Hannukah and the Children of Israel: Gathering the Sparks
The creation of the Jewish people is patterned on the creation of the universe. It is a process of separation, of fine discriminations, of the formation of integral identities that are distinctive in them selves and that become fully realized in an intact creation.
Studying the narrative of Genesis, one could say that G-d chose the people that chose Him, that recognized and turned to Him. Out of the darkness of violence (Hamas) and immorality, Noach was righteous and perfect in his generations; in the years of Nimrod and his Tower, Abraham perceived and honored the Creator and defied the tyrant of Mesopotamia. Working with Sarah to bring people to knowledge of the Eternal One, the Torah speaks of “all the souls they made” (v’et hanefesh asher asu) in Charan. Those who know some Hebrew will notice that the converts are referred to in the singular, hanefesh (literally, “the soul”) to indicate that they formed a distinct and integral group unified by their recognition, love and awe of the Creator. And Hashem separated them from the idolaters.
In the same way, the Children of Israel stood around Mt. Sinai “like a single man with a single heart” in the pattern of their forefather and namesake, Jacob – Israel who arrived shaleim, “whole” back at Shechem from his service in Charan, shaleim at Shechem where Abraham had built the first altar to the Eternal One in the Promised Land.
The integrity of Israel the Land, the people, and their code, the Torah (“you shall not add to it nor shall you take away”) is central to the story of Hanukkah. In accordance with the principle that “the deeds of the fathers are a pattern for their descendants” it was a drama played out in the dynamics of Jacob and his sons, events that were the bridge that led Israel, the person and family into the crucible from which they emerged as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” to be a light to the nations, a role the Maccabees later fought to sustain. 
Since the Tower of Babel, the goal of history is for Israel to lead the way in re-gathering all the sparks of the good light (haOhr tov) of the first day (“a whole” or “unified day”) that have been scattered throughout creation in each one of us, in everything around us. This it is to do by its service in its entire land centering on the Temple and Temple service. The Mishnaic sages state that the world is upheld by three things: Torah, Israel’s Temple service and deeds of kindness” (Shimon haTzadik in Pirke Avot 1:2). The Unified Presence of the Eternal One in the world and His blessings cannot be fully felt, experienced and taught so long as Israel and its service are fragmented or torn, in exile, without sovereignty, dressed in alien or foreign ‘robes.’ This is why the Creator states that the scattering of Israel and division of their land is the one thing He will not forgive (Joel 3-4).
The process of separation and winnowing, the gathering of the sparks is lengthy because human beings are its agents. The best of us are imperfect. Even the forbearance of Jacob with his uncle Laban has its limit (31:36-42). It is from Jacob’s sojourn with Laban that we will briefly chart the drama of Israel and his sons, the struggle toward the love, dedication and integrity that brings the fullness of the Eternal One’s light into our lives. Hanukkah is the festival of the light of faith, courage and dedication to the covenant being brought back through struggle and brave persistence to a darkening world. “Man must begin and G-d will complete” to paraphrase the Jewish saying epitomized by the miracles of the Maccabees that Hanukkah commemorates.
As Eliezer was sent to find a wife for Isaac from Abraham’s native land, far from the Canaanites (with whom Esau had intermarried), so Rebecca sent Jacob away from the murderous Esau back to Charan to find his bride from her family. Laban’s treatment of Jacob shows that the light of Rachel and Leah had to be teased out of Charan and brought to the Promised Land. G-d gives us free will; our thoughts, words and deeds matter and Laban greatly complicated this process but Jacob, Leah and Rachel (as for example in their naming of their children), working with G-d made it ultimately for good.
Similarly, Jacob was able to disengage himself from the threatening and unstable Esau (and his four hundred armed men) and, with much worry and excessive conciliation keep his family, including the pregnant Rachel intact. He wrestled with Esau’s angel (some interpreters say it was with the last aspects of Esau within himself) and won a new title, Israel, soon to be confirmed by G-d. As a result, he was “whole” when he came to Shechem (33:18).
