The Miracle Coins of a Hasmonean King and the Spiritual Significance of the 8th Day

[Music] before we begin I'd like to extend a tremendous muscle [Music] post who are kind enough to host our Shon uh YouTube on the opening of their new center tonight this is Tuesday evening the grand opening of Theon Community Center in that's 52 amim there'll be festive food and there'll be a sheer from Rabbi brewitz at uh 8:30 and manora lighting starts at 7:00 the dedication of theza this is a great achievement first for our bridez and R Poston and for all of us who benefit from the work of ibon and we here at comp sheemish are very very honored and glad to be a contributor to their Torah and all their efforts thank you happy kanuka to all welcome to a special she in honor of the last days of Hanukah we're going to speak about the importance of the fifth day which has passed and the eighth day which is coming and I'd like to dedicate today's very special Hanukah in memory of Solomon and Ruth Glazer uh we have received the safer Torah from them and we've had it this is now the 20th anniversary of the writing of the saer Torah uh it's completion and we've had it here in Israel the past 12 years here is um their son yanan okay Glazer who um helped me bring the safer Torah to our neish benfish flight and we danced with it down um as neish benfish has online at least at the time in 2012 uh dancing and we made hakos right at the foot of the plane with Soldiers with uh people who were Ola there were many many lone soldiers who met that flight and therefore we were graced and honored with bib Netanyahu speaking to our group and nothing shansky speaking to our group Ministry absorption and I was at that time my about six-year-old uh son Ellie Mel in the middle of BB's speech got up and said on top of his lungs I hate speeches so that was our original welcome toel we finally remember the Glazer family at this time we D them for their health their wealth and their being wellbeing okay so I want to speak about two aspects first of all regarding the fifth day of Kaneka fifth day of Kaneka is a day in which we are the Minh is to give out Kaneka G the reason for that is is if all all of days considered the fifth day of Kaneka is the most appropriate day because it is the one day of Kaneka that cannot ever fall on chabas and since that's the case it was designated as the day to distribute monies because it will never interfere but there may be a deeper reason as well and we hope to explain that um secondarily we're going to speak about the significance of the final day of kanuka known as zos khaka and try to get a deeper understanding of its significance which is referenced in this in the kosim as the final day of judgment that began on rashash continued through H Raba when the when the judgments were distributed and when uh but Kaneka is so to speak the final appeal we have to understand why that is where that's coming from and there is no appeal that's ultimately final in the Ace of Hashem so what does it mean that zah is s as the benar described it so first there was a kanuka miracle that happened just several days ago uh a shabas khah this year the research team from University of Kaa located a treasure Trove of Honan coins from the kashai King Alexander yanai who was the successor he was the grandson of Simon of Shimon the last of the mbans uh to to rule um the first uh and of course he was the nephew the great nephew of Yehuda hakabe and they said it was an AR archaeological Hanukah Miracle so this University of K team discovered 160 coins all dug in the Jordan Valley North of eure notice the location uro the entry point of er Israel a point which has been unfortunately no longer under the jurisdiction of the state of Israel but hopefully will return soon or at least close to the border line which is Jericho the the coins were dated from the from the uh King Alexander yanai whose Hebrew name was yonasan he was a very successful King he was um the king that really took over a solidified Jewish state of Judea and on the 25th anniversary of his Reign which is a long time uh if you think about it like the 25th anniversary from the founding of the state of Israel A lot happened in those first 25 years and uh he found what we will call Dr yah fari called it Kaneka gelt okay he actually had delivered a pack of chocolate coins and gold in gold foil and distributed to his archaeological digging team in the hope that they would somehow find coins that would be of significance to whatever era Dr Shai bar of uh University of Kaa said we we'll hope we'll do this uh so that we will find some coins today and they ate those kanuka GS and sure enough four or five hours later on Arab shabas Kaneka they found this stash of 160 haonan coins from alexandrian which all had an eight pointed star which is interesting we don't have usually an eight-pointed star and it says King Alexander year 25 in Aramaic which was the spoken language of the Jewish people at that time at least the Jewish language so to speak you could call it the Yiddish of the day or the Hebrew of the day and on the other side it said in Greek coin of King Alexander and uh this dates to 80 before the Common Era what is the significance of this incredibly incredibly miraculous find the researchers are stunned so it's something we need to take note of and it's something that we need to interpret in the context of these last days of Kaneka and what its meaning for us specifically is on this Kaneka okay so let's begin the the idea of zos Hanukah being the end of judgment is raised by basar and his teachings but is particularly highlighted in a a of the laab rebi that was given um in his it was recorded in volume 25 of his lutos and page 243 to 250 only thing is it's in Yiddish I'm actually going to read you two Yiddish paragraphs hopefully without butchering it too badly so the bat wanted to know why the eighth day is so significant and we know that there is a m between beill and Bai whether the eighth day is the largest