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Hi, everybody. This episode is recorded on Sunday, December 14, the day of the massacre in Sydney, Australia. So much to say, but it's hard to say anything. It is a massacre of Jews that even when it ends, it never really ends. All Jewish gatherings in Australia will now look different. Jews will think differently about themselves. It follows on the attack in Colorado and the attack in Washington D.C. and of course, the attack in Manchester. There is a wholesale, persistent wave of killings of Jews. We're in a new age. And it's an age in which, for well over a decade now, every single synagogue on earth has security, often armed, outside its gates anytime Jews gather to pray. And when you talk about that, they tell you Jews are too much obsessed with being victims. Jews always talk about how bad they have it and not how bad others have it. And of course, since Jews are the great and powerful movers and shakers of the earth, how dare they? There is a disease and it has taken hold and it has raised the fever and it is not going away. I don't ask people to pity Jews. I barely even ask people to protect Jews. Australia has a responsibility to protect its Jews. They are Australians. But I come from a Zionist home. We protect our own. My only recommendation to Australia, on this day, when everybody in Australia is shocked and surprised at the discourse, the vocabulary, the language, the hatred, the anti Semitism that everybody hears when they visit the Australian Jewish community. I visited a school in Melbourne that had security gates and guards more dense and better protected than government ministries back in Israel. I visited a community that said that there were constant harassment. Jews who said that it's a beautiful country, they love the country. Increasingly they face real dangers. And in Australian political class that doesn't give a shit, that is deeply committed to pretending nothing is happening because it is racist to say anything is happening. And now people are dead and people will be dead again because this doesn't go away. This is not one off. This is not a problem of crime. This is not a problem of people who are socially maladjusted. This is not a job for social workers. There's an ideology here and it is deep and it is old. And the Australian authorities and the Australian political class don't understand it. They don't know what motivates it and they don't know how to stop it. And they don't understand the threat that it poses to the liberal order of Australia. It is obsessed with Jews. That's a sign of the depth of its dysfunction, of the depth of the damage it can cause to everyone else who aren't Jews. And they're not going to care until. It's not really a problem for Jews anymore. It's a problem for everyone else. Jews left Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. They left because they had somewhere to go. Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Iran. To a large extent, almost, almost entirely the vast majority. These are countries that cannot sustain Jews. They cannot sustain Jewish communities. There is a 1% scale of the community that once existed in Morocco still remains protected by the regime in Iran. There is a tiny Jewish community officially granted a seat in parliament by the regime that is under constant intelligence, surveillance, constant oppression. And anybody who wants to leave has to forfeit absolutely, literally all their assets and leave them behind. That's the law. Countries that cannot have Jewish communities where Jews cannot live well, they look like Iraq looks today, and Syria and Yemen and Libya, Iran. These are signals of collapse. Why would you join them? Why, dear Western world, would you join them? And that brings me, that brings me to Hanukkah. I also want to say we have a sponsor for this episode. This was originally an episode that was a comment on Hanukkah. The sponsors asked us to dedicate this episode to somebody who died on September 11th. And that feels very fitting somehow that that happens to land on this episode tragically. But it's a kind of closing of a circle. This podcast is sponsored by Donna Silbert and Kevin Foley and dedicated to the memory of Thomas Irwin Glasser. Tom Glasser was murdered by Islamist terrorists as he worked at his desk in the South Tower of the World Trade center on September 11, 2001. At the time of his passing, the New York Times said Tom's occupation form would have read philosophy major, track star, stand up comic, restaurant owner, bartender, partner at Sandler o', Neill, a senior partner and head of mortgage backed securities sales and trading at the Wall street firm Sandler o'. Neill. Tom was brilliantly funny and broadly loved throughout the bond trading community by clients and competitors alike. A talented and fiercely competitive collegiate athlete, Tom earned a gold medal in track and field, representing the United states at the 1981 Maccabia Games. One of the best athletes ever to attend his beloved collegiate alma mater, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Haverford honored him by naming its sports hall of fame the Thomas Glaser 82 hall of Achievement. The Glasser family established a scholarship at Haverford in Tom's honor. A firm supporter of Israel and Jewish causes, had he lived, Tom would have led from the front in the fight against antisemitism at Haverford College. A devoted husband and Father Tom is forever mourned by his wife, Meg. Sons Dylan and Lucas, parents Anne and Jerry, sisters Laura and