Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Spiritual Insights into Chanukah - Illuminating the Light of our Soul

[Music] and i hope that this holiday of hanukkah should be a source of light and joy and closeness to hashem we have broke hashem once again very generous sponsorships for this year uh first uh lili neshama binyamin israel and halevi a young courageous uh man that we were praying for for quite a long time and uh lizzareno uh he succumbed but hashem his parents are here and we want to welcome them and we hope to see you very very often only for happy occasions and and but all the learning and all of the sponsorships and all of the torant's filas should be the ili neshama of binyamin israel in addition this week and next week's classes are sponsored by river fryim and naomi finkelstein and hillel and fremi danziger lizet nishmas their father harav moshe official ben rob mikhail rabbi phillip finkelstein whose first your side is sixth of tavis i do have to say a few words about this i grew up in hartford connecticut and uh rabbi finkelstein's equino luvraka was a person that was makair of me as well as many many other people so i have a very very close relationship to him and his whole family and really anything i do as a large part because of the care and the love and the concern that he showed me and again many many other people in the small town of hartford connecticut so i'm very very happy to give a shirley nishmato as well and refuama to all of those who are ill whether it's covet related non-covet related whether it's inoculated or not inoculated and those who are broke hashem healthy should remain healthy and in a good in a good state we're continuing hanukkah so we kind of moved away from the parsha a little bit for these two weeks and if you remember i don't want to repeat too much of the old share because i want to say something new but if you remember one of the things that was developed last week is that the holiday of chanukah underwent an evolution and a change of emphasis in the passage of time if you look for example in the book of maccabees safer march which is the earliest chronicle of the chanukah story you will see that the hanukkah celebration was enacted to commemorate a victory over the greeks a victory over the ivanim and a rededication of the basal mikdash and the eight days of chanukah was not because of the miraculous burning of the oil but because the dedication of the mikdash was an eight-day dedication ceremony similar to the dedication of the mishkan in the torah which was an eight-day dedication ceremony so maccabees one ties the eight days of hanukkah to khanukah sabbah like the word chanukah means that the dedication of the basa mikdash maccabees ii gives even another reason that's kind of a strange reason that the eight days of hanukkah correspond to a makeup for sukas that had not been observed that that year and uh sukis is it was it's seven days but then there's shimini series so circus is essentially eight days of of observances and in fact the book of the maccabees indicates that they even took lula vanessa in those early years of hanukkah which is a minute that obviously did not become part of the halachic practice so the common denominator between maccabees 1 and maccabees 2 is neither attributes the holiday of hanukkah to the miracle of the jar of oil that should only have lasted one day and burnt for eight days the first mention of hanukkah being connected to the pakha sheman is in a source that is much later than the book of the maccabees and this is the book that is called megillah tanet which is a pre-mission it's written around 100 of the common era which describes the various festive days that you're not allowed to fast because there are days of joy and it mentions hanukkah as being eight days of joy and it connects the eight days to the miracle of the oil that burns uh for eight days when it should have been seven days now keep in mind that the hanukkah story happened the chanukah tobias happens again the dates are all approximate here before the common era megillah tainic was written around the year 100 of the common era so between the story of hanukkah and its recordation in mcgill atanit is actually 265 years almost 300 years depending on the accountant so the pacha shemin becoming the dominant reason for hanukkah was a relatively later development and i suggested last week again it's not my first other people have said it that there's a hanukkah version one and a hanukkah version two and chanukah got redefined in some ways chanukah version one was about military victory coupled with dedication of the basa mikash albeit for spiritual reasons i'm not suggesting it was a celebration of independence like the american revolution or yom mahatma it was a religious war to be sure to keep the torah but it was a celebration of that victory coupled with dedication of the temple but around uh by by the time of mcgill tynett which is uh 265 years later it got redefined as a spiritual holiday connected to the miracle of the oil and one reason might be because when we were under roman domination uh chanukah was very dangerous it was a very dangerous holiday because we're lighting our candles and the romans asked why are you lighting your candles so what are you going to say well we are celebrating the overthrow of foreign domination of eric israel doesn't sound so good and therefore chanukah acquired a different emphasis now again please understand me i am not saying god forbid what some secular people say that the miracle of the oil was a made-up story absolutely not the miracle of the oil happened but it wasn't the reason for the holiday of hanukkah it became the reason later and the truth of the matter is morale also says it's a governor precious that we don't make a holiday because of a miracle of the oil we make a holiday because ami israel was saved from an enemy so the morale himself says that chanukah is not because of the miracle of the oil it is because