Hanukkah -- 5775

I awake in darkness, and want nothing more than to stay in bed.   It is pitch black when I leave synagogue at the end of the day.  This is the season for hibernation, and despair.

The rabbis taught:  When Adam, the first human, witnessed that the daylight waned [after his creation in September (Tishrei)], he said ‘Woe is me!  Perhaps it is because I sinned that the world grows darker and is slowly returning to a state null and void.  This is what the heavens decreed upon me.’  So, Adam stood, fasted, and prayed for eight days.  Then Adam saw that the month of Tevet [the month following Kislev and Hanukkah] arrived and the days began to grow longer.  He said to himself:  ‘This is the natural way of the world’ [i.e., the days grow shorter and longer throughout the yearly cycle].  Therefore he celebrated for eight days and the following year he set it as an annual eight-day festivity.  Adam set it as a celebration in honor of God in Heaven; they [the pagans] established it as a time of idolatry. (BT Avodah Zarah 8a, in Steinberg, Celebrating the Jewish Year, p. 25) 

As children, we learned that Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the oil.  We were later taught about the Maccabee’s military victory over Antiochus.  So too, Hanukkah is the Festival of Light because it reminds us of what the rabbis of the Talmud knew:  in dark days like these, the human soul craves warmth and light.  We need the promise of springtime.  The candles of the Hanukkiah, both glowing and growing, offer a message of hope.  They remind us that light, now just a glimmer, will return.  Long, bright days and abundant harvests will be with us once again.