Do You Believe in Miracles?

Vayigash 5772
December 31, 2011

For those of you who know me well, you know that I have am a true sports fan. Watching and/or participating in sports is something that I have loved and luckily excelled in since I was kid. I love the camaraderie that is formed on a team and the passion one can have as they root uncontrollably for their home team. I love the fact that an underdog can win, that the unexpected routinely occurs, or as my grandfather told me a million times growing up “on any given day, anything can happen, that is why you have to play the game.”

I was born in November of 1980 and while I was but a glimmer in my parents eye at the time, I have always felt a fondness for the Winter Olympic Games which took place the preceding February. You see it was February 22nd 1980 and the United States Hockey Team was playing Russia in the Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. The game was seen by many as a show down between the two superpowers of the time. The mighty Russian Red Army versus the United States. The Russians were heavily favored to win going into the semi-final game, having won Gold the four previous Olympics. Regardless of the odds or the predictions that were made, the game needed to be decided on the ice. With 11 seconds left in the game, Al Michaels, the TV color man calling the game could not believe that the Americans were actually winning, and made what would be his most famous call: “Eleven seconds, you’ve got ten seconds, the countdown going on right now! … Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles?” And while the Americans did win, and the game has been over for more than 30 years, the question still stands:

“Do you believe in miracles?”

While this may seem like a simple question, it is one that causes many people, including myself, great difficulty in answering. This quasi-rhetorical question asked by Michaels back in 1980 is especially fitting now due to the holiday we are currently celebrating, a holiday where we commemorate a miracle that occurred over 2000 years ago.

From a religious standpoint Hanukkah is a unique holiday. For many Jews this unique nature is derived from the fact that as children we received gifts. I imagine if every Jewish holiday involved gift giving we would all be broke, yet quite possibly living amongst a much more observant crowd. Nevertheless, from a religious and historical standpoint Hanukkah is special in that there is no mention of the holiday anywhere in the Bible and while it was common for the Rabbis to make additions to already held practices, Hanukkah was solely their invention. There was something, dare I say miraculous, that happened back in the 2nd century BCE that they believed was worthy of a yearly, 8 day celebration.

The Talmud in Tractate Shabbat in discussing Hanukkah says the following:

What is [the reason of] Hanukkah? For our Rabbis taught: On the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev the eight days of Hanukkah commence… For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in the Temple, and when the Hasmonean dynasty (the Maccabees) prevailed against and defeated them, they searched but found only one flask of oil which was set aside with the seal of the High Priest, and which only contained oil for one day’s lighting; yet a miracle took place and they lit [the lamp] for eight days. The following year these [days] were established as a Festival with [the recital of] Hallel and thanksgiving. (Shabbat 21b)

So in short the miracle of Hanukkah was that the oil lasted 8 days, just enough time for more oil to be retrieved so that the flame in the Temple could continue to stay lit. And the manifestation of how we observe this miracle today is by lighting the Hanukiyah. Simple enough!

Yet it is important to point out that most holidays are not miracle specific. Yes, the story of Passover includes the miracle of the splitting of the sea, but our reasons for celebrating this holiday exceed this one aspect. The Israelites were brought from slavery to freedom and that is the essence of the holiday for us today. Similarly, on Shavuot we celebrate Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah. Yes, this was a miraculous event, however we observe this holiday based on the giving of the content of the Torah, not for the exact manner in which it was given. Whereas with Chanukah, the miracle was that the oil lasted 8 days, and our observance is based on recreating that same miracle or symbolism in our homes on a yearly basis. 

Churchill said that “History is written by the victors,” and since the Rabbis were the ones in charge, they put God, and the miracle that God provided the oil, at the center of the holiday. Its makes perfect sense, the Rabbis wanted to commemorate the rededication of the temple and instead of basing this yearly commemoration on a military victory over Hellenization, they based it on the miracle of the oil lasting 8 days. However, as with most holidays there are additions or changes to our daily liturgy, the addition of Al Hanisim, (which we just recited moments ago) is a perfect example of one of those additions. Yet if you read Al Hanisim the miraculous nature of the oil, while present, takes a back seat to thanking God for watching over Matisiyahu ben Yochanan, the Hasmonean Kohen Gadol. We are thanking God for the same things Jews have thanked God for since the beginning of time: allowing the Jews to survive, to overcome, and to prevail another day.

Yet what was that battle that takes the forefront of Al Hanisim? It is important to understand what was going in and around Judea in the 2nd century BCE. It was a time of great change as the outgoing leader, Alexander the Great, who had started a policy of pushing Hellenization within Judea had died. His successor was Antiochus IV, and while Alexander the Great may have been a more passive pursuer of Hellenization, Antiochus was much more overt in both his goals and in his policies that were put in place to achieve them. For many Jews the idea of becoming more like the majority culture appeared to be the right path. While for others, the prohibitions against sacrifice, circumcision, and Shabbat observance (to name but a few) was too much of a concession to make, just to fit in. And as we have learned time and time again, it was the Maccabees led by Matisiyahu and his son Yehudah, along with his brothers that led a revolt against Hellenization. I am careful not to say that the Maccabees led a revolt against the Selucid Empire because there is a wealth of scholarship that points to the fact that the Maccabees main enemy may have been the assimilated Jews and not the empire that was trying to integrate them. 

