(RNS) — A thought experiment: Imagine a world where no grain or vegetation has ever grown. People and animals are somehow nourished by breathing the air and eating soil.
Suddenly, a stranger appears and procures a seed, something never seen before in this strange place, and plants it in the ground. The inhabitants look on curiously, regarding the act as no different from burying a stone, and are shocked when, several days later, a sprout pierces the soil where the seed was sown. They are even more flabbergasted to witness its development into a full-fledged plant, bearing fruit — and, even more astonishing — seeds of its own.
A great rabbi, Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892-1953), painted this bizarre panorama, and, as it happens, the conjured scenario has pertinence to Hanukkah.
Rabbi Dessler was illustrating the fundamental Jewish idea that there really is no inherent, objective difference between what we call nature and what we call miraculous. We simply use the former word to refer to that to which we are well accustomed; and the latter, for things we have never before experienced. All there is, in the end, he concludes, is God’s will, expressed most routinely in nature.
The celebrated essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson famously conveyed much the very same idea, when he wrote:
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The star-filled sky, Emerson asked us to realize, is seen as something less than a miracle only — and only — because it appears every night.
Famed physicist Paul Davies put the thought strikingly: “The very notion of physical law,” he wrote, “is a theological one.”
What does all that have to do with Hanukkah?
The holiday, on a simple level, commemorates the Jewish Maccabees’ routing of the Greek Seleucid fighters who sought to impose heathenism on the Jews in the Holy Land. The Jewish fighters recovered the enemy-captured Holy Temple in Jerusalem and restored it to the center of Jewish worship.
Famously, only one vial of undefiled oil for the use of the special Temple candelabra was found in the debris. It was enough to burn for only one day, yet, once kindled, lasted for a full eight, yielding Hanukkah’s observance of eight nights of candle-lighting.
Why, though, is Hanukkah observed for eight days, when the miracle of the oil was really only evident over seven — since there was sufficient recovered oil for one day? It is a question famously posed by the 16th-century codifier of Jewish law, Rabbi Yosef Karo.
One answer, offered by, among others, the late Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, is that one of Hanukkah’s eight days commemorates the miracle of nature itself — the fact that oil can fuel flames to begin with. The “extra” day is an acknowledgment of the Divine essence of nature itself.
The Talmud tells of how the daughter of a famous scholar, Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, realized shortly before the Sabbath that she had accidentally poured vinegar instead of oil into the lamps, and began to panic. Her father reassured her, saying “The One Who commanded oil to burn can command vinegar to burn.”
And that is what happened. None of us likely merit a miracle like vinegar burning, but the story’s message speaks loudly all the same: That oil burns is itself a “miracle,” just one to which we have become accustomed.
Heading into the cold and darkness of what some people might think of as a “God-forsaken” deep winter, the Hanukkah lights remind us that nothing, not even nature, is “forsaken” by God, that divinity is manifest even in the mundane.
(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes widely in Jewish and general media and has a Substack here. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
