Chanukah and the Core of Freedom
Chanukah is the perfect festival to consider and marvel at the interplay of freedom and providence. This complementarity is very different than determinism. Indeed, this latter concept scarcely exists in Judaism: freedom at every level, choice and discrimination shape the structure and pace of which the creation plays out its purpose and natural laws work with their Creator to produce “measure for measure” with a helping of mercy. 
Many foundational sayings and verses stress this point. “Man must begin and God will complete.” And the sages say to each individual, “it is not for you to complete the work, neither are you free to refrain from it” (Avot 2:21) alluding to the interplay of human freedom and divine providence. The Mishna elaborates, “Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given. And the world is judged by grace but all is according to the amount of the work” (Avot 3:19).
Via the Books of Maccabees, the victory of Torah-true and patriotic Jews over pagan Greek imperialists based in Antioch is widely known. It was a cultural war for religious freedom and national integrity and survival. It also was an assertion of the sovereignty of the God of Israel in the entire land of Israel; thus, the Chanukah prayers thankfully acknowledge “all the miracles, salvations, mighty deeds, victories, and the battles which You performed for our forefathers in those days at this season.”
But the victories of Chanukah, the miracles of courage, faith, dedication, teaching [1] that “delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands of the pure, and the wanton into the hands of the diligent students of Your torah” speak not only to the Creator’s grace and enduring promise to Israel, land and people but are embedded in the substance of creation, from the beginning. This is why the sages say that the lights of Chanukah distil and show the light of creation, the direct expression of God’s love and kindness, “the source of life.” The lights not only are lights of freedom for great battles and victories of the few over the many, but of free will, in this case the choice to fight in honor of heritage and remembrance rather than to submit to new skin-deep pleasures and political emoluments, to go along to get along in a new world pagan order.
When one lights these lights one participates in the creation, a work the more miraculous because the Creator limited Himself in creating and concluded with a creature “made but slightly less than the angels…crowned with soul and splendor” and “able to choose freely between good and evil” [2]. Even though “man’s deeds are not all the result of his free will” but are affected by innumerable stimuli, he was “made absolutely independent in this respect,” different from all other creatures, having been “given the power to influence the world” including the intrinsic or “spiritual forces” that drive and shape all physical things in a “multifaceted influence directed upward from below” [3].
The goal of human freedom is a “perfected community” organized by means of becoming uniquely close to the Creator’s miraculous ways and mercies but the ways that we may get, or fail to get there are as varied as human individuals and communities acting upon each other and creating the intricacies, drama, pain, glories and opportunities of history: creating, in short, human freedom which is modeled in the national customs set forth in the Five Books of Moshe.
Judaism’s understanding of the Eternal One embeds the idea of freedom in the creation and its origins. It is there, in the tiny fraction of a second between light’s bursting forth and time beginning, in the freedom of every family on their inalienable land holding to till, defend and give tithes from it, an inalienability that defines the relation of God to Israel, land and people, and the world that so often comes against it (Leviticus 25:1-41) [4].
Demonstrating the ubiquity of ordered liberty in the creation, of the complementarity of freedom and providence would produce a multi-volume study for the evidence is as varied and voluminous as human history. For the purposes of this essay, grasping the essence of radical freedom the Creator built into the universe as it regards human will, thought, choices and deeds let us consider one individual case, one national – ethical one and one geopolitical – historical event that exposes the tapestry of Western civilization and the myriad individual, communal, religious, national and ideological strands and patterns that have made and unmake it. To do so we will consider the works of a scholar who fully understand this pattern and expressed it with great precision.
Though little known outside scholarly Jewish or theological circles, Moshe Chaim Luzzato was one of the greatest philosophers and seminal thinkers in the last half millennium. Born to Rabbi Ya’akov Chai in Padua, Italy (1707), he was recognized early in his life as a prodigy. It was said “that he did not know what it meant to forget a matter.” By the age of seventeen he was authoring distinctive works and had organized a group of youth for study and meditation on attaining maximal closeness to the Creator. His younger contemporary, the Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna who long survived him said that Luzzato had the greatest grasp of Judaism a mortal could obtain and that Derekh Hashem (note 2 ff, supra) is “the most systematic exposition of Jewish fundamentals ever written” [5]. His few works that survive intact are intensively studied to this day.