of the victory over yavan and the dedication of the base of mikdash and by the way this itself is a beautiful answer to the famous famous question of yosef cairo and that is if chanukah is commemorating the miracle of the oil that burnt eight days it should only be a seven day holiday because there was enough oil for one day now i have to tell you i had mentioned this question last week and i had said there are 250 answers somebody sent me a book that came out recently that has one thousand answers so that's gonna i think have the world's record for a while uh i'm increasing it by 400 percent uh so there are gazillions of answers so many answers but according to maccabees you know according to chanukah version 1 hanukkah version 2 it's actually not a question at all because the eight days of chanukah it was were not because of the eight days of the candles the eight days of chanukah was because the dead either because of a make up for circus which is eight days including shimini at sarat or because the dedication of the bay samik dish was an eight day dedication ceremony similar to what it was in the days of moshe it's a very simple answer to yosef kairos very very very famous question okay so that's kind of where we were at the idea that chanukah underwent a redefinition of what ideas of chanaka you're emphasizing in other words the idea is that chanukah has many different things coming together there is the dedication of the temple there is the military victory against the oven there's the re-establishment of the ability to serve hashem there is the miracle of the pachacemen right all of these come together but at different times in history sometimes the holiday emphasizes one aspect and sometimes it emphasizes another aspect they're not contradictory but these are different themes that come to the forefront some themes recede some things come forward hashem today we're able to incorporate all of these different themes and think about all of these different meanings and in fact i want to point out that the rambam even says that the holiday of chanukah is a celebration of jewish sovereignty he doesn't even connect it necessarily to religious meanings i mean i i believe that's a very very good source for halal and yamato says that jewish sovereignty returned to the jewish people that is a reason for for for a holiday okay so what i want to do now is i want to uh look at the gemara in massachusetts remember that chanukah is not discussed that much in the talmud but the sugya of chanukah are a few pages in masaka shabbas now you may ask what is it doing in masaka shabbas the answer is that the second chapter of masaka shabbas talks about shabbos candles that's by mahmud lincoln that many people say friday night and in the nature of the gemara that we go with association oh what you're talking about jabba's candles let's talk about hanukkah candles and then it gives you the story of hanukkah that's the that's the association and the like so the gemara mentions a very interesting thing there are three different ways of observing the mitzvah of chanukah lighting three different ways there is basic there is enhanced and they're super enhanced basic you probably have never met anybody that just does basic but basic if you're really stuck with candles all you have to do is light one candle not counting the shamans here but one candle every night one candle night one two three and even on the eighth night one candle and you are yod say the mitzvah ner ishubeito one candle for my entire family that's basic and your yo so you make a bracha you make a buck on it but then there's a level called mahadrin if i wanna do the mitzvah in a more beautiful way so then i liked one candle still not what we do for every member of my family that would mean let's assume i have a family of six including me right so it's my wife and and four children so i would light six candles the first night and i would light six candles second third and even the eighth night that's still not familiar to us that's called mahadrin but then there's a super duper level it sounds like restaurant is you want to do things in the most beautiful way so that is the famous mahloka special in basilal in which you light according to the days of hanukkah and beshamai says start with eight and go down bass hillel says start with one and go up it's interesting you know sometimes you might say i'm not such a sonic i don't have to do all of the beautiful hummers i do basic when it comes to hanukkah everybody is a super duper sonic right you didn't realize that when you listened to the maneuver tonight you weren't just doing the basic mitzvah you are mahadran mina mahadrin the highest level right hanukkah brings out the best in people right we do things at the highest level now interesting maklocus if i'm doing things at the highest level do i also incorporate the middle level by that i mean the following the middle level was you light for every member of your family so let's say i'm doing number of days does that just mean one menorah number of days in other words that's a separate or does it mean number of days and i incorporate middle level for every member of my family again i don't want to get into the technicalities but it is a much locus between raviosafe cairo and the rama which means it's a mahlokas within ashkenazim and svardim because svardim follow raviosefcaru according to the shokanarak rivosev cairo if you are doing the highest level you don't light a separate menorah for each member of your family you only like one menorah so the minute of svargin except for moroccan spartan which followed the rama very often but the standard meaning of svardim is that if i have a family and i'm swardy we only light one menorah and that covers everybody because the third level of days does not include the level of separate lighting for each member of the family the rama on the other hand says that the minute of ashkenazim is that if you're doing the highest level you also incorporate