Rabbi Yair Kobernick

The blessing we say in Havdalah (the prayer that marks the end of Shabbat or a Holiday) is: "Blessed are You, Hashem our God....who separates between holy and secular, between LIGHT and DARKNESS...." On the festival of lights, better known as Chanukah, we also get into this light and darkness thing. What's it all about?

4000 years ago, give or take a day, there was a great darkness. It was called night. It wasn't particularly unusual, and therefore not worth talking about. However, there was another type of darkness that is worth talking about....a spiritual darkness. As in a physical darkness, (i.e. night) people are unable to recognize the physical world around them...so, in a spiritual darkness people fail to recognize God.*

Teen years are exciting, full of exploration. But there are also cloudy days and dark nights. Times of confusion when it wouldn't hurt to have a bit more clarity and direction to shed some light.

Years ago in the streets of Athens walked a man in the middle of the day carrying a torch. "Why are you carrying a torch in broad daylight," the people would ask him. "I am searching for Man" came his response. This is how one of the great Greek philosophers searched for the meaning of life and mankind. At the same time, not too far away in Jerusalem, the people had no reason to ask this question. There, they knew the meaning of life. They knew that mankind had a purpose in life.

Every Saturday night we mention the difference between light and darkness. So too on Chanukah we light candles for 8 nights to recall the miracles of the Jews who overcame the darkness that the Greeks wanted to spread in the world. These lights remind us of the clarity that we as Jews have about life.

It's worthwhile knowing what Mark Twain wrote concerning the Jews: "The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was..... All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

The Greek philosophers were way off. Mark Twain was getting close. The Jew has been right on from the very beginning.

There is a prayer that we insert into our regular prayers during the week of Chanukah. It is called Al HaNisim, which means: For the Miracles. This prayer basically says the entire story of Chanukah in short and that eight days were established to express thanks and praise to God for the miracles that were performed for us.

Looking back on our history it's not hard to look at the Jews as one big miracle. Empires rose and fell but the Jew remains. Throughout history the Jew has resisted the darkness that each generation has offered. For the Jew, history was an uphill battle. It didn't matter if the hills were in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, Germany during the Holocaust, Russia or wherever. The story has been the same all along. For all of these miracles we continue to express praise and thanks to God.

Can you think of any special occurance in your life to thank God for?

*This paragraph was taken from: A CARTOON EXPOSITION on Mark Twain's Concerning The Jews, by R. Rohinsky.