A Soulful Journey

" These candles are holy. We are not supposed to use their light for any purpose except seeing them." This is the Hanukkah prayer when lighting candles. This is the height of impracticability.  We are not to us the candles for illumination, cooking, heat or any other purpose.   This  idea goes against everything that conservationists demand.   But this mitzvah, of lighting the Hanukkah candles, must be done for its own sake, only to pronounce and proclaim the miracles of long ago.

The Rabbis learned: When Adam saw the days getting shorter and shorter, he said, ‘woe is me, perhaps it is because I sinned that the world is becoming dark, and will return to chaos and disorder, and this is the death sentence that was decreed upon me from heaven’. He went and sat and fasted and prayed for eight days. When he saw the winter solstice arrive, and the days began getting longer and longer, he said, ‘it is just the way of the world’. He went and made an eight-day holiday.      - Avoda Zara 8a

The motto "where there's a will, there's a way," is a supposition of modern man. We are "blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control.  His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names.  They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, am insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, and, above all, a large array of neuroses."  - Carl Jung This small holiday that we are in the midst of, Hanukka, is a reminder that what is truly great is not what is most valuable but what is most valued.  God is here already.  We do not need to hunt for Him.