the middle level so if i'm lighting the number of days i also have a separate menorah for every member of my family that they like not not that i like that they like now even in the ramada there are many many for example according to the rama should a husband and wife light separate menorahs most people do not do that most people a husband and wife have only one menorah because ishta kagufa husband and wife are like one person but there are some opinions that even say husband and wife should lie separately uh the male children as soon as it's safe for them to light even if they're not bar mitzvahs should indeed have their own menorahs that is actually the case for ashkenazim whether that's true for the women is yet another maklocus because some say women and men are exactly the same for hanukkah therefore women should like their own menorahs others have a minute that the girls do not like their separate menorah so again almost whatever you do you will have a source but remember this is a mahlokas within the ashkenazic tradition amongst fargim there's no shiloh because there's only one menorah that's going to be lit but without getting into all of the halachic details the one thing you see is that on hanukkah there's an extraordinary extraordinary emphasis on the notion of hidur beautifying a mitzvah multiple levels of beautification now it's true that the phrase hid or mitzvah to beautify a mitzvah is not limited to hanukkah in fact we are told every single mitzvah should be done in a beautiful manner get a nice tallest fill in esrog all of these things and yet we see that by hanukkah it's not simply a general hebrew mitzvah mashahu miyukhad there is something special and unique in hebrew mitzvoth hanukkah in fact i'll prove it to you mathematically arithmetically and that is the halal actually discusses how much money do you have to pay for heat or mitzvah meaning let's imagine i could get a kosher esrog that's not so beautiful but it's kosher for x amount of dollars but if i want a beautiful s rogue i got to pay more money how much more money do i have to pay for hedera mitzvah so the gemara says you have to add up to a third by that we mean the following if i could get a kosher s-rope for 40. i have a good memory uh so i have to pay up to 60 meaning 20 extra dollars which is one-third of 60 for a heater so uh if i could get a kosher for 40 and i can get a beautiful one for 60 i got to pay up to 60. but if in order to get a beautiful one i have to pay 65 or 70 i am hilariously not obligated to go more than a third of the final price for heater mitzvah now for chanukah now granted candles aren't very expensive but you see that for hanukkah i'm not working with that calculation because if the basic mitzvah could be that i could light one candle every night that's a total of eight candles and instead i'm lighting uh kaminion hayamim i'm lighting 36 candles so i'm going much more than a third i'm going like uh you know many many times over that and if i'm writing for every one of the members of my household even more than that in others i understand that candles aren't expensive i'm not suggesting it's going to break your bank but all i'm saying is under the basic mathematics of peter mitzvah hanukkah is creating a much greater obligation of hidden mitzvah than you would have in any other mitzvah so i go back to my original point that hanukkah is unique in its emphasis on hidur on beauty and why is that so why is chanukah so connected to the concept of hidur mitzvah so i'm going to give you three answers for this the first answer goes all the way back to noah right after the flood noah came out of the ark and you'll recall that noah planted a vineyard and noah drank wine and noah got drunk and again you have to understand what was going on many understand that noah was profoundly depressed he comes out of the tava he sees a world that is desolate a world that is destroyed a world in which he and his family are the only survivors and you can imagine on one hand there's a tremendous kindness of god that he was able to come back to the world on the other hand you can imagine that's a bit overwhelming and a bit discouraging so he got drunk he took wine and to try to escape the miseries but in the course of his drinking his nakedness was exposed and you'll remember that ham you know looked at it and he called over his brothers according to them he did something worse he castrated okay but but even just looking at the sukim he called over his brothers and his brothers had honor for their father and they had a blanket and they walked backwards and they covered up his nakedness and because of this noah gave bracha to yephis in particular and he said the following yaf delhi kim leefest the ishgen bial hashem this is a biblical pun yaft elokim liefus hashem should give you hashem should give beauty to yfs and he will dwell in the tense of shame now in english that sounds very bad the tense of shame but shame is a person and they're dwelled in a sense of shame the son of noah refers offers a very very profound interpretation of this passage what is the bracha god gives beauty to jeffers and he dwells in the tent of shem and that is shame and jeffers represent the two fundamental missions of humanity kham is a bit excluded from his curse some represents uh evil but shame and yes represent positive forces the fs represents bringing beauty into the world now remember yephs's descendant was yavan the founder of the greek nation so the legacy of yevez went over to yavan and greek culture had a great great emphasis on beauty in all of its manifestations there is the beauty of sculpture there is the beauty of art the beauty of literature drama plays poetry music although we don't really have such a record of greek music the notation system didn't exist but we are told it was greek music drama the beauty of philosophy and mathematics which is the elegance of science it was an extraordinarily beautiful culture beauty that was the mission