So here’s the question: why should so saintly a young man, committed to Torah and closeness to God die just a few years after fulfilling the commandment of aliyah to Israel, so difficult in his time that it was an act of heroism to perform? Could not he and other saintly olim like Rabbi Chaim ben Attar (1696-1743) have been blessed with long life in the Promised Land? How does one reconcile their early deaths with the Creator’s mercy, loving kindness, compassion and righteousness? [6].
The answer is simple; Chaim Luzzato understood and explained it well, including why it mostly is not sad even for the generation in which it occurs. First and foremost, the majority of a person’s deeds are rewarded, measure for measure in the World to Come. A good person’s minority of deeds, his flaws are paid back in this world through suffering that rectifies them; this suffering is “his specific assignment and challenge” (DH 2.2.3-9; cf. King Lear). The minority of good deeds done by the evil, Luzzato wrote show in the good ‘fortune’ or power they often enjoy in this world while their majority of proud or callous deeds will be paid, measure for measure in the World-to-Come by awakened shame and distance from God. The Ramchal understood and accepted his illness and death as a rectification for flaws however few, if any he may have had by our standards.
Moreover, the Ramchal notes that all human beings initially were “bound together” in Adam and, thus, “each individual is bound to everyone else; no man is counted [totally] separately…As a result of this principle, suffering and pain may be imposed on a righteous person as an atonement for his entire generation” (dh 2.3.8). While the Rav would have shied from thus identifying himself, his untimely death reflects this principle. Similarly, in bearing God’s witness through the world for millennia the Jewish people understand and accept, while struggling for freedom that they often play this role, though unappreciated for all mankind. To take an extreme instance, the genocidal population management of the shoah was both atonement for an increasingly scoffing and pagan world and a warning of what was coming for all humankind in the high tech era of managed terror.
This understanding of pain as necessary aspect of freedom and as atonement for error is a leitmotif throughout Derekh Hashem. Thus Ramchal writes, “Every man’s predicament in life is therefore his challenge…in the battle with his evil impulse” [7]. This is “his assignment and responsibility in this world [to be] judged by God’s Attribute of Justice with true precision.” Dignity and honor come with this knowledge and help manage pain in achieving closeness to God. Luzzato knows, too that ultimately our minds, heart and words fail to embrace this fully, — for we are not God. Knowing this too is intrinsic to freedom. “The manner in which this [responsibility and Judgment] is accomplished with regard to the entire human race is beyond our intellect’s ability to grasp and we can never understand it fully.” Our grief or sense of inadequacy should not lead to the proud despair of atheism or other cults. And as with individuals, so with entire nations: given the vilification, pressures and attacks with which the nations have perennially afflicted the Children of Israel, the Jewish settlers are the most humble and forbearing people on earth, truly a light to the nations.
While he understood that all physical things are governed by physical laws, Rav Luzzato know they are not separate from the spiritual realm, the “Throne” above it or the Divine Light (radiant energy if you will); they follow laws intrinsic since the creation when “time grabbed hold” of matter [8]. “We are well aware of physical things and their natural properties and laws are well known” he wrote (DH 1.5.2). The actions of individuals and human groups of varying kinds, size and intent have enormous demonstrable effects on the physical world and, Luzzato wrote, on the spiritual or metaphysical world, too. The desolation of the land of Israel by 2700 years of conquerors, with the worst desolation stretching from 70 CE till 1900 made a “desirable, good and pleasant land,” “a land of wheat and barley, of the grapevine, the fig and pomegranate, of the oil olive and date palm” into a waste of sand, thorns and malarial marshes; an area that for 1800 years had open season on Jews [9]. Thus Rav Yehuda ha Levi, the great poet and author left Spain for Jerusalem at age sixty-five only to be trampled to death by a Crusader (1105 CE) whose free will thrust him infinitely far from God and, in the pain his wrath inflicted helped Ha Levi atone for any of his shortcomings. Multiply by millions and you understand why the world has been so violent, why the violence has been increasingly organized and terrifying, and why the Jewish people and their land have been decimated till the burgeoning of its ‘new spring’ in the late 19th century, as the sixth millennium of history approaches its twilight. And as it does, again the nations gather against Jerusalem and the Jewish people. Shining in the twilight are the lights of Chanukah…
Human beings were made free and the acts of the wicked effect everyone, themselves and their groups, and others as they are “physical things [whose] natural properties and laws are well known” (ad loc.). Evil also deranges creation, unbalancing it and generating more evil: “every multi-faceted influence” from below to above “results in specific influences from above to below” (DH 1.5.6). The “corruption and damage” of this evil dims our perception of divine light and “causes God’s Presence to be all the more hidden” (DH 2.3.8, 9). These processes are complex, “follow many detailed laws…and the ways in which the higher Forces react toward the physical world depend on many factors” for “rectification or damage” as we do well or ill.
