Why do we light these candles every year? you ask me, my son.
Why do we go on repeating this ritual every year and every day of this festival we insist that a new flame shall dance in our homes?
My child, Hanukkah is not only a beautiful story.
When the Maccabees defetaed the enemy they did not go around the streets with their swords, as all other nations used to do. They had more important things in their mind.
They ran to the Beth Hamikdash, the sanctuary in Jerusalem, with one main goal. To rekindle the menorah, the seven branched candelabra. They did not organize parties or massive celebrations, but they dedicated all their time looking for a sealed, still pure, oil flask. All they wanted was to bring back to life with the outmost pureness, the light that for years had been lighting from Jerusalem, the whole world.
They found a sealed flask, but it was only one.
And this little flask resisted with its own strenghts against winds, oxygen and the laws of nature and it went on dancing and lighting for eight uninterrupted days.
We Jews are used to walk in the dark. Every step we undertake there is an obstacle, a challenge, an enemy, to wait for us.
And yet nothing could make us ever think ‘this is the end. I will surrender’.
My little child, we did not come to this world for observing in a passive way what is going on.
Our soul was not detached from the Divine throne to suffer events without shouting back.
G-d cared to blow inside us His deep essence for only one reason. Because we can.
Everyone of us is that flask, everyone has inside himself that strenght to resist, the power to change.
We are all able to overwhelm ourselves and the world that surrounds us with positivity and absolute light.
My son, Hanukkah is Jewish history that repeats itself, again and again.
It’s the story of a girl who just lost a few weeks ago her father and brother in a terror attack and did not want to surrender to our enemies and their plans.
We, Jews, do not give evil a break.
And from the last, weakest ray of light, from the last drop of faith that survives in every human soul, we kindle a new fire, bigger and stronger than before.
‘Do not joy my enemy, because I fell down but I got up’, Micha the prophet said and the Israeli girl, who was ready to get married when two days before the wedding she had to bury her father and brother, this girl wanted this sentence printed on her new postponed wedding invitation.
Remember my son.
We, Jewish nation, blind darkness with endless light.
Hanukkah sameach
Gheula Canarutto Nemni