Margie, brothers in law Joel and Sam, numerous nieces and nephews and hundreds of friends. Thank you for that dedication. We will remember everyone who died today from Islamist terrorism and we will remember all those we have lost. Let's get into it. Hanukkah is the most significant Jewish holiday that isn't mentioned in the Bible. And it's not a foundation story in the mythical sense. It's a holiday that takes place in the full light of history. It's a holiday that about history, about practical history. And so it has been for two millennia a Jewish vocabulary for talking about history and how we respond to history and its many pains and agonies and tribulations. And that makes it profoundly relevant for this moment. And we'll get into how in a moment. The enemy on Hanukkah is the king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid emperor. And he attacks the temple in Jerusalem, plunders the temple in Jerusalem. And over the course of the 160s BCE he institutes massive new laws that are basically meant to destroy Jewish life and the Jewish religion and Jewish identity. He is a man with very serious imperial problems. For one thing, he needs to rob the temple because his empire is in financial straits in he has had too many military campaigns he couldn't pay for, the vast costs of the court of his empire were becoming too much. And he had just been humiliated by the Romans. He invades Egypt in 169bce and returns to his empire having plundered parts of Egypt. And then he tries to do the same in 168. And he is stopped at a place called Eleusis by the Roman envoy Gaius Popilius Laeenus. And there is a very famous scene among people interested in classical history where the envoy Laeinus actually draws a circle in the sand around Antiochus and he says to him, you have to leave Egypt. You cannot invade it or you will be an enemy of Rome. And. And you must give me your decision before stepping out of this circle. It is a Roman threat, a Roman ultimatum. That is also Roman humiliation. And he is terrified of Roman power. His kingdom is financially unable to mount a massive campaign. The Romans are only growing in the west in power. They have the ability to actually project power in that way. And he obeys. And that is when after that humiliation, we begin to see a massive crackdown. From 167 to 164. He basically orders an end to the Jewish religion, to the Jews unique practices. He bans Torah study, he bans the Sabbath, he bans circumcision. And it is that. It is those things that spark the Maccabean revolt by the Hasmonean family, a priestly family who wanted to expel the imperial power. They wanted to reconsecrate the temple and they wanted to basically reconsecrate their small plot of land, right, their small place under the sky in the middle of this great imperial power politics. And they launched this immense rebellion that by 161, with a defeat of Nicanor Yahusa's main general by Judah Maccabee, by the leader of this family, they were successful. And it is then in the traditional story, after the human exploits, after the struggle, after the toil, after the sacrifices, it is then the sages of the Talmud tell us, and only then, that the miracles kick in. It is then that a single day's worth of oil in the sacred menorah, in the sacred candelabra of the temple lasts eight days. It is then that the Maccabeans, the Hasmoneans, institute a holiday that commemorates their victory and commemorates their return to their holy and sacred home. They had lived during the rebellion in the wilds as wild animals. That's something recorded in 2 Maccabees, a text written in the Jewish Diaspora. It's not part of the canonical Hebrew Bible. It's written in the Greek speaking Jewish diaspora roughly 50 years after the events. It records what people with living memory of the events thought about the events. And Jews have drawn many lessons from that Hanukkah story. One of those lessons is that miracles don't come when we sit and weep and pray. They come when we rise up, when we struggle, when we overthrow miracles. Interventions of God in history is one way to understand them. There are other ways to understand them. The inexplicable good that sometimes chances our way. Miracles are the result of work and struggle and sacrifice. When I talk about Israeli history, about the many strengths of Israel demonstrated in the various wars of Israel's history, in the economic success, in the technological success, in the amazing integration of waves and waves of immigrants from radically different cultures, all these other enormous successes, I talk all the time about Israel's weaknesses and failings. Obviously it's a society of human beings, but there are some tremendous successes that can be studied with great profit for any society out there in the world. And when I talk about them, I often am accused by well meaning listeners, people of faith, of Erasing God from the picture. I always favor the human factor, the structural or institutional factor, the cultural explanation, and there are a few reasons for that. I personally happen to think there is a God, and maybe someday I'll explain why it's not that exciting. But I don't think that God is so bad apparent that he's holding our hands every hour and every moment and rescuing us from all of our follies and from all of our troubles. The prophet Amos, chapter nine tells us, you Israelites came out of Egypt, I brought you out of Egypt in this great miraculous choosing of the Jews. And I brought Aram out of Kir, and I brought the. Who is it? The Philistines out of Kephtol. He gives