of yephes to create yofi the mission of shem is ethical monotheism to introduce hashem into the world a sense of morality a sense of submission a sense of subservience to a higher morality and to a higher calling what noah is saying in his bracha is that the kayak of jeffers to create beauty is a beautiful and good thing when it is subordinate it is dwelling within the tents of shem submission to god and ethical monotheism when you separate it from god then it leads to hubris arrogance and ultimately something very very destructive you see so our first three sees that in we actually see an affirmation of the beauties of literature in art and drama and music and poetry and science and mathematics when they are subordinated to the service of god and when they're separated from the service of god they become evil and destructive so now let's go back to the story of chanukah the story of chanukah is a war against what yavan represented and hanukkah is the victory over yemen but the vic now yeoven represents yoffi but victory over yavan doesn't mean destroying the beauty of yemen but it means appropriating it capturing it and using it for higher ends that's why hanukkah has such an emphasis on the idea of hedor hider means beauty because beauty is what we would associate with the oven and chanukah is the victory over the oven but the victory over yavan is not a disparagement of yafi but it's a recapturing of yafi so it should dwell in the tents of shem that's an important idea now again you understand ref hirsch is writing is interpreting these verses in light of his own philosophy refers to his philosophy uh was called by himself torah in derek in other words that you tai you take worldly culture and you integrate it into your religious world view as opposed to kind of a ghettoization in which you reject everything from the worldly culture right as you know the german jewelry under a perch had a bit of a different philosophy than the lithuanian and polish and russian jewry which kind of rejected the outside culture of course keep in mind that when the culture gets separated from god then it becomes destructive and that is indeed why a holocaust could emerge from germany which was which was by far the most cultured nation in europe in terms of science art literature music there was no country in europe maybe no country in the world that had the culture of germany at the time and one would wonder how could a holocaust originate from such a culture it's still something that historians i mean they come up with different reasons the german pension to obey orders there are many many different attempts to try to understand it but the point is the very fact that historians have to come up with so many different possible explanations actually means it is a question it is not logical yes now i do understand that the actual uh people who may have carried out much of the holocaust were not necessarily always the germans there were poles ukrainians hungarians all sorts of people but the mastermind who did not who devised the death camps and the machinery of death were in fact germans who came out of that great great culture but when that culture is separated from god it can turn into the most destructive force and again i don't want to talk about nazism so much i know that well you might say to me why do i call it separated from god i mean after all hitler was a catholic nazis were catholics the truth is not really in the sense that nazism was actually a return to old german paganism even the swastika a lot of symbols were appropriated even from a pre-christian time going back to the pagan rites of idolatry so much of nazism was connected to avodah zaramamich in terms of the old medieval not medieval the old ancient german idolatrous writes okay so that's one answer of why chanukah has such an emphasis on beauty because the victory over yavan is not the destruction of the beauty but the appropriation of the beauty for higher sanctity there is another reason why chanukah has such an emphasis on beauty and hedor and that is the following consideration and this is really a halachic point they found enough oil for the menorah that was uh not contaminated not tommy not ritually impure but it only would last for one day now there was plenty of oil that was impure but they wouldn't have had pure oil unless hashem made the oil last for eight days but after which they could get pure oil and the light now let's ask this question what is the if the only oil you have for the menorah is impure oil are you allowed to light the menorah with imperial i mean what what would be the halacha if the oil only burned for one day and the next day there is no pure oil what would you have done so interestingly enough is that although normally private korbanot cannot be brought from impure things that's true but when you're dealing with a communal offering of the nation which the menorah is the halaqa is the laws of impurity are waived they are set aside when it comes to a communal offering surprisingly what this actually means is that they could have lived with impure oil they didn't need the miracle they did not need the miracle they could have lit the menorah with imperial they could have done it day one and if they if the oil after day one ran out they could have done it on day two so the whole miracle was superfluous so why did god do it because god wanted us to do the mitzvah in the most beautiful way possible the whole miracle of hanukkah was to enable heater mitzvah heder mitzvah it's a more beautiful mitzvah when you do it in purity you see the point meaning the miracle was not to enable us to do a mitzvah we could have done the mitzvah with impure oil the miracle was to enable us to do hebrew mitzvah so if the whole miracle is to enable us to do hebrew mitzvah so we thank hashem by doing hebrew mitzvah right that's the whole miracle this is from the riduche who was the first guerra rebbe the first rebbe of gare in the middle of the 19 19th century the 