. Miracles, Chanukah insists, will descend from Heaven only after people have provided a landing strip down on earth.
Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik noted something intriguing about the length of Chanukah. Chanukah is eight days long, of course, because the small cruse of oil miraculously burned for eight days. But why did it need to burn for eight days? The answer is that it took that long to retrieve fresh, new, unadulterated oil. Which is to say that had the human effort to produce new oil taken only three days, the oil would only have lasted that long. And had it taken ten days to produce, we’d have an extra 48 hours of Chanukah and even more impressive looking menorahs.
Again we find that human effort creates the environment in which miracles can emerge. It was a human process that determined how long the miracle of the oil would last. And it was a human process that created the vehicle for the miracles that unfolded on the battlefield.
These are the miracles that we remember on Chanukah and throughout the year. When Nachshon jumps into the Sea, it splits. When Esther risks her life for an audience with the king, Haman is thwarted. When Yehudis launches a rebellion, a great military victory follows. All miraculous. All the products of Divine Intervention. All initiated by human effort.
There are plenty of reasons why Jews never accepted Jesus. But in a year when Chanukah and Christmas nearly coincide, when the retelling of our miracles follows immediately upon the retelling of theirs, it is important to consider how distinctly un-Jewish is the claim that a savior would be born without the basic effort normally undertaken to have a child. Moshe was the greatest Jew who ever lived, was the human vessel through which countless miracles were visited upon the Jewish People, and yet was born to both a human mother and a human father. Jewish thought will tolerate no less.
In the Jewish view, every act of conception is indeed miraculous. When a man and woman enter into the partnership of marriage and endeavor to build a home predicated on Jewish values, Hashem’s presence comes to rest on that home and blesses their union, oftentimes in the form of a child. Marriage is a vessel that human beings must create before G-d’s Presence takes shape. We must do ours before Hashem will do His.
Chanukah is a reminder that wherever we hope for miracles, we must be prepared to act. If we want Hashem to bless our lives, our homes, our existence and success as a nation, we must first ask ourselves if we’ve done our part. Have we sufficiently prepped the terrain with the sweat of our own brow, so that a proper vessel exists for Hashem to fill with the miraculous? We must first extend our hand to Him before we can expect Him to extend His hand back to us.