Chanukah for Grown Ups

Rabbi Menachem Creditor from A Year of Torah
The Talmud says the basic obligation is one candle per household for each night. And then it says there are mehadrin, people who want the mitzvah to be more beautiful. They light one candle the first night, two the second night, three the third night, etc. And then there are mehadrin min hamehadrin, people who are fabulously beautiful mitzvah keepers. They light one candle per person each night increasing the light so that the eight night is grand and spectacular.
How wonderful to know that we are not satisfied to simply fulfill an obligation? We are committed not only to answering an immediate need, but also to beatifying this world. We are called to add everything that we can to enhance the splendor and beauty of Channukah.

Rabbi Michael Strassfeld from The Jewish Holidays
I would suggest that Shammai is following his general overriding principle-to tell the truth. The truth is that we live in a world of ever diminishing expectations The moment we are born we begin to die. Each day brings us one day closer to our last day ....For Shammai, truth is the ultimate value...similarly, for Hillel there is a deeper sense of truth at issue here. The deeper truth is that our lives become ever richer and fuller with the passage of time, not increasingly diminished. The light of Hanukkah reminds us of the potential that lies within each moment. The present can be filled with light and that light can increase no matter where we are in the span of our lives. Like life, light can pierce any darkness.

Rabbi Miriam Weisel
Beit Hillel's approach is the reverse. Each day is a recognition of what has occurred: a day of achievement, another day of accomplishment. Or was it another day of frustration, another day of sameness? Whatever we put into it, it is now done, and we can only look back on it.
So why was the position of Bet Hillel adopted? Why do we prefer looking at the reality rather than the potential? Possibly it is because of a second explanation the Talmud gives for Beit Hillel's reasoning: We increase in matters of sanctity, but we do not reduce, ma'alin ba-kodesh ve-ain moridin. We acknowledge the reality, the actuality, the accomplished, the done, we look at this day and understand that it has the possibility to be imbued with kedushah. As Rabbi Harold Schulweis has said, "Kedushah is experienced through realizing the holy (kodesh) locked in the potential (chol)." Inside the potential of each day lies the possibility of bringing kedushah into it. That is what we do by increasing the lights: we increase the holiness that lies waiting each day, in each event, in each moment, in the potential of the chol.

Adapted from Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk
There are two kinds of “righteous” people: one who is truly righteous and one who just dresses like a righteous person in a fur coat. Each of them faces the winter in a different way. One will go out and collect wood for the fire; the other will wrap himself in his fur coat. The one who collects wood lights a fire and invites others to join him. He not only warms himself, but others as well. The one who makes himself cozy in his own heavy coat is secure, but those around him will freeze. The genuinely righteous person is the one who shares his warmth with others.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor from A Year of Torah
Jewish tradition guides us to bringing more light, more and more, to place it in the window because that light is not only for us bit for others as well...we have love and light to share with a world in deep need of illumination. More and more we see how interconnected we can and therefore must be so that society and the world around us can emerge from challenge to a little more air, a little more light.

Rabbi Shefa Gold from The Inner Practice of Chanukah
The story of Chanukah reminds us that even the holiest place within us can become desecrated. We must enter the darkness of our own wounded hearts, survey the damage, clear away the rubble, and then light a candle to rededicate ourselves to holiness, to our own wholeness and connection to the cosmos. It is truly miraculous that a single spark of hope can ignite the radiant fires of passion that illuminate our way forward, even on the darkest night.
As the days grow short and the darkness long, we are invited to enter into the darkness of our own hearts. There, buried beneath the ruble of our disappointments, we find the miraculous spark of our Divinity, the awesome knowledge that we are each created in the image of God. This is the spark that kindles our Festival of Lights. Each night of Chanukah, we light another candle. Each night the light grows brighter, shining its radiance into our won hidden places.
The "Great Miracle" of healing is happening right here within us when we call light into our own places of darkness, when we bring the healing light of compassion into hidden crevices of shame or fear. As we light the flames of Chanukah, may we kindle the flame within that will shine the light of awareness across the true expanse of Soul.

Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz from "Making Meaning of Chanukah Today" (Kolel.org)
The Temple in Jerusalem that the Maccabees rededicated on Chanukah was the Jewish institution par excellence. It was the center of Jewish life in its time. For Judaism to function in the world - to bring meaning into our lives, to bring us closer to God, and to bring the world closer to God's vision of a world of peace and justice - requires Jewish institutions...striving to make the prophetic vision a reality. Pick one Jewish institution that has made a difference in your life...and help with your time or money to rededicate that institution to the service it was founded for.

Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger 1847-1905)
“Especially at this season, when lights were miraculously lit for Israel even though they did not have enough oil, there remains light even now to help us, with the aid of these Hanukkah candles, to find that hidden light within.” The Hanukkah candles are a spiritual symbol; the light of the commandments by which we search out our inner selves. We seek out the hidden divine light within ourselves; the mitzvot are light-seeking candles, instruments given to us to aid us in that search.

From: "The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays" by Rabbi Irving Greenberg
...Pessimists and assimilationists have more than once informed Jew that there is no more oil left to burn. As long as Hanukkah is studied and remembered, Jews will not surrender to the night. The proper response, as Hanukkah teaches, is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle.

David Hartman from Trusting In A New Beginning; Lighting the Surviving Cruse of Oil
1. Jews throughout history loved to retell the story of the tiny cruse of oil, which refused to burn out. In recounting this tale, they indicated their deep hope that the small community of Israel could survive and generate light irrespective of its size and power. Israel's fervent commitment to and trust in its way of life were sufficient reasons to retain hope in the community's future regardless of the empirical conditions of history.
2. The "miracle" of Jewish spiritual survival throughout its history of wandering and oppression may best be described by our people's strength to live without guarantees of success and to focus on how to begin a process without knowledge of how it would end.
Hanukkah lights encourage one to trust human beginnings and to focus one’s passions and efforts on whatever opportunities are available at the present moment. One ought to pour infinite yearnings into even small vessels. The strength to continue and to persevere grows by virtue of the courage to initiate a process by lighting the first flame. Only lamps which are lit may continue to burn beyond their anticipated life span.
3. The eight days of Hanukkah incorporate the miracle of the first day, which signifies the miracle of human courage to begin to build within imperfect human situations...Those who went ahead and kindled the lamp ignored "voices of reason" and they a vailed themselves of the precious opportunities at hand.

A Mystical Message About Chanukah from R’ Zalman Schachter Shalomi z”l
While everything is God and in God, and the whole cosmos is not separate from God, the point that a Temple makes is that there is a concentrated, stronger focus of the quality of Divinity for those who enter there. So while it is true that God is in everything, and everything broadcasts its own quality, a Temple could be understood as a kind of “broadcasting tower” from which a signal goes out to the world.
The carrier wave is a field of blessing, and the message stream is the way in which God would like to see the world be in harmony in order to receive that blessing. There would also be a certain kind of beacon in the broadcast, giving meaning to life and beaming the sense of justice and compassion for the world. In each human being there is a receiver for that broadcast – because Divine Compassion broadcasts on human wavelengths. People who are open to God and want to be open to receive that beacon can in this way recalibrate their moral and ethical life.
Although the First and the Second Temples were destroyed, the teaching is that the Third Temple is already present on a higher and more subtle vibratory scale. The broadcast comes even now from that Temple, is received by some people and, alas, not by others. The beacon to us, as human beings, also invites us to contribute to that broadcast. In the way in which we invest energy we boost the signal strength in public worship and in private prayer, in meditation and then acts of justice and compassion.
We beam these back to the Source of the broadcast...

Mother to Light by Rabbi David Zaslow
Darkness, mother to light,
surrounds, embraces,
nurses the light -
holds each image
in her arms;
lets him be seen.
What energy is to what matters,
darkness is to light.
In darkness
we see stars
light years behind us
in an ever present past.
In light we see
what's near
in an ever present now.
Shammai
teaches us:
embrace the darkness
for a change.

Hannah Arendt, from Men in Dark Times, 1968.
"Dark times," in the broader sense I propose here, are as such not identical with the
monstrosities of this century which indeed are of a horrible novelty. Dark times, in contrast, are not only not new, they are no rarity in history, although they were perhaps unknown in American history, which otherwise has its fair share, past and present, of crime and disaster. That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth— this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.