1800s okay now there's a third answer of why hanukkah is connected to hedera mitzvah and this is a little complicated but i think it's an interesting answer and that is the following the oil that they found is described as a jar of oil that was sealed with the signet the seal of the cohen gadot now here's the problem why would the oil be sealed with the signet of the coin good or the cohen godol was not the custodian of the oil in the basal mikdash there actually was an appointed person who was in charge of flour and oil for the meal offerings for the menorah it was not the coming goddess job there would be no particular reason why a jar would be sealed with the seal of the coin gutter except there is one reason and that is this was not monaro oil if it would be mineral io the cohen guttal was not the custodian but rather every single day the cohen guttel had to bring a meal offering in the morning and in the afternoon this is called khabitech by the way the modern word for omelette uh actually comes from the carbon of the cohen guttal that is described as chavite koengato which was kind of a combination of being baked and being fried meaning the flour was mixed with oil and then it was fried and then it was baked so when elijah ben yehuda was looking for words to describe new things so he used the term khabita for for omelet kind of you fry it and you cook it and different types of things so every single day the coming gutter had to pour some oil into flour fry and then bake so the point i'm making is and that was the coming gutters private oil and that would be sealed so it turns out here's the problem the jar of oil that they found was not oil that was prepared for the menorah it was oil that was prepared for the khabitem of the kohingol okay now that itself is not a problem okay it was prepared for that reason but we're going to use it for this reason nope there is a problem because the quality grade that you need for menorah is much higher than the quality grade that you need for the meal offering for minora the only oil you can use for the menorah are the first few drops when the olive is gently squeezed and a few drops come out without sediment that's manure oil meaning once you have to crush the once you have to kind of crush the the olives in a millstone grind them that oil is not kosher from manure because that oil has sediment in it that oil is kosher for meal offerings such as habitant which means manira requires grade a oil kaviten as a meal offering only requires grade b oil so now we have a halal problem they found a jar of oil that was sealed with the cohen guttel that oil was not menorah oil because the cohenol was not the custodian of minor oil that was javitan oil which we're now going to use for the menorah but the problem is how could we use javitan oil for the menorah habitan oil is grade b minora oil has to be grade a so how could they use that oil answer it must be that even though the kohen gadol could have used grade b oil he wanted to do his mitzvah in the most beautiful way and therefore he used grade a oil which is mandatory for minora for minor we have to use grade a but for havitan it was a heater mitzvah so it turns out that there wouldn't have been a miracle of hanukkah if we couldn't have lit with that pure oil and we wouldn't have been able to light with that pure oil had the coin godol who prepared that oil not wanted to go beyond the basic requirements so the whole miracle of hanukkah came from the hebrew mitzvah of the anonymous cohen godot who prepared grade a oil for his meal offering when he could have been yotsei with grade b oil so if you look at these two answers of the kadushi rim and this answer again from one of the commentaries i think you see two different perspectives of what you think about when you look at the candles one way of looking at the candles generally is that the candles represents symbolically the light of hashem that enters the world illuminates our darkness gives us strength gives us courage gives us torah gives us understanding the light of the neros is the light of the shechena the light of the divine presence in other words when i look at the candles i am thinking of god's presence i'm thinking about god's light and the gifts that god gives us that is why it is said that how many candles do we like during chanukah we light on hanukkah 36 candles not counting the shamans if you go from one to eight it's 36 candles so it's brought down in swarm in kabbalah that you know the sun was not created until the fourth day that means there were three days in which there was light and dark but there was no sun or moon so what gave the light for the first for 36 hours meaning the 12 hours of day one day two day three the answer is it was the light of the shechina and after those 36 hours the light of the shechinah was withdrawn and replaced by the light of the sun so the light of the 36 hours of the first three days means the hidden light the concealed light and it is said that the 36 candles of hanukkah represent the 36 hours of the divine light that comes back into the world that's why there is such a concept of looking at the candles there's a big thing to see them in particular literally sit and look at the candles and it's proper for all of us too i'm not saying necessarily uh don't blink or whatever it is i mean you can read by the shamish or whatever it would be but to sit by the candles for a half an hour this is the light of hashem that's one aspect of it and that's what the hidduchiya rim is bringing out because the arim is talking about the fact that the reason it's heated or by chanaka is because hashem does miracles for us to enable us to serve him in a beautiful way in other words the emphasis is what god does for us and that's looking at the candles as god's light so that's the rims aspect of it but there's another aspect to the candles and that is a puzzle in michele the soul of a person is a candle that is lit by hashem that is why we like your side