other examples. The prophet Amos is a tragic prophet of the Northern Kingdom of Israel who prophesies the collapse and then lives to see the collapse. And he tells the Israelites, he tells the Jews, you are not as special as you believe. Maybe you are as special as you act. Not as special. Your chosenness is a responsibility, it is not a pedestal. And he literally tells them, there are other redemption stories and they are divine as well. And failure and success are a choice. Our enemy's failures. The difference between our success and what so much of the Arab world around us looks like. And that's what it looks like, folks. We don't look away and we don't pretend. Large parts of the Arab world around us that aren't extraction economies are failures. If it was your country in the west looked like that, you would count it a failure. Economically, technologically, educationally. Maybe culturally, culture is much, much more subjective. But just the status of women in the Arab world is enough of a reason to say maybe culturally you're allowed to have subjective views on these things. Those differences, those gaps that are ultimately translated into gaps in military capability and prowess and competence, those gaps are choices. Those are replicable differences of culture. It is a choice of the struggling societies that surround us to continue to organize around certain ideas, certain cultural or religious ways of acting and thinking that make it hard to build high tech ecosystems that make it hard to build good universities. And they should get on that because God doesn't hold our hand. There are no excuses. And just to clarify, because it's an important caveat, it isn't a specific thing about them. I'm not accusing Islam of being backward. Inasmuch as you partake in certain characteristics that allow you to build out that high tech ecosystem, that educational achievement, inasmuch as you partake in it, you have it. You can do that in a Muslim idiom, you can do that in a Christian one, in a secular one, in a Western one, in a Japanese one. You can do it in all kinds of different ways. It's not like there's only one culture that joined in modernity's successes. There's a vast diversity of cultures. But you do have to actually do the things that will actually make that happen. There is an old debate about what divine help is, what miracles are, and it speaks to this moment, to Hanukkah. It's a debate between two of the great giants of Judaism, Rambam and Ramban. That's with an M at the end and with an N at the end. And they represent in this debate, roughly, very roughly, because it's very complicated and it's articulated differently across the millennia, two very different ways of understanding Judaism, two different ways in which mainstream Jewish theologians, thinkers, rabbis, scholars understood what it is. They were what it is Judaism is. And I'm going to just in roughest terms, call one the mystical version, the mystical camp school, and the other one the philosophical school. And they had a debate in the Middle Ages about the nature of miracles. And through debating the nature of miracles, they really debated the nature of nature itself. In his interpretation to the Torah portion, bo, which is a Torah portion that we read around late January, and it's an amazing little piece of the Torah because it contains the plagues of Egypt and the Exodus, the actual Exodus itself. Ramban, Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman, who lived in Catalonia from 1194 to 1270, toward the end of his life, he actually had to flee Catalonia, and. And he left the land of Israel, and he helped build up the Jewish communities in Jerusalem. And Akko Ramban interprets the miracles of this section of the Torah. And he writes from the great public miracles like the exit is the splitting of the sea. A person comes to acknowledge the hidden miracles which are the foundation of the entire Torah. What does he mean by hidden miracles? That a person has no share in the Torah of Moses, our teacher. Until we believe this is an article of faith which is required to have a share in the Torah itself, says Ramban. Until we believe that all our affairs and occurrences are miracles, there is no nature, he writes, or regular course of the world in our affairs. All things are miracles. There is only one miraculous, constant emanation from the divine. In his view, creation that never stops, instant to instant, all physical order is a kind of illusion, or maybe a kind of method that God uses for that ongoing creation. The miracles of the Bible are not meant to teach us that there was a moment in which the hand of God metaphorically intervened in the world. They are meant to teach us that, in a sense, there is no world, there is no object, permanence. Every breath, every minute, every instant, every thought, every experience is a created moment of miracle, of divine emanation and creation. And then there's a second school that opposes this view. Both these schools are very ancient. They begin in the sages of the Talmud. They begin in the early, even earlier than that, in the Second Temple period that we can find traces of in the Mishnah. In P Avot chapter 5, the chapters of Our Fathers, chapter 5, verse 6, the Mishnah writes, Ten things were created at twilight on the eve of Shabbat, meaning at the very last instant of the six days of creation. The last little things created at the creation itself, before the the system was put on autopilot and God rested on the Sabbath. Those 10 things are the mouth of the earth, the mouth of the