amount of candles which is b hillel's or Eighth Day eight candles on the first day which is be sham and what is the m between Bas Hill and be Shai and why would they have these opposing views so in order to understand this the tght as follows that's not yet is in other words there's a difference between the first day of Kaneka and the last day of Kan in the following way because the first day on the first day of Kaneka all of the days of Kaneka are there in potential and so he introduces this concept of between coak and poel potential and realization of the potential kaak means an ability you could do it you have strength but you didn't do anything yet with that strength you have it but it's not bipo it hasn't been applied to anything yet but the first the uh last day represents pooo it's the work of your hands it's the human output it's the accomplishment that was made utilizing the K you're given so the rebi explained that b sham I always looked at the world in its ultimate potential and actually I'm going to put it in a very simple way from the perspective of The Giver of Torah Hashem in hashem's eyes when he gave us Torah okay there was no difference between days moments hours he gave us a Torah which spells out an entire calendar even many hidden references to Kaneka all the way back to the beginning of the Torah uh that the world was toe of a even the word Braes contains uh potential references to Hanukah so was all mapped out all the different y all the events the perm events the the the and subsequent establishment of Yumer the suus event to commemorate the PES event toate sh the M Torah it was all laid out right Hashem hashem's World potential kak and po are the same every moment of time is Unified into one moment of time there is no time space and time in this world were creation recently just on shabas Kaneka my mut um who's quite an accomplished uh computer scientist said that in the journals right now of astrophysics they are still stumped by what causes time they absolutely don't know Einstein formulated the idea that space and time are Continuum they're all like the there's a dimension of creation known as time we know that Hashem created time so we would have yamen that we would have holidays and opportunities and Mitzvah to perform uh uhad AOS kasus all these different things require time elapse but from the perspective of a there is no time elapse time collapses into one simple Moment In Time call it the moment right before creation which time did not yet exist and we know in the the we should all reach after 120 more importantly we should live until be mashiah in which we will be able to live eternally in our bodies here in AR Israel with the third basa mikdash that the basa mdash was Al always a time always a always a experience cleaning the mishan where the confinement of time and space collapsed so for example hasal teach us that the Aron was Eno you could actually not fit the AR kodish and its staves and its uh and its U St staffs that you carry it with in the space allocated for in the mishan it was impossible another medis says when CLA Israel mosha addressed CLA Israel and saim all of CLA Israel stood between the two staves of the arodes how is that possible it's not humanly possible it's only if space as a restriction has been lifted completely okay then in addition to that we see that in pavos in the fifth paric we're told about 10 Miracles that occurred in the basa mdash this seems to be even in the time of the second Basa mdash in the Years about 150 maybe 200 years before the khah story and that is as follows it sayses bases the the meat of the Bas KES never ever deteriorated how is that possible and there was never a in the B which would indicate Decay Decay requires time meat spoils not in one second okay if you're in a hot day and you're M chish and you buy a piece of meat from the kosher market and you put in the back of your car and it's 100° okay so it might be a very short period of time where that meat is no longer recommended for eating but it still requires time in the first millisecond that you place a cold piece of meat straight from the butcher in your 100 degree car it has not yet deteriorated so I'd like to suggest that what they're really saying is there was no timer no time lapse reality in the beta M Sim Le space it says om and they would bow down they would have plenty of room how is it possible they were shoulder Tosh shoulder Bumper to Bumper they couldn't move but when it came to bowing down somehow miraculously there was enough space for everyone that's a spatial dimension of change that's really a miracle okay so that that is in the in the intense presence of the Shina okay which existed even in the second B mdash even today in the Mak mdash although not in the to the extent that it wasn't by reown and therefore uh these Miracles were present and able to exist because Hashem From hashem's perspective there is no elapse of time so now let's go back to let's go back to be chami Bei says that is imperative upon the Jewish people not to look at Torah from their perspective but from hashem's perspective we want to do the r on Hashem let's look at what Hashem sees Hashem doesn't see the first day and the second day and the third day of course he can but essentially from his perspective the the first day and and the last day are the same point in time says be let's strive to be like Hashem let's try to achieve the RM in this world that's our job to surpass this worldly limits to get past the limit of time and space utilizing the miracle of Torah learning and Tor and mitzvos which which em us with the energy tells us that's T is with him says which is the essentially means my will come to you wherever you are just open a safer I heard from by salvation on a recording of a sheer that in 1967 I believe he was in triple AOS he lost three family members for which you had a Sit sh including his wife I think a wife and a brother and at that time he was very broken emotionally he was a very