candles et cetera ener is a symbol of inishama in fact the hidushi arim says that one of the words for soul soul is nefesh and nephesh can actually be an abbreviation ner now ner refers to a receptacle not not a can in other words uh when ghazal used the word ner they mean the container that holds oil so nephesh ner a container pesilla wick and shin shemin oil meaning what is a human being i am a receptacle with oil and a wick waiting to be ignited by hashem my whole job is to make myself a candle that can be a recipient of life and thereby be a generator of light both both ideas i receive the light of hashem i then radiate it out so it turns out that when i look at the nearest of hanukkah there's kind of a double vision that i'm seeing it is the light of the divine presence that suffuses the world but it's also the light and the radiance of my soul and that is reflected in the second answer because the second answer of hebrew mitzvah is not focusing on the favors that god did for us it's focusing on the devotion of the jew cohen godol who strives to serve hashem because he used great a oil instead of grade b oil in other words one is emphasizing the beauty that god gives us and the other is emphasizing the beauty that we give god and that is reflected in two different visions of the neros are the neros the light of hashem or are the nero say mirror to the light that is within me which also comes from hashem but it's a celebration of the greatness of the jewish people who want to serve hashem in the most beautiful way possible right the second answer is emphasizing the cohen goddard serving hashem beyond the basic allah so that's an interesting double vision i gaze at the lights of the shaheena and then i gaze inward at my light which of course comes from god but it's the light within me that can illuminate the darkness now we can take this further with a very very interesting discussion let's go now to the mach lokas base shamayim bashillah where bait shamai says you start with eight and you go down and basilo says you start with one and you go up and we of course follow basil as we normally do but how do we understand this the mach locus here by the way right there what's the mark locus so the gemara gives a few explanations but the the second explanation the gemara gives is basil el says you go up because in holy matters you always go up when it comes to holiness you got to move more and more and more okay that makes sense why does bashame say you go down so it's a very strange thing he says oh we go down because we want to follow the pattern of the sukkus offerings on sukis we bring 70 bull bulls as burnt offerings and they're brought in descending order descending order 13 12 11. so bait shamai says we want the hanukkah lighting to follow the pattern of the sukkot offerings now that's a bit enigmatic basilo's reasoning is fairly simple in holiness we go up but why on earth would betrami want hanukkah to be structured on sukkahs so one answer might be historically that this might be a reference to maccabees too that said that the whole eight days of hanukkah were a make up for circus and that's why the lighting corresponds to the carbonate of sugars that that is in fact a possible historical answer but let me share with you a hasidic interpretation of the swastemas both bait shamay and basila are focusing on the seconds perspective of the candles that the candles are a reflection of the inner radiance of my neshama i look at the candles and i have a sense of the inner light that hashem has given within us but our job is we have to perfect our light we have to remove the impediments we have to make ourselves pure and holy we have to make ourselves an air now the mach lokas be sila is how do you view the metaphor of fire as a mechanism of spiritual perfection bait shamai says that the nature of fire is it burns away and destroys right that's what fire does fire burns and destroys that's combustion so bait shamai says the way you achieve spiritual perfection is to honestly confront your shortcomings and your flaws and burn them away one by one work right if i have an anger problem i work on controlling my temper if i have a lush and horrible problem i work on controlling my speech if i have a selfishness problem i work i'm becoming more generous i take my negatives and i burn them away that is how i perfect my soul i confront the inadequacies head on and i attack them if that is the model of the narotz then hopefully you will have less and less to work on as time goes on meaning i start off hanukkah with eight problems i gotta work on seven six because if you're using the metaphor of fire as that which is saref which burns and mikhail destroys the shiva that is based on turning away from evil the hope would be you'd have less and less to burn away as time goes on just like when you're refining metal when you initially refine the metal there's a whole ton of impurities that comes out but as you continue the process they'll be fewer and fewer right it'll be you know 80 pure then it'll be 85 percent pure then ninety percent then ninety five percent per by the time you're 95 you know the the amount of impurities that have to be removed gets smaller and smaller and smaller that is what bait shami says but base hill says maybe that is the chuva of sadiq because eight sadiq is so strong that they could stare their failures in the face and it's not going to crush them they'll just say got to work on this i'm going to work on it but basil says for many many people if we focus too much on our on our inadequacies and our flaws we get depressed we get crushed we get despondents we lose faith so the modality of chuva that looks at the fire of the menorah as that which burns and destroys basil argues is not going to help many people and therefore he uses a different model he uses the metaphor of fire not as that which burns and destroys but that which illuminates and provides warmth meaning don't focus your energy on the flaws and the