Thus the West disintegrates, beginning with its religious prejudices and hysteria, now taking overtly pagan and materialist forms in the cult of terror; thus the tents of Kedar continue to simmer with pride, violence and hatred [10]. And thus these powers continue their strangely complementary, suicidal assault on Israel, its present and its remembrance (psalm 83). That the assault is now termed a “peace process” shows that the nations of the world are in a state of terminal deceit, sterility and morbidity.
The freedom instilled in creation began when the Eternal One withdrew Himself, so to speak in a primordial Tzimtzum or contraction so that the radiant energy He spoke could form and fill the pregnant darkness with matter and space-time. As Ramchal and many others have explained, human beings alone He created and formed free to also effect the creation and their approaches to the Eternal presence.
We are free; there are innumerable paths human beings, as individuals and communities can take, innumerable ‘programs’ they can write to get to the place inscribed for the goal of history. The story of Joseph and his brothers indicates this vividly in which errors and merits find measure for measure fulfillment; where pain and repentance felt, stated and expressed in deeds rectifies the character, family, history and world, the Creator always working to emphasize good, actual and potential and rewarding those who help others [DH 2.3.10 and preceding].
“Joseph was a lad” with the sons of Jacob’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah, handmaidens of Rachel and Leah. Commentaries discuss the implications of his immaturity or generosity of spirit and the extent of the “evil reports he brought to their father” Jacob. The frailties implied here were expiated by suffering, partly at the hands of those against whom he brought them. (That the reports were “evil” indicates that they were not trivial). So also his unabashed revelation of his dreams of dominance, like his awareness of his good looks and charm (which always implies “grace,” 39:4-6, 21, 41; 41:39-46, 49:22-6) were based on truths of his character and abilities but also became “his own challenge in his battle with his evil impulse…within this framework he must strive for success”; it was his own “assignment of service” (DH supra). His charm expressed and buoyed his eminence but also prompted his affliction by Potiphar’s wife and second imprisonment as his pride and evil reports prompted his first.
Among the brothers, Judah paid first, publicly in embarrassment (Genesis 38:25-6) for his role in putting Joseph in the pit and then ignoring him while he was kidnapped and sold and he indicated part of his royalty by acknowledging his error. Later it was he who insisted to Jacob that Joseph, hidden from their knowledge in his role and clothes as Viceroy must be obeyed, that Benjamin accompany them to Egypt on their second trip and that he would “personally guarantee” Benjamin’s safe return. The stress, false accusations against them (not the first or the last ones suffered by the children of Israel), atonement, imprisonment on false charges, and their love for their father and youngest brother demonstrated in self-sacrifice rectified the earlier errors of all concerned and brought the family together, shaleim, as Jacob was when he returned to Shechem from his torturous time of testing with Laban in Aram (33:18).