When his daughter, Dina, was raped by a Canaanite prince, Jacob’s sons, led by Shimon and Levi avenged this tearing of Israel’s integrity. An in-depth examination of the episode, including the war only alluded to is discussed in Ramban’s colloquium of sages (Ramban on Genesis II, Mesorah 2002). With this integrity restored, “a Godly fear fell on the peoples all around” “because Jacob’s sons were mighty warriors” comments Ramban, citing ancient sources. This “hidden miracle” (ibid) led directly to the Eternal One’s re-affirmation of the covenant and name of Israel to its full boundaries. The chapter that follows, detailing the descendants and kings of Esau-Edom, from Eliphaz and Zepho to Magdiel indicates the struggle with Rome that was to come and is coming to a head.
But already the key point has been stressed: it is only through wholeness, shaleim, that true peace, shalom can emerge. Integrity of the covenant below draws down the vav, the bridge of light into the word and condition shaleim to produce full peace.
Hanukkah begins on 25 Kislev, the month of dreams, and spans the passage of fall into winter in the same way the events and historical trends bridge and carry over from one millennium to another. It is the month of the greatest physical darkness in the year and Joseph’s exceptional grace led him to prophetic but troubling dreams that brought him into darkness from which ever greater light and integrity would grow as hinted in his name, Yosef (“He [G-d] will add on” for me another [son] Rachel had said). She was a prophet and the son whom G-d added for her was Benjamin the only son of Jacob born in the Promised Land. Kabala identifies the month of Kislev as that of Benjamin and its letter is the somech (“support”) hinting among other matters at the role he was to play in the life of Jacob during the darkness when Joseph was away; and in the relations of the other brothers, especially Judah and Joseph in relation to their father and the unity of the family’s lights coming together, shaleim in the darkness of Egypt.
The name Benjamin (right hand son) includes both senses of the name Rachel tentatively gave him as she was dying: Ben Oni means “son of my sorrow” but also “son of my strength,” encapsulating the journey that the Children of Israel; for the Jewish people are the Eternal One’s suffering and mighty (Yisrael) servant, His “first born son” (Exodus 4:22).
Joseph had the ability to bring dreams from the darkness and disorder of night and sleep into light and action for life. His tale-bearing and pride (true as his dreams were) brought suffering; his brothers would atone for their cruelty in leaving him. But the flaws and suffering were also the stuff of redemption. G-d creates the ‘hard drive’ of history, the D.O.S., too and leaves human beings to write the programs and files. As Joseph did, so his brothers suffered unjust bondage, and they repented and worked to make things right; As Jacob let the schemes and accusations of Laban keep him too long from his own elderly father, so he suffered the absence of his beloved Rachel’s firstborn. The many kinds of darkness and slowly coalescing light in Torah portions Vayeishev, Mikeitz and Vayyigash (genesis 37 - 47) are strikingly connected to our times and to Hanukkah and to the grand theme of freedom, responsibility, and repair of the human world, to fulfill the promise that is the context which shape all efforts and understanding of good.
Three and half millennia ago, Jacob faced an impossible dilemma: to let his support, his youngest son Benjamin who gave context (smuchim) to his life by the enduring attachment to Rachel be taken down to Egypt as its viceroy demanded or have his family would starve. The Jewish teaching that G-d does not want us to rely on miracles, forcing His hand so to speak is exemplified in the intense drama of the episode. Judah wins Jacob’s approval for the brothers’ last trip to Egypt, with Benjamin, by promising on his own eternal share (in the land and in the life to come) to return the youngest “and stand him before you.” And when the drama plays out in Pharaoh’s palace, it is Judah who enables the re-unification of the entire family by appealing in a complexly-textured address (44:18-34) to the disguised Joseph on behalf of Jacob’s love for Benjamin and the sons’ love and concern for their father and the hard facts of grief and mortality. And so “Joseph made himself known to his brothers” and “cried out in a loud voice, — is my father still alive?”
The demonstration of enduring family love, loyalty and unity goes further in his words immediately following. “And now, be not distressed and do not reproach yourselves for it was to be a provider that G-d sent me ahead of you…to insure your survival in the land and to sustain you for a mighty deliverance” (45:3-8 ff). It is only after He has passed by, so to speak that even the most insightful of us can comprehend the ways of Hashem (Exodus 33:13-23). And when the great news of salvation comes to Jacob it is the Eternal One who calms his worries about descending into the darkness of Egypt, speaking to him out of the night as He had to Abraham: “have no fear of descending to Egypt for I shall establish you as a great nation there…and I shall also surely bring you up” (46:1-4).