inadequacies that you have to correct focus your energy on your strengths on your mindless on your talents on the mitzvos that you're able to do do them with joy and eventually the light that you build up will dispel the darkness right the darkness cannot be chased away with a baseball bat you can't attack darkness frontally but you attack it indirectly by generating the light of the enthusiasm that you bring to your availa and therefore you understand that these are two different models of spiritual avida one is burn away the evil the other is build up the good is fire that which destroys or is fire that which illuminates and in beit s calculus of burning away the evil hopefully it will diminish with time in basilo's calculus of building up the light it increases right and therefore the mach lokes bashamen is looking at the lights of the menorah as a metaphor for my neshama how do i achieve a connection with hashem now it's very tempting in a sense again i'm going to say something that i know is very over simplistic and stereotype it's not controversial necessarily but i know you were hoping i was saying something controversial no no this is this is not a controversy but uh it is an oversimplification so i do apologize for being over simplistic but on a very superficial level and i acknowledge it's superficial this could be one of the differences between mussar and khasidus and that is the muslim movement of resolve solanger was very very concerned with deep introspection to uproot from your personality any type of negativity or lack of a good media so every time you dabbing you would ask yourself did i truly die i mean that's why the khaji nish felt it could lead to uh an unhealthy obsessive compulsive aspect did i truly dive in you know to hashem or was i thinking about you know my own selfish reasons a constant second guessing a constant introspection the idea of looking into your personality and uprooting anything that's negative that's what mustard does hasidas in its emphasis on inner joy said you know you dove and be happy with your davening be happy that you served hashem be happy that you're made of and do more of it so one could say of course this fascination says so he says bashamai represents musser and of course we prosecuted like bacilla so uh this false em as an effect is saying the hasidic way is is preferable but again i do want to emphasize this is over simplistic because there are many schools of musser that stress inner joy and there are schools of casitas that did do stress intense introspection so the dichotomy that casitas is all sweetness and joy and musa is all somberness and and sadness is a bit of a stereotype but but i think it does have a certain validity uh even so as an understanding of the difference and let me point out as well that beit shama's meda is appropriate for azadek a person who's spiritually strong can look at his failures and not be discouraged you just say i gotta work on this and i'm gonna work on it for many people though if you're not spiritually strong then sometimes you've got to attack it indirectly by focusing on your strengths and then you'll be strong enough to deal with it so it depends on the person but this is what the svas ms says uh is the makhlokes bayshama now let me i i i i left out a point so what does this have to do with circus let me explain yeah i i didn't explain that let's go let's go back to circus circus you bring 70 bulls to correspond to the nations of the world now the nations of the world represent the powers of evil that try to destroy us in different ways sometimes by persecution sometimes by genocide sometimes by assimilation or enticement and the fact that they're brought in descending order represents that as we approach mashiach their power should get less and less and less with the passage of time and indeed this is actually the trajectory even though it doesn't appear to be that way that is the koak of the umo to take us away from hashem actually gets weaker as we approach gaola now you may say well wait a second i kind of see the opposite i see intermarriage going crazy like over 70 percent i see islamic fundamentalism ruining the world in so many ways but the answer in ways we don't fully understand is that these are the death throes of a force that is fundamentally spent and bankrupt and empty and just as right before someone dies there may be a convulsive movement that seems like a strong movement but it is really the last gasp before it expires so too the ascendancy of evil in the period before mashiach is a death throw it's a deceisa now it doesn't mean it could last a long time but nevertheless it is the last guest so it turns out that sukis represents the carbonus of sukkos represents diminishing evil with the passage of time so the connection to bashamai's model is that the neros of hanukkah are the internal reduction of the evil just as the carbonus of sukis are the external reduction of the evil that's why he's connecting with the circus because it's the same process of reducing the evil as time goes on but bashillo rejects the analogy because basilo says with respect to internal work i have to focus on the good i have to focus on the on the positive and indeed uh i understand that even though because made the point uh that uh he had mentioned that early hasidus it's interesting the opposite of what i just said earlier hasidis was very introspective and very self-critical but he said in our generation we have to be more positive he says you know we are a weaker generation and we are prone to depression we are prone to despair we are prone to hopelessness and if someone is giving us too tough of a message we simply shut down and shut off and therefore the rebbe said that the emphasis has to be ana and being grateful for what it is that we do and not overly berating ourselves for what we don't do and the good thing is by building up your spiritual light by what you do you will get stronger and you will have more encouragement to