At each step of this process, Jacob and his children exercised free will thoughts, words and deeds all of which are shown to be important and to resonate through time and space (“identify if you please, this garment”…”identify, if you please, this cup,” etc) and their fundamental love for each other and their father, his feelings and physical condition made them into the core of a mighty nation based on the reconciliation of Judah and Joseph for which Judah’s demonstration of love was key (44:18 - 45). All of these individual acts meshed into Providence as Joseph told his brothers: “and now, please, be not distressed nor reproach yourselves for having sold me here for it was to become a provider that God sent me ahead of you…to insure your survival in the land and to sustain you for a mighty deliverance” (Genesis 45:2-15); this was the same prophetic assurance with which he told his brothers “God will surely remember you” (Ibid. 50:24-5). And so it was through a mighty process that included countless millions of acts of individual courage, skill, wit, suffering and endurance as the Creator’s pledge to Abraham (Genesis 15:13-14), the glimpse of the script’s outlines was formed into myriad paths by people freely, including the Egyptians, free enough for Pharaoh to make himself “a hardened sinner” through dictatorial habits and the insensitivity that frequently accompanies it: paths that led to the Promised Land and the ultimate fulfillment of the Promise: to “proclaim freedom throughout the land” (Leviticus 25:9-13 passim) for all the descendants of these brothers whose names and essence are engraved in the “perfect” or “eternal lights,” urim v’tumim on the breastplate of the high priest (Exodus 28:30, Deut. 33:8).
And that was only the beginning. The individuals of all the nations, the relationships, alliances and institutions they form and support, willingly or not are their freedom acting directly upon the physical world and indirectly on the spiritual world which then further complicates the human matrix in which we confront and respond to our choices, none of which are all of our making since none of us choose where or when or to whom we are born. Rav Luzzato’s brilliant understanding of this led him to follow his discussion of free will by the second part of Derekh Hashem, “Providence” arranged as “Providence in General,” “Man in the World,” “Individual Providence,” and “Israel and the Nations” tracking the logic of freedom and providence through history.
As noted, every life, every portion of every life of an individual, institution or nation could be analyzed by this pattern. For the purposes of this essay, and in keeping with our century, we will briefly consider the shoah which breaks the faith of many people to this day; they cannot understand how a loving, merciful and compassionate God could allow this to happen to His people. But the Creator allows freedom: everything that ensues reflects this conferral of dignity and responsibility on human beings as co-partners in creation. He may “hide His face” but His promise is rooted in creation. As a covenant it cannot be revoked.
In fact, the foregoing sections of this essay already have explained how it happened: human beings are free; institutions, cartels, nations have freedom and effect the physical world and all it contains directly and even indirectly in the effect their thoughts, words and deeds have on the spiritual or metaphysical realms up to the supernal light or, for agnostics, radiant energy. Cultural histories that explain why the West targeted the chosen people, the “first-born son” of the Almighty (Exodus 4:22) for extermination are Israel and the Endtimes (2006) and WW III: the War on the Jews (2007) that trace the path back to Amalek (Exodus 17). Suffice now to mention people, policies, ideologies and hopes as diverse as Henry Ford, the Czar’s anti-Jewish policies and ministers; restorationists like John Quincy Adams and Laurence Oliphant; the cultic mythographers of Aryan supremacy, 19th century materialism and Statism as in Hegel, Marx, Comte; Darwin, Huxley, the spread of aliyah to a broad based population of Jews, British geo-political plans for an Arab Federation, doubts about aliyah, some physical, some ideological from the religious and secular Jewish establishments, the re-arming of Germany, hatred of Jews in the Vatican and State Department… clearly the ways in which providence is worked out through freedom and everything resulting in “measure for measure” justice “is beyond our intellect’s ability to grasp… and understand fully,” for the Creator “takes account of every detail and its effect on the whole, the manner in which every element [of history] is interconnected with every other one in the structure of creation” (DH 2.3.1, 7) [11].
As Ramchal notes further, “God’s great love and goodness decreed that the [other] nations still be given a chance” to embrace Israel; ”to include themselves among the branches” of Israel without trying to uproot much less defame and pillage it [12]. For the most part, as nations, they have failed abysmally. The tyranny into which we being pushed, in which we are tumbling ever further from God and a Godly order on earth is the index of this failure, of the nations’ continuing war on the Children of Israel, the “intimately treasured people” (am segula) of the Creator (Exodus 19:6).
It is the secret treasures of the Creator’s interrelation of Providence and free will that are blessed and besought in Chanukah prayers and expressed in the Chanukah lights as every child of Israel seeks to unify and be unified in the loving Source of all being [13]. This means remembering, honoring and choosing to remain part of the perfect lights of the family of witnesses to the Creator whose promise is ordered freedom.
