Let There Be Light
A Drash for Chanukah
29 November 2021
25 Kislev 5782
IN THE BEGINNING, God created light. God said, “Y’hi or” — let there be light; va-y’hi or — and there was light.¹ God saw that the light was good,² and He gathered the light into the two great lamps of heaven: the greater lamp to rule the day and the lesser lamp to rule the night, to divide the day from the night, and to give light upon the earth, and to serve as signs for seasons and days and years.³
Each time we kindle a flame for our hearths and our lamps and our candles, we recapture a tiny fragment of the light that God made in the beginning. In our houses of worship, we signify the presence of God with a ner tamid, an everlasting light, which shines unceasingly over the ark of the Torah. This earthly light is a likeness of God’s light, as each of us is a tzelem Elohim, a likeness of God.⁴ But each is only a likeness. For the flame of heaven, like the life of the world, is eternal and self-sustaining. But the flame of earth, like the life of our bodies, must be fed with fuel; it consumes the fuel as it burns; and when the fuel is exhausted, the flame dies.
In all our history, only a few favored individuals have been privileged to look directly upon God’s eternal light. It appeared to Abraham in the burning torch that passed between the pieces of his offering on the night when God established his Covenant with him.⁵ Moses saw it in the miraculous bush, which burned with fire but was not consumed⁶ (and which was also the etz chaim, the tree of eternal life in the center of the Garden⁷). For most of us, there is only the earthly flame, showing us the image of the eternal within the limitations of time, as we meet in each other the image of God in mortal flesh.
And this is the meaning of the Chanukah miracle that we commemorate this week. Antiochus of Syria thought that he could extinguish the eternal light of the God of Israel, but it was only a lamp of oil that he doused. When our fathers recaptured and prepared to rededicate the Temple (Chanukah means “dedication”), the first order of business was, naturally, to rekindle the ner tamid. But the available supply of oil was not sufficient to fuel the lamp until more could be prepared. The nes gadol she-hayah sham — the great miracle that happened there — was that the earthly flame of the oil lamp transformed itself into the true light of God, the light of the bush that burns but does not consume. For seven days, the period of one Shabbat, the pure radiance of the Beginning shone forth from the lamp. On the eighth day, when fresh supplies of oil had been prepared, it turned back into an earthly flame and consumed the one day’s worth of oil. Remember, as you light your candles and say your blessings this week, that though their flame is the flame of earth, consuming the tallow and cotton of the earthly candles, their light is the light of heaven, which shines through the flames as it shone for Moses in the wondrous bush.
Barukh ata Adonai, me’ir la-aretz — Blessed art thou, O Lord, who illuminate the world.
¹Genesis 1:3
²Genesis 1:4
³Genesis 1:14–16
⁴Genesis 1:27
⁵Genesis 15:17
⁶Exodus 3:2
⁷Genesis 2:9
***************************************************************
“Let There Be Light” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