By their complementary plans and deeds, faith, courage and self-restraint, Judah earned the blessing of royalty and Joseph the double portion of the firstborn (both his sons, Ephraim and Menashe received their own tribal territories the lynchpin being “Shechem, which I took from the Amorite with my sword and with my bow,” Jacob states (Genesis 48:22); Shechem where Joseph’s tomb now stands ruined by the pere adam, waiting to be restored to the wholeness that Judah and Joseph achieved thirty-five hundred years ago.
Thirteen centuries later, the Seleucid Kingdom sought to destroy the light of Torah and to fragment the integrity of Israel. Mattisyahu the High Priest and his sons brought the Jews back together. The sanctity and sanctuary that was broken (the Hebrew word toraf and its derivatives means predatory beast, torn, crazed, jumbled up, non-kosher) was purified and the scattered light re-gathered. And for the acts of courage and faith, the Eternal One added on another, and another, added on seven more days of light, a new creation hinting at the grace and sacred oil of Israel (“oil” – shemen – is the root of “eight”) and the ‘new week’ that will come with the Messiah when all the sparks are gathered.
The world powers of our day define “peace” as dividing Israel’s land and expelling Jews. The entire process is built of lies and forgetting of history and grace. It is unstable; it embodies the world of chaos, olam tohu which the Jewish people, especially those in Israel and those who bless them struggle to redeem, making the land whole. Amid the greatest darkness, the darkness of lies and the lust for power the dream will be realized: “when the Eternal One returns our exiles to Zion, we will be like dreamers” (psalm 126). The sheaves of Joseph’s dream will fill the fields of the entire heritage of an intact Israel: “days are coming when Jacob will take root, Israel will bud and blossom and fill the face of the earth like fruit.” Where the powers have created jihadist mini-states in the midst of Israel the Jews will return to embody the embrace of Judah and Joseph, “a single nation in the land upon the hills of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:15-28).
We live in the erev Shabbat of history. Judaism teaches that there is one millennium of history for each of the six days of creation (“for a thousand years in His eyes are but a bygone yesterday, and like a watch in the night”). But fashioned by human ideas and deeds, historical trends and events do not fit neatly within the three, two-thousand year periods of Desolation, Torah and [Birth pangs of the] Messiah. For example, Abraham was born, recognized and began preaching the Eternal One, the Creator near the end of the period of desolation. The Romans destroyed the second Temple one hundred and seventy years before the period of Torah ended in a slide toward our tumultuous era of Messiah which saw the utter desolation of the Promised Land, as G-d vowed, when Israel was in exile. The sixth and last millennia, by the Jewish calendar began in 1240 CE with the early glimmerings of resurgent Greco-Roman thought in Italy and, in geopolitics, the firming of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans which dominates Europe to this day. And the afflictions of the Jewish people reached terrifying levels as the powerful world, filled with new ‘animals’ generated light that was darkness and madness.
As a Jewish twenty-four hour cycle begins with night (“and it was evening, and it was morning, — one day”), after a fifty-year period of sunrise and stirring, the main business of the sixth and last ‘day’ of history began in 1790, with the American Republic and culturally with the rise of feminism and the illuminati - communists. The fourth and last quarter of this last day of history began in 1990 when G.H.W. Bush, Baker and Company used the first Gulf War to threaten Israel into the Madrid Conference that put the Jews on the greased track toward Oslo, the Road Map and the fragmenting of the land. But it is the husks that are breaking amid sterility, perversion and terror: the indestructible light is coalescing. In the darkness, a new day of grace and dedication is gathering as in those days, at this season…
In the “multi-cultural” world of artificial, mismatched and unnatural slogans and regions, of evil fantasies and Hamas, assaulted Israel will persist as the rock of light around which a new world will coalesce, as in the beginning. And around that rock, as it was before Esau destroyed it and Ishmael desolated the land the Jewish people with their Temple Service, Torah and deeds of kindness will restore a House of prayer for all peoples to the living G-d of Israel, the G-d of life and love of kindness. The light is being gathered even as the collapsing darkness of deep night covers the earth yearning for the dawn.
Co-partners in His miracles, we will light the candles for a happy Hanukkah…