These lights and this unity grow from darkness to plenitude as the holiday proceeds, just as Israel’s victory did then, as it somehow will now by some combination, “beyond our intellect’s ability to grasp” — except in retrospect — of freedom and choices, faith and endurance. The Chanukah Menorah, the Chanukiyah has eight lamps plus one for the lighting candle, the “leader” that suggests the individual who chooses, for example to do the mitzvah. Why eight lamps? Because when the Temple Mount was re-conquered and the Temple rededicated the one flask of oil burned not for one but for eight days until more pure oil (shemen zayit zahn) could be produced. As the prayer of thanks states, “and they established these eight days of Chanukah to express thanks and praise to Your great Name.” Freedom also consists of gratitude and the understanding that human bravery, skill and wit are necessary but not sufficient.
The sages say that the light of the Chanukah lamps embodies the light of creation, six days and the day of rest. A miracle of eight (shemona) days wrought by a family whose name, the Chashmonai (Maccabees is a nickname) is based on the root of oil (shemen) and refers not only to the logistics, work and natural laws needed for re-consecrating the Temple but to the new ‘week’ of creation after the great week of human history when a perfected community will embrace and be led by a Mashiach (anointed one), a human being who will preside over a world of ordered liberty, teaching and grace, first through wars of liberation, the work of Joseph, and then through forming, teaching and leading a Torah state, the work of Judah (Ezekiel 37:15-28): “a time for war, and a time for peace” [14]. As Torah and Shakespeare always teach, identifying and then seizing the time in coordination with others is essential to fulfilled heroism and the forging of a miracle, the intersection of many choices and divine providence.
1. Chanukah (the first two letters indicate a slight guttural in Hebrew) means “dedication” or inauguration (see verse 1 of psalm 30, “a song for the inauguration of the Temple, by David”). Its root is the word cheyn, “grace” and its cognate is chinuch, “education.” The Jews with the Maccabees were fighting with and for all these social, ethical, educational, charitable, and national qualities: for the essence of Judaism and to cherish and uphold them by being, as the Israeli national anthem states, “by being a free people in our land.” It is all these reasons and more that Israel was a model for those who settled America and fought successfully, if briefly for its independence from Britain and from tyranny.
2. Psalm 8:5-6, passim and Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato, Derekh Hashem (“The Way of the Eternal One”), 1.5.4 – 2.3.12 passim. This is an extensive discussion of free will as the unique feature of human beings and of their correspondingly unique relation to the spiritual (metaphysical and what we might call electromagnetic) world and to providence. Derekh Hashem (NY Feldheim 1977 translated and annotated by Aryeh Kaplan; 1997, revised 6th edition), 79-131. Rav Luzzato lived from 1707-46, dying of illness in Akko (Acre) three years after making aliyah from Amsterdam to Eretz Israel (ibid. 18). His name, as with the names of all oft-cited Jewish sages is abbreviated to an acronym; in his case, Ramchal. This volume will be cited above as DH.
3. Ibid. 79-80; for the “perfected community” see DH 2.2.2, 4, 7-8 passim, “Providence” and “Man in this World.”
4. For example, “in the entire land of your ancestral heritage you shall provide redemption for the land. If your brother becomes impoverished and sells part of his ancestral heritage, his redeemer who is closest to him shall come and redeem his brother’s sale [of his landholding], 25:24-5.
5. This assessment is that of Aryeh Kaplan himself a prodigy, a genius at physics (the youngest physicist ever to work for the US government) and math and widely acknowledged Torah genius and expositor who also died too young, 48, in 1983. The paragraph in which this note appears is drawn mainly from his translation of Derekh Hashem 15-18, supra.
6. See Exodus 34:5-7 for “the 13 names of mercy” that identify the Creator in his relation to humankind and all creation. “Eternal, Eternal One, Compassionate and Gracious Power, Slow to anger and Abounding in Kindness and Truth…” The special love of God for Israel was embodied in the gift of Torah; Avot 3:18 on Proverbs 4.2 and many passages in the Books of Moshe, “it is your life and the length of your days.”
7. Judaism believes every person is essentially good and born innocent; each, however has within him an impulse to good (yetzer haTov) and an impulse to evil that they must learn to strengthen or control to the best of their ability and desire. Here again is Judaism’s radical insistence on freedom and the integration of chinuch (education from grace), with dedication to and knowledge of God and His ways as set forth in Torah both for Jews and non Jews (Bnei Noach). Quotes in this paragraph are from DH 2.3.1.