well, the mouth of the donkey, the rainbow, the manna, the staff, the shamir, the writing, the inscription and the tablets. Now, these 10 things, if you are a learned Jew reading the Talmud, you would know are some of the great miracles. The mouth of the donkey is the prophet who comes to curse Israel, but ends up blessing Israel, and his donkey speaks to him. The mouth of the earth is the earth swallowing up Korach in the rebellion against Moses. These are all literally. The rainbow is the rainbow. That is the covenant given by God to Noah. These great miracles were built into creation in the six days at the last moment, as pieces of the divine plan preordained for the creation of the universe. They're built into the structure of the universe. And partly interpreting on this point, Rambam, Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, who lived in the century before Rambam, he actually spends most of his working life in cairo. And under Saladin's empire, he lives 1138 to 1204, which means he dies when Ramban the mystic is 10 years old. Rambam writes of that sentence in the Mishnah the following they, meaning the sages of the Talmud of the Mishnah, do not accept the idea of a renewal of God's will at every moment. Rather, at the beginning of making things, he placed into nature that it would produce everything it would later produce. This is an immense debate about the nature of reality and the nature of creation and what it means for there to be a reality and therefore a creator. And what kind of a relationship they can have and what is being. I'm going to draw from it a very narrow point about human agency. These are two enormous schools that have completely different Judaisms. Welcome to a religion where the dogma is secondary to the practice. First you do, then you hear, then you debate. And so there's this vast diversity of dogma deep within really mainstream orthodox understandings of what Judaism is. My main critique of the Ramban constant creation, mysticism, vision of the world, for the purposes of this conversation, is that I don't want to live in that world. I don't want to live in a universe without object permanence. I don't want to live in a universe without consequences. I love the idea. I love it. It's an intimate universe. It's a universe of deep and constant and direct divinity. Every, as I said, breath and thought is a gift. Nothing is on autopilot. But it's also a world with much less cause and effect or no cause and effect. Less consequences, less responsibility, less reason to build. I don't believe the miracles are the hand of God reaching out to give us each second of our lives in existence. I believe that it is in the structure of the standing universe, the rules that favor certain ways of doing and thinking, where we find miracles. And I think that that's the message of Hanukkah, for example. Be honest. Judaism tells us to be honest. There are all sorts of reasons to be honest. There are all sorts of reasons to have integrity, to make good faith arguments, to have the kind of empathy and kindness that comes with all of those. We often overlook that. One of the reasons is that it is unbelievably useful. It grants us enormous evolutionary advantages. It enables us to achieve more in cooperation with other human beings, which is the superpower of human beings. Trust and honesty are fundamental because high trust societies can build sophisticated institutions that can accomplish more things. They can build more efficient supply chains. They can sign better contracts. High trust societies matter. And so you should be honest. And if you're not honest, if you're congenitally culturally dishonest, for example, any dictatorship, you will not have those kinds of high trust institutions that can do great things. And you will be weaker for it, and you will suffer for it. And those that do have high trust through mechanisms of self critique and debate will beat you at war. So high trust and honesty are incredibly useful for reasons built into structures of how animals like us interact in the universe. And that's my point of the universe being built to favor certain ways of thinking. Not every culture can create geosynchronous satellite networks that tell your smartwatch where you are and where you're going, or cure all the cancers that have already been cured and quite a few have been cured. It takes a culture that is steeped in scientific trial and error, in free speech, in innovation, experiment. And all of that is just one form or another of self critique. All cultures can get there. This is key. All cultures can get there, but you actually have to get there to become capable of doing those great things. What are miracles? Miracles are not the hand of God reaching out and changing the world for us because we believe, because we prayed, because we asked nicely. Miracles are the human being doing the work and getting there and a world built so that doing the work achieves the great and the good. When I was a kid, my dad got upset. I remember this moment at some rabbi on TV explaining that God saved us in the 1973 war. My dad fought in the 1973 war and actually found himself in a desperate position, overwhelmed by Syrian forces and behind Syrian lines. In the first day of the war, he saw friends die. I must have been 12 years old when I heard him get angry at this rabbi. And I asked him why he was angry. He believed in God. Was it so terrible to think that God saved him? He. He was one of the few in the unit that survived that first day. And he explained that God doesn't swoop in