Do You Believe in Miracles?
Sermon, Parshat Mikets, Shabbat Hanukkah 5783, Rabbi Sam Cohon
As many of you may know, my dad and I have been doing a virtual Hanukkah Menorah lighting each and every night of Hanukkah on our Beit Simcha Facebook page. We started doing this two years ago, during the pandemic of Coronavirus, and have continued the practice each Hanukkah since then. We enjoy having the opportunity to share this wonderful festival of light and dedication with an online community, and since I have over 100 Hanukkiot—and more each year—there is never a shortage of menorahs to light.
There is nothing like adding light in a time of darkness, singing a few Hanukkah songs, and bringing our love of Judaism to a wider audience. But there is one challenge to it: each day I have to come up with both a couple of songs I haven’t sung already, and an even greater challenge, a story or interesting narrative that tells something about Hanukkah that I haven’t already told. That’s eight days of new material—or, rather, new-old material, since the events that we commemorate took place 2200 years ago. It’s not the easiest of tasks even on a festival as rich in tradition as this one.
Now, you would think that, having done this Facebook broadcasting on Hanukkah for three years now, I would have written down what I spoke about in the past, and I could just recycle the same old stories and historical nuggets eight times. Sadly, I am not always that well-organized. Which means that each evening there is a certain cross between excitement and panic as 5 o’clock grows closer. What exactly am I going to share about Hanukkah today that I didn’t share yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that? What new information can I possibly impart about a holiday we have been celebrating as a people for more than two millennia, since Rome was a republic and public Jewish worship consisted of slaughtering and roasting animals on a stone altar?
Of course, the first night of Hanukkah it’s pretty easy: tell the basic story of the Hasmonean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, and show off a menorah or two. The second night I can talk about the “miracle of the oil”, and how, although it doesn’t show up in any records until the Talmud, some 600 years after the Maccabean rebellion, it has become the prevailing rationale for so much of our celebration of this festival. By the third night I am talking about the different ways Hanukkiot, Hanukkah menorahs are made, and the ways that they have changed and grown more interesting and colorful over the years. By the fourth night I am discussing dreidels, usually, explaining how they illustrate the centrality of learning in Judaism, the teaching to Torah that was banned by the Syrian-Greeks, and how this little game has become a great excuse for fun and games on Hanukkah—even though the original game is pretty, well, lame, and requires spicing up to make it more interesting and challenging. By the fifth night of Hanukkah I’m on to oil, what it meant in the rituals of the Temple, the 7 branches of the original menorah—which just means lamp—and how it indicated God’s presence in the Beit HaMikdash, the holy Temple, both the First and Second Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. By night six I can discuss the word Hanukkah as the source in Hebrew not only of dedication but also Chinuch, education, how pivotal that proved to be in motivating the people of Judea to fight for their right, not to party, but to learn, to grow, to develop as human beings and believing Jews, and why the right to study ideas is at the heart of true religious freedom. On the seventh night? I might be down to discussing Hanukkah gelt, how gift-giving on the holiday developed out of the tradition of giving just a little extra to the local teachers at this time in the Old Country, the Pale of Settlement, when coal was expensive and teachers, then as now, were badly paid.
By the eighth night I’m probably at the point where I need to talk about how to clean wax off of menorahs and get grease out of aprons after Hanukkah is over—or why my menorah collection has grown to unreasonable numbers.
Or maybe I’ll just talk about miracles, since we claim that this is a great holiday of miracles, when the few defeated the many, the weak defeated the strong, the believers beat the idolators. Nes Gadol Haya Sham, we say, a great miracle happened there, in Judea, in Israel long ago.
Which brings me to the actual subject of tonight’s Hanukkah and Mikets sermon…
It is fascinating that the central prayer we say on Hanukkah, al hanisim, praises God for the miracles that were wrought for our ancestors in those days long ago. In truth, those miracles were really a simple matter of a more deeply committed people fighting for their homes and their beliefs and culture against a larger, numerically stronger enemy that had better military equipment.
You know: what we would call a guerilla war today. Only it was the Maccabees, the Hasmonean Jews who invented that idea, or at least who were, so far as we know, the first successful practitioners of that mode of battle and warfare. Of course, there are now many examples of such successful wars taking place in history: it might have been the Maccabean Jews who started it, but it has happened again and again since then, an occupying power forced out by the passionate defense of a native people. It happened, eventually, right here in America back in the American revolution; it happened to America in Vietnam, for that matter; it happened in Israel in 1948, nearly 75 years ago, and it appears to be happening in Ukraine now. There are lots and lots more examples.
These guerilla wars, while they don’t always succeed, are important. But scarcely miraculous, are they? We know that they can work if enough members of the conquered people are unhappy enough to rebel with force and commitment. That’s simply human solidarity in the face of brutal oppression, which is powerful and heartening but necessarily miraculous. No, the miracle for the Maccabees may not have been the military victory, but the fact that enough Jews got along well enough, and agreed with each other enough, to fight long enough to expel the Syrian Greeks. How often does that happen?
Or perhaps the Hanukkah miracle is that a strange idea, the notion that there is only one true God, and we have the right to worship that God as we see fit, the fact that incredible idea survived in spite of powerful oppression. Because lots of great truths can be suppressed when enough effort is exerted against them.
One thing is certain: if the leaders of the Maccabean revolt—Mattathias, Judah, Jonathan, and the rest—hadn’t seized the opportunity when it presented itself, if they hadn’t used the very geography of Israel to their military advantage, if the people hadn’t been ready to rebel, and yes, if the Romans hadn’t weakened the Seleucid Empire by defeating them in war. Perhaps miracles only work when people are ready to take advantage of them.
You know, we always celebrate Hanukkah around the time of year when we chant the Torah portion of Mikets, which happened to be my daughter Cipora’s bat mitzvah portion. It is a very long portion, by the way, and actually has more sentences in it than any other weekly Torah portion—and since my daughter chanted the whole portion, she has never stopped reminding me of that fact. Mikets, as Ed has told you so beautifully, is about Joseph, and this week we get the heart of the extraordinary Joseph narrative that fills the last four weekly Torah portions in Genesis. And it is, in its own way, a true miracle story, too. As we begin the story, Joseph is at the lowest point of his life, and it would be the lowest point of nearly anyone’s life. Betrayed into slavery by his brothers, betrayed by his owner’s wife into prison, he is forgotten even by the fellow prisoner he has helped.
But then the miracles start to happen. From Joseph’s perspective, he is dragged out of prison, cleaned up, brought to Pharaoh, and after he interprets a couple of dreams he is catapulted to the heights of power and fame. From the bottom he shoots to the very top.
Now that’s truly a miracle. One moment you are an inmate, with perhaps a death sentence to be handed down soon. And just a few moments later, literally less than a chapter of Torah, you are the second most powerful man in the country, and perhaps the world.
Of course, even this miracle story wouldn’t have happened if Joseph, an abandoned Hebrew inmate, hadn’t been ready to seize his opportunity and rise to the occasion. He did so magnificently, was rewarded for it, and we call it, well, a miracle.
I’m not saying miracles don’t ever occur. But surely the lesson of both Hanukkah and the Joseph story is that it is best not to count on miracles, but simply to be ready to take advantage of them if they do actually occur.
What was it that David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said long ago about miracles? “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” But you also must be ready to take advantage of them.
In our own way, our Congregation Beit Simcha and its success have been a kind of miracle—but a miracle made possible because people were ready to work and show dedication and make what otherwise would have been impossible into reality.
That is, above all, the great Jewish lesson. May it continue to be true for each of you, for our congregation, and for our people, on this holiday, and always.