8. Ramban, Nachmanides on Genesis 1:1-2 (NY Mesorah 2004) and discussed in Gerald L. Schroeder, the Science of God (NY 1997), 52-62, passim. As a scientist, Schroeder refers to the beginning of time, one-one hundred-thousandth of a second after God said, “Let there be light” as the “moment of quark confinement and initial formation of helium. This was when the original hila, “very fine substance without substance” as Ramban put it, entered into bohu, “comes into it” literally (present tense for there was as yet no time). Schroeder affirms, “it could be in a modern text on physics,” Ramban’s view that bohu often translated as “void” means “matter was in it” or, as Schroeder writes, “filled with the building blocks of matter” (op. cit. 57). This was the hundred-thousandth of a second when the infinitely dense and hot plasma of primeval light “entered” the primeval darkness from which God had withdrawn (tzimtzum) and the formation of a universe filled with increasingly complex and organized matter/energy began. The creation of light, the plasma or hila preceded time and thus its first burst, filling the darkness is termed “day One” (yom echad) because it is not relational but ordinal: no time existed by which it could be called “first.”
9. One could extend this period of time another century until today as both American governments and their clients in Jerusalem give arms, ammunition and training to professed Jew-haters and prepare to seize the legal arms of the Jewish settlers of Judea and Samaria.
10. Neither an individual nor a community nor a civilization can enjoy a close, enduring bond with the creator if they have built a culture that re-defines His nature, changes His Name and afflicts His land and people. “The wheel will come full circle…” just as the great spiral wheel of the universe, set into time and motion by the divine wish for life via life completes its circle and brings us all close to the Eternal One.
11. Rav Luzzato specifies that “when an individual is judged, Providence takes account of his” place in time, “what precedes and follows him, and what is associated with him…his forbears, his descendants and the people of his city, community and generation.” When all this is considered “he is given his specific service assignment and challenge,” Derekh Hashem 2.3.7
12. “If they so desired [the nations] still had the free choice to tear themselves from their own [pagan] roots and through their own actions include themselves among the branches of Abraham’s family… the 600,000 branches being the Jews who left Egypt and received the Torah” (DH 2.4.4-6). Ramchal stresses that every individual has and retains freedom regardless of what his or her nation does as a collective. Even after the nations have for millennia hacked at the root-sparks of Israel, “it is still possible for any individual to convert to Judaism and attach himself to Abraham’s tree of his own free will” or to follow the Noahide commands (Rambam, Hilchot Melachim 9; Sanhedrin 46-50 inter alia).
13. U’v’khoach segulat ner Chanukah (“and with the inherent, precious power of the Chanukah light”); mindful of the manifold powers of freedom Jews conclude, “in the merit of the Maccabees show us wonders: through Your light may we see light” (cf. Psalm 36:10; the “Source of life” is the divine “kindness” and “charity” in the working out of freedom whose goodness we can know only in retrospect (Exodus 33:20-23); one cannot see the “face” of the divine Source of energy as one cannot literally say or hear the words and sounds that go forth from it to “articulate” the uttermost end of the worlds (psalm 19) as the Ramchal (supra) and many others have noted. For the pre-lighting prayer that engages sanctity with national freedom and the light of creation see Chanukah, its History, Observance and Significance (NY Mesorah, 1981; 1996), 121-41. Examining the Chanukah song, Maoz Tzur (“Fortress Rock”) indicates how Jews and Judaism intertwine national identity, remembrance, history, endurance, courage, hope and eagerness for ultimate salvation from foes that have always been and, if history and human nature offer any clues always will be until the Perfected Community exists in the root and tree of Israel and wholeness comes to a world oriented around Yisrael Shleimah and Jerusalem.
14. Kohelet 3:8 cf. psalm 29:11, psalm 30, the Chanukah psalm “for the dedication of the Temple,” psalm 67 inter alia and Rambam, Hilchot Melachim 1:1a-c, 2; 5:1-2, 5, 7: “appoint a king; destroy Amalek; build the Temple.”