to save us. God acted that day, but he acted by stealing the hearts of the men and women who fought and maneuvered and planned and died and sacrificed to stop the Syrian advance. God's help is a function of devotion, of commitment, of sacrifice. It's something that I've seen many times in many places. Coleman Cox was a business writer in the 1930s. He once had this line that people loved so much, they misattribute it to Thomas Jefferson because it's too good a line to attribute to a business writer in the 1930s. I am a great believer in luck, cox wrote, and the harder I work, the more of it I seem to have. It captures this sense of the place of miracles in the philosophical school of Judaism. They are not deus ex machina. Salvation opportunities flow past us all the time. We don't see them. We don't realize that they're going past us. The harder we work, the smarter we become at recognizing them and at understanding what we can do about them, the better equipped we are to make use of those opportunities. You don't wait for the miracle. You work and you struggle in Darkness with the wild beasts in the field. We'll get to that in a moment. You work even in despair. The more you work and struggle, the more likely you are to be able to seize what light chances upon your path, no matter how much you are in darkness. Hanukkah is more than a holiday of light. It's a holiday in which Jews deconstruct and study the process of the miraculous and the inexplicable success. It isn't an accident that the Zionists turn to the Maccabees example for inspiration. Even secular Marxists could cling to this understanding of miraculous salvation as easily as the religious could. With them, the when the biblical canon was closed, the sages tell us in the Talmud, prophecy ended and the Torah became the inheritance of man. It isn't in the heavens nor beyond the sea, the Gemara says, quoting a verse from the Bible. It is here. It's in our hands. God gave his revelation. Then God stepped back and left its interpretation, making use of it, building societies in light of it to us, because children have to grow up, because God's grace and God's loving kindness aren't meant to replace human responsibility. Because that would be a worse world, not a better one. The miraculous is therefore a human act. It is ours to build. And we live in a universe in which our sacrifices to build the miracle can actually produce the miracle. That is a world of overflowing kindness and good. We are partners in building, in repairing the brokenness of this world that is the miracle. And we don't pause to see it, we don't notice it. We spend our days raging and weeping at all the bad. In Judaism there is an idea called the yetzer hara, the evil creation. It's often translated as evil inclination. It's the peace of the human soul that tends toward satisfying hunger at others expense, all different hungers, and tends towards a lack of sympathy and empathy, tends toward evil deeds. And it isn't just the hunger to take what is others, whether it's theft or sexual hunger or any of those hungers. It isn't just the taking of things. It's despair. Our tendency to despair, our tendency to forget the miraculous, our tendency to magnify what is broken, the pain that is inherent in life, that is part of life, that is the flip side of all the good in life. It is the demon within us called ingratitude, which is the destroyer of things. Ingratitude destroys relationships, ingratitude destroys family. Ingratitude can destroy society. And surrendering to ingratitude drives bad deeds. People who do bad things usually believe they are the victims. Despair and ingratitude are deep parts of unethical behavior and are deep parts of the evil inclination. And so the second great lesson of Hanukkah, and of all of Judaism, is gratitude. The gratitude that flows from noticing the miracle of the world and our agency within it. Without gratitude, almost no Jewish ritual or holiday makes any sense. But if you understand Judaism as a vast system of creating norms around the principle that all life is thanksgiving, suddenly everything clicks into place with astonishing beauty and depth. And here's one way that it does so. There's a famous debate among the sages in the Talmud in tractate Shabbat, page 21B, about how we light Hanukkah candles. We read in that Talmudic passage our rabbis taught, the mitzvah of Hanukkah is one light per person and his household, every household has to light a light. That is the mitzvah of Hanukkah. Those who are exemplary for those in the know, for the Hebrew speakers in performing the commandment, light one light for each and every person in the household, the Gemara says. And those who are the exemplary of the exemplary, well, for them, there's a debate. The Gemara, it says, the school of Shammai, the students of the scholar Shammai from the first century, they say, on the first day, one lights eight candles, and then one decreases the number of candles each day. So on the first day, eight, on the second day, seven, you count down that way all the way to the last day of Hanukkah. And the school of Hillel, which is always opposed to Shammai, says, on the first day, one lights one candle, and from then on increases, adds an additional candle. The first day, one candle. The second day, two candles. The eighth day, eight candles. This is a very famous disagreement. Kids learn it in schools just to understand the origin of the custom to light an additional candle each day of the eight days. And the question is, why? Why do we side with, in the end, Hillel? Jews