continue in that path in good in good ways uh let me just end with a story that's not necessarily related to this but it's a beautiful hanukkah story and this involves the blizzard of a rebbe the blizzard rebbe was the khasidoshi rebbe who lived well after the holocaust he died i believe in 1980s so he lived 35 years but there's a book some of you might have the book or have read the book uh by jaffa eliak called hasidic tales of the holocaust and she has many many different stories that you heard from hasidic rebbies and her main source her main source is the blizzard of a rebbe or she heard from the blizzard of his daughter-in-law whatever it is the stories involving blizzard and this is a story that he told about chanukah in bergen-belsen now this was the last hanukkah of the war world war ii was over the concentration camps were liberated april 45 basically and this is the last hanukkah which is december 1944. uh five five or six months before or five months before liberation of the concentration camps now you may know that at that by that point in the war germany knew nazis knew they were losing the war they knew they would lose there was no hope but they were determined to kill as many jews as they could even in those final months and the the concentration at this point was on hungarian jewelry and that's why if you know your history you will know that the rate of extermination of hungarian jewelry was a massively fast rate they were just you know working double triple ships to kill the jews and bergen-belsen was one of the concentration camps where hungarian jews were and this was uh chanukah in 1944 and the several hundred jews wanted to light hanukkah candles a great personal danger to themselves and they had to wait until two o'clock in the morning where the guards would not be watching them so carefully so imagine the scene two o'clock in the morning several hundreds of jews leave their bunkers in total silence they're going to light a hanukkah candle they're going to rip off a thread from their pajama uniforms somebody saved a little pat of rancid margarine and they're going to put a string in the margarine they're going to light the candle and immediately blow it out to be outsei and the blizzard of arabi as khasheeda shireby was given the honor of lighting the first hanukkah candle in bergen-belsen and he made the bracha a shaykh mitzvos hanukkah okay people said amen he then made the second bracha nisim that hashem had done miracles for our forefathers and then it was time to say the third bracha of the first night of hanukkah which is thanking hashem for letting me live to see this day and the rebbe hesitated he didn't make right away he looked confused he looked perturbed and he looked around and then he made shakianu and he lit the candle one of the people there was a person who had lost his faith because of the holocaust he was there because i guess he wanted to be with the other jews he went over to the rebbe and said rebbe you know i don't believe in anything i don't believe in god i don't believe that there could be a god that would allow this to happen you do believe in it i don't begrudge you if it gives you comfort you know it doesn't bother me but i have a question to ask you i understand how you could make the blessing that god commanded you to light hanukkah candles you believe god commanded you to obey obey the sages okay you believe it you believe it you men then make a bracha thank you god for doing miracles for our forefathers in the past okay you believe that happened so it happens i'm not going to argue with you but let me ask you this the third blessing thank you god for letting me be alive to experience this day do you want to be alive now do you know how many people help every how many jews hope every night they go to sleep they will not wake up from the nightmare of their lives people who lost spouses and children and brothers and sisters and parents the blizzard rebbe himself lost the whole family how can you say thank you god for letting me be alive we would rather die although it is true the suicide rate in the concentration camps was extraordinarily low extraordinarily low and among religious jews it was even much lower than that but still people would often say let god take my life now the blessing of a rebbe could have told the guy you're not because you were shaken get out of here he didn't say that he said you asked me a really good question and i wasn't sure i knew the answer and that is why i hesitated because here's my problem on one hand i got to follow the halacha the halakhah says on the first night of hanukkah you make a shakianu i got to do that but there's another consideration god is a god of truth god hates lies the seal of hashem is ms how could i say words to god that were a lie that i didn't believe in so what do i do i didn't know what to do could i say i have to say but maybe i'm not allowed to say ashayanu i'm lying to hashem so he said i looked around that's why i looked around i looked around and i saw hundreds of jews and these were jews who lost everything and still at great risk to their lives they have such love and devotion to god that they come in the middle of the darkness of the concentration camp to light hanukkah candles and as i was overwhelmed with their goodness with their devotion [Music] their messier snefesh and in my heart there was gratitude that i was able to be part of such a glorious nation that i was able to see such a goodness and a greatness and for that he said i can make a shakhyanu thank you god for letting me see the greatness of your people right me israel and that is why the rebbe said i made a shakianu the first night of hanukkah in bergen-belsen and that goes to the idea that when we look at the nearest of hanukkah we are seeing a reflection of the radiance of our neshama so again i wish you all a wonderful wonderful hanukkah and may we be socha to experience both the light of hashem and the light that is within us [Music] is