In the end the fight that took place was over the topic of assimilation. The Hellenized Syrians wanted their subjects to conform to the majority’s culture and religion. In short, they wanted a common thread amongst all of their citizens, which could be found in a nationalistic identity. And for many Jews of the time, the idea of giving up their identity, as Jews, to become more and more like the prevailing culture was appealing. Yet there were those, who could have been seen at the time, and through the lens of history, as zealots who said, “enough is enough.” And so it was this hard-line group that declared that their Jewish identity would always come before any national interest. Thankfully, it was this group that won the day.

Interestingly (and dare I say conveniently) our Parsha this week Vayigash also deals with assimilation, albeit in a different way. To bring you up to speed with where we are in the story, Joseph has already been sold into slavery by his brothers and through this action the setting of the story moves from Canaan to Egypt where through a series of events Joseph becomes a pillar in Pharaoh’s government. Joseph, as I see it, embraced Egyptian culture to take over his life, and for good reason. He had taken an Egyptian wife who gave birth to two sons. The first he named; Manasseh, meaning: “God has caused me to forget all my toil and all my father’s house,” perhaps telling us that Joseph has moved on. We are told that even when his brothers came to Egypt asking for food they did not recognize him. We are to infer from Rashi that this is because Joseph made himself into a stranger and spoke harshly to them, yet while that understanding is certainly plausible, it seems just as tenable that Joseph had changed. He was older, he was dressed differently, and in a role that his brothers could never imagine he would be holding. I believe that the brothers did not recognize Joseph because he had assimilated into Egyptian culture and life. The paradigm of Joseph when it comes to the topic of assimilation is, in many ways the antithesis to the Hanukkah story. 

The Maccabees wanted nothing to do with assimilating into Greek culture. They wanted to be wholly different, I assume, because any acceptance of, or integration into, a foreign society would mean that you are giving up part of your own uniqueness. On the other hand you have the paradigm of Joseph. An individual who moved on from his past life, for good reason, and for better or worse integrated into Egyptian society. While it could be easy to look back at these two periods in history and come away saying that the common bond is that the Jewish people survived and eventually prospered, it would not do justice to the lesson that these two periods of history can and should light up for us about the time we live in today and the role we play within the Jewish world and society at large. It is sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what a certain time period in Jewish History would have looked like, I believe that in a much less violent, yet no less passionate way, the assimilation that Joseph faced in Egypt and the Maccabees faced in the 2nd century BCE is that same fight we are fighting today and they give us two different templates for which to model our response.

From the Maccabees we see the beauty of an unbridled devotion to Judaism. The realization that our Jewish national interests should be seen as equal to, or even more important that our national secular interests. The paradigm of the Maccabees teaches us that it’s ok to set up lines in the sand and say, “for me, for my community this is unacceptable.” They teach us that even a small group of devoted individuals can change the course of history. And yet while there is so much to learn from their example, we quickly realize they may have lost sight of the fact that what has made Judaism so unique throughout history is its ability to change, to adapt and to integrate into every culture and/or society that it has ever met.

From Joseph we learn that becoming part of our surrounding culture is wholly acceptable. He was able to live his life as an active member of Egyptian culture, while not loosing his Jewish roots. While Joseph may not have seen the advantage of being outwardly Jewish, he embraced the fact that he could attain a level of power and prominence in a society that was so very different from his own.

I asked before “Do you believe in Miracles” because the holiday we have been celebrating for the past 8 days is all about miracles. Yet while the rabbis find the rationale for this holiday to be that the oil lasted for 8 days, I happed to understand this miracle a little differently, which is to say that I think the miracle is that the oil was refilled, replenished and reignited. The fact that it lasted 8 days is fantastic, but whether it took 3 days or 8, the point was that it did not go out and more oil was brought so that the flame never ceased to exist in the Temple. A flame is a powerful symbol. Light wakes you up, it guides you in the dark, and it is our charge in the world, to be a light unto the nations! A light that can be seem from our windows expresses our uniqueness to the outside world. Furthermore, by rekindling the Chanukiah each night this past week we have been reestablishing the miracle that happened in the Beit Hamikdash in our own homes.

From the time I started rabbinical school and even before I have taken part in or simply been in the presence of any number of conversations about how Conservative Judaism holds the middle ground within denominational Judaism. I have listened to people discuss how defining ourselves as the “middle” is problematic because it does not define ourselves by what makes us unique, rather by the space we make up between two or three other unique denominations. Yet, when we look back at examples presented by Joseph and the Maccabees the middle doesn’t seem so bad. The middle, I would like to offer is somewhere between the paradigm of Joseph and the actions of the Maccabees. It is living as Jews in a non-Jewish world and being a vital part of both communities. I realize that “Tradition & Change” may no longer be the watchwords of our modern movement, yet their meanings still ring true. For myself there is no greater lesson from this week’s parsha and the holiday we are celebrating than to realize that we must always be mindful of our tradition yet cognizant of the time we live in and the people we live amongst. It is not an easy task, yet it is a noble one, and it is one that I look forward to tackling together.