do it according to the school of Hillel, not according to the school of Shammai. There's a general principle of Jewish law that you ascend in holiness, you don't descend in holiness. The Gemara explains, in Temple rituals, in calling people to the Torah readings at synagogue, there's always a sense that you don't start with the high number and go to the low, and you start with the low and go to the high. There has to be a sense of ascent built into Jewish ritual, that's part of what's happening here. It's a kind of habit of Jewish ritual practice. But, you know, volumes have been written about this short passage, this disagreement long ago about how you light Hanukkah candles. It's a small thing, but it speaks to larger things. Hillel1 because of a sense that the light always increases, the light always grows. And one of the ways that I learned this is that, of course, the Talmud, as is its want, as it always does, preserves the losing opinion so that we understand the context and so that we know the debates and so that we know the reason for the opinion that then becomes the actual law. As each day passes, the miracle that the oil continued to burn becomes a greater miracle because the gift is larger with each passing day, because a single day's oil lasting three days is one size of inexplicable, wonderful, wondrous success as they're producing oil to return to ritual, to return to the temple, to return to doing the thing that they consecrated and that is who they are. Well, the return to themselves. Once they've done the work, once they've sacrificed and struggled and won, then things line up for them. Then the rest of the universe does its part as well and gives them that breathing space so that once the light is lit in the temple, which doesn't go out, it continues. And so each day that passes, that consecrated flame that continues to burn is a greater miracle. And so we note that there is more light in the sense of more of the miraculous, more of the inexplicable good that can come when we've done our part in the world. With each passing day on Hanukkah, Judaism asks two understandings from us. One is that we are given more than we deserve or expect. The universe is built for good. It's built for us to fix and build it. Look at the modern world. Look at the beauties around you, the things around you that would astonish as vast miracles. People living 300 years ago, never mind 3,000 or 100,000, look at all the good in the world that humans can build. The world was built for us to make of it this astonishing place. But it only happens after we have fought for it, sacrificed for it, consecrated it, built everything that we want. Those are the miracles. The Maccabees fight, and then the Maccabees have miracles. It couldn't have gone the other way. And the longer the good continues, the greater the gift that we are given and the greater our gratitude must be. Gratitude is the heart of it. Don't get used to the good. All life, and certainly all life worth living, is a kind of thanksgiving. All Jewish ritual is founded on that principle. And so why is this important on Hanukkah? These two things combined. Work hard for the miracle because it's a function of hard work, and fight actively against your tendency to take the good for granted. And because you take all the vast good for granted, you descend into despair over the things that are bad, over the things that are wrong and broken. These two ideas, work hard for the miracle and don't take the good for granted, are Hanukkah's basic structure and lessons. On Hanukkah, we are required to publicize the miracle of the burning of the lamp, to light candles where they can be seen from the street, so as to make it public. It's a shared publicity in a shared public space. That's what Chabad does when it lights these candles. That's what the Chabad rabbi was doing when he was lighting a candle on Bandai beach to tell the world there was this miracle of light 2200 years ago. And that makes Hanukkah a vocabulary, a platform for the sages of the Jewish bookshelf to debate the meaning of living publicly. In the Tractate Shabbat of the Talmud, page 21B, it says the sages taught it is a mitzvah to place the Hanukkah lamp at the entrance to one's house, on the outside, so that all can see it. If you live upstairs, you place it at the window adjacent to the public domain so it can be seen from the street. And in a time of danger, the Talmud says, you place it on your own table, and that is sufficient, you can hide the miracle. The mitzvah of publicizing the miracle can become hidden in times of danger, meaning danger for acknowledging or telling the public space that you are a Jew. Judaism has gone through different periods. There were periods of sovereignty of existence in public spaces that were Jewish public spaces. And there were periods when Judaism shrank into the home of exile, when Jewishness became personal because it was dangerous to be Jewish as part of the public space, because the public space belonged to someone else and the Jews were the strangers. What happens in that period of fear? What happens when every ritual has that caveat? In a time of danger? This move from the public to the private is a move from carefree, unhindered, to conditional and anxious. And it's part of the core of how Jews have understood Hanukkah over the centuries. And it's worth talking about Right now, when there won't be Hanukkah celebrations in public that don't feel a little bit dangerous. Tugh Maccabees. They celebrated for eight days with rejoicing in the manner of the