emotional man for all his giant intellect he had aish a heart as we know and actually taught Tanya in nobody was interested in his jman Tanya only only in lumus only in so he said he was so broken he opened up a gamar to learn he actually felt hashem's hand on his shoulder comforting him and little steps of some divine presence coming to listen to him learning that's that's the reality you can you can you can bring that even as an individual person if that stature or maybe not even that that anybody can bring the to a presence using the miracle of Torah itself which is itself Beyond Time space contains all spatial reality contains alltime reality but that's a diffic different subject but one example of that uh so one second Bas Hillel on the other hand says although it's very very important to strive to get to the presence of Hashem to reach himl to reach ganeden BisMan you know in our times he says we look at it differently we look at Torah from the perspective of the receiver and when we receive the Torah we're given all these yam and 63 Mitzvah and hundreds and hundreds of mitz andary Mitzvah and and they yes we will experience the joy and reward of those Mitzvah andah but the Perros are right here and we have to eat those Perros cuz right now we're alive yes we're building up our olaba place we're setting our place our portion every mitz we do here but that's not the focus says says basillo the focus is to create a reality hashem's Ron was to bring his da down here in Theon as it says in theim and therefore he created the world for us yes to bring Mitzvah to light a Kaneka candle one at a time one day after other day after a third day and keep building more uh more energy of Torah and mitzvos in this finite world and where therefore we look at our we look at not our full our full po as if it's already happened no living our life from the human perspective is very much a process we go through a process of Aging we go through a process of reaching Bar Mitzvah like it says in note the you know I don't get into the controversies of when you're supposed to get married but it does say and is to race after what after Torah be a shom make Shalom with your wife all the time go out and acquire parosa for your family whether it's through cotus work or whether through it's any other work so we we live in a process says Bill everything is processed we go from koak but we achieve poel after poel after po po it's a nonstop project that continues our whole life okay so one example of that and the rebi spoke about in his s was the reference to AOS mosha notice zaka which let me explain is the Torah reading that we say at the last day of haneka but it's also referenced on the first day of the carbonos remember the carbonos of the 12 n which are read on Kaneka are all identical they're all the same and yet the Torah invest enormous amount of suim to redet tail them one shav at a time okay so we start the Torah reading on Kaneka day one with the BR of the that would symbolize poel because by Hashem by giving us which emanates out of the Mish that's hashem's portion that's hashem's BR that the coning are pouring onto us but at the end we speak about Z and we recap the totals of all the 12 tribes at once which seems completely redundant I know math maybe we even have calculators today it's not that difficult to figure out the cumulative gifts and those gifts are unusual gifts and they don't mean the same to every Tri Rashi brings the idea that it represents the beginning of mankind Adam is is is a reference to the year that he begat the the person who would guarantee human existence because K and heav were basically not the ones to carry the human Dimension forward it was going to be Shas and that happened in the 130th year and so on and so forth you know this conned Theos it's neged the Torah that's the mitzvos ETC and we culminate by saying we're here in the mishan today and we have biras colony which emanated from the Mish mdash it's a recap of the entire history okay so yes but that was a we first had Adam we first had the the a with then we had the tiin witha of giving birth to Chas and then it led to the 10 Generations between Adam to Noah but that didn't quite work out in the 10 Generations from no to a where a was mael the old it says doesn't mean that he got the reward of all those people he made sure they would get their reward he salvaged the world possible connection to Hashem if not for AR and the Jewish people there would be no connection to Hashem none and that was the cumulative effect so it's not unusual if you think about it if you think about in the context of Hill and Shai's debate in the beginning of Kaneka we look at the potential which is the end game you get to the bdash you get to the Mish you've gotten all the way down to this world but it takes a heck of a lot it takes the AOS and their noos and and all the pain and suffering and finally finally finally in M Tor and overcome and finally finally you're gonna have okay but that's from hashem's perspective is immediate from our perspective we have to build towards that and what do we have at the very end of where it's Z Hanukah the cumulative uh computation of everybody that's a different world that's an enormous achievement because you know what if one of theim did it it would be enormous achievement but that they all did it similar fashion with one voice orbe it with different dimensions according to Med different cavanos but that they held it together and accomplish that that's the Mish that is activating the full potential of writes about you know if you do uh factorials for example you do 1 Time 1 two 2 * 2 Four 3 * three a 3 to the 3 is nine once you get past four or five numbers the numbers start shooting up into the thousands and then beyond computation when you put Jews together in a minion it's an infinitely more powerful than with one person it's possible with one person in fact the Mish says you can have it with three people on a bezin which uh you know beim Hashem is