festival of Booths, remembering how not long before, during the festival of Booths itself, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals. Therefore, carrying ivy, wreathed wands and beautiful branches and fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to him who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place. They decreed by public edict, ratified by vote, that the whole nation of the Jews should observe these days every year. Year. This is Hanukkah originally as a celebration of homecoming. It's how Jews thought of it when their independence was restored, when despite the wars and the dangers and the imperial machinations around them, they were safe from the kind of destruction, cultural erasure, imperial domination and oppression that Antiochus represented. By the time of the debates of the schools of Hillel and Shammai in the first century ce, Hanukkah is only a memory of that redemption. It's no longer the lived memory of the actual victory, of the actual salvation. And it's a quarter of a millennium later, almost. And Rome now rules the eastern Mediterranean and the temple will soon be destroyed. Or depending on when the actual debate was held between their disciples, it could also be after the temple was already burned down by Titus. The text itself that we have of the Hillel Shammai debate about whether you light the candles going up or light the candles going down is in the Babylonian Talmud, meaning that the debate happened 200 plus years after the actual victory. But the final edited text describing the debate is 500 years after that, or 400 years after that, roughly 700 years after the events of Hanukkah. The Jews of the Hasmonean era could see in Hanukkah a celebration of the overcoming of a great trampling, evil empire, a return from the wilds to a rededicated holy home. But those ideas, those experiences, were beyond the imagination of the sages of Babylon. Seven centuries later, Hanukkah became not a lived memory, but a ritual memory. The military triumph becomes the less important piece to those living after the ultimate reversal of that triumph by a still more powerful empire, namely Rome. And so the part of Hanukkah that takes center stage is the shining of the light from the darkness. It's the shakeup of world affairs that is eventually possible in theory, in this vision of how the world works through courage, through sacrifice, the Miracle inherent in the structure of history that comes when bloodied, exhausted warriors reclaim their own. That becomes the heart of the story. The heart of the story becomes that there will be a salvation, not there was one. And how do you hold on to that idea? You hold on to it by focusing on the light. On the light of faith, on the light of identity, on the light of the reclamation of a home that is still possible even against great empires. It is in the sage's hands that Hanukkah becomes that. Hanukkah expands from a remembrance of a specific victory to a promise made in darker times that there is always light. That section in tract 8, Shabbat, page 21B, begins, My Hanukkah. What is Hanukkah? It literally, that is the beginning of it. And it has to explain what Hanukkah is. Hanukkah is a specific event in a specific context, a military triumph that carved out some measure of Jewish independence in the sort of waning days of the waning decades or centuries of the. Of the Hellenistic world. And Hanukkah is every struggle and every sacrifice and all the light that can come into the world from our own efforts and from our own devotion. This Hanukkah Israeli schoolchildren will sing the famous song by Sarah Levi, Tanay. We have come to banish the darkness. In our hands are light and fire. Each of us is a small light. All of us are a powerful light. Away, darkness, be gone, blackness flee before the light. In the 11th century, I'm really finishing, I promise. The rabbi and poet Bahia Ibn Pakuda, who lived in Zaragoza in Muslim Spain, he wrote a book foundational to the Jewish bookshelf, called Chovotalevot Duties of the Heart. It's one of the key books of Jewish moral thought. In one of its most famous passages, he writes this observation, which I always found very for even a little truth defeats much falsehood, just as a little light dispels much darkness. This is an idea that electrified the Hasidic masters. You see it everywhere in Hasidism, especially in Chabad. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, loved to say, even a little light casts out great darkness. Quoting Bakya IBN friends in the aftermath of a massacre. I'm sorry I've gone on so long in the aftermath of a massacre. Hanukkah teaches us so much. We need some miracles, and it is incumbent on us, not on anybody else, to make them happen. It teaches us that all light is fragile, all flames flicker even the great Hasmonean victory was only for a few generations. But together, in unity and devotion, and a willingness to do things, both that require our sacrifice, the willingness to do the work and also to do it intelligently. To understand the world, to learn the world. That is where the miracles come from. All light is fragile. All flames flicker and threaten to die. And together our light becomes powerful. And the flame lasts much longer than it should. When we bring the light through our struggle, through our toil, the miracles follow. May our light on this sad day, May our light grow each and every day. May our gratitude increase in kind because we can see all the light that surrounds us. And may our days be safe and unafraid. Happy Hanukkah, Sam.