with the bezin of three Hashem is with a group of five people interestingly enough a Al AA is a fist fist is five fingers right but when you get to Esser when you get to ESS that's already a different world okay then really there's really no number beyond that because Sr comp is the full you're connected then into the wifi laav de of all of Cl Isel the totality of Cl Isel you've reached a moment of which is kados kados kados you can Lane you can DAV you can you're logged into the Wi-Fi like if you go on your phone you'll see the passcode is 613 you log on that's what a minion can do you create a anyway so this is the this is the Deep aspect of the day one we see it from aem's perspective like Bei day eight we see we look back at what we have accomplished now that's what brings us back to the coins of our kashite King let's understand the chronology is very important in the year 319 for the Common Era Alexander the Great invades the Persian Empire which includes AR Isel so that day which we know to be the ninth of tavas the day that Ezra the so Ezra Soper died Ezra sare is identified by kazal as the final prophet of Israel otherwise known as Mali so if malahi Ezra passes away the moment that Alexander the great Alexander mdon enters the land of Israel and then the presiding kod shim sadic who took over for Ezra runs and meets him and offers him two massive concessions number one that instead of destroying the basam mikdash or putting an idol of himself there which is what he traditionally did in all the nations that he would conquer he offered him a human testimony he said the name of all the children born in this year and when you come back to visit ER Israel as a province of the alexandrian Empire which it will become part of and in six years time he conquered the rest of the world so he'll find thousands and thousands of Al of Alexander babies you could say that was ya Elohim leem just saying shem's name ishem we give it we to give you a living testimony of Jews who love and worship Hashem and have your benefit in mind and bring carbonos for you they actually brought carbonos Alexander the Great came to the B mikdash and they offered Cabanas as we today have a minut of daving for the you know for the welfare of the government especially in Exile if you're in Exile should do it today too I think very important they need a lot they need a lot of help a lot ofos oh so that was his what he convinced them to do but one more thing he said when you finish your Conquest which took six years we will acknowledge ourselves as a province of your Mighty Empire by signing every single Jewish document with your name and the day of your reaching your Pinnacle of greatness which would take place in six years later in the year 313 that's called minion stos until recently ironically the Jews of Taman still dated their stus that way you know Teran Taman where the hoodis are hanging out they go back way back okay so that's the significance of the early years of the B mikdash and then what happens 180 years later after the helenite after the Jews kind of started to degrade they went from pusim and many of them became tuim observant Jews but not of the Rabin uh law they believed in the Torah 100% they interpreted the Torah Lo shab they said okay no candles on chabas and we say noos we put right at the beginning of of of the M shabas right there by to show no we're not stuk we know what the Torah means we have a that goes all the way back to and they so that was like a midstage of assimilation and they were prominent in second B MDES as Asim and as members of on hedin until the Kash came around and then there was unfortunately the third stage which was at that point they abandoned everything and just wanted to fully assimilate into the Greek Empire this was very sad it was 180 years of deterioration until after shimad was gone after he was no longer k his one of his descendants hono was a legitimate cohain a from person sh Tor mitzvos was to his fullest extent and he himself is deposed by his brother Jason Jason unfortunately goes to the newly Risen King known as Antiochus epos an heir of the salusa dynasty one of the four generals that split up the Alexander's Kingdom when he died was the cusd who were based in Antioch in Syria and interesting Syria we're back in Syria and the tomies were were in were in MIT it was Tom who forced us to translate the Torah into Greek you see the assimilation going on actively but we tried the the Torah World tried to assimilate the best that they could to take the beauty of the culture of yavan and use it to enhance our Mitzvah create the concept of H Mitzvah now on a deep level I want you to understand how radical it is that kanah is completely built around the notion of H Mitzvah why well if you really want to know that brings the best of Rome what they emulated what they wanted to say and rosha Shapiro said it this way ra Shapiro said in one of his one of his he said yakov's job the Torah community's job tiako the Torah Learning Community what's their job what's their job it says Ms Mal hashem's Torah is truth he's our King he has commanded us to our mitzvos we learn them we observe them we promote them we teach them to our children y but what was the job of Yo's compatriot known as asov what was his job that he was supposed to do he was supposed to do the next phrase EES we're going to hold the truth of Torah the N of Torah the of Torah the Sanhedrin of Torah of Torah the of Torah but we need help in bringing it to the world that not only is no point in the globe not knowing about Torah Mitzvah but agrees that the entire world itself from this table to this microphone is all a that's the imminency that really wasn't brought fully out to the world conceptually until the arrival of B and the that each and every element of the world is get is complete from K don't look at anything on face value don't believe it has an existence other than AEM and the the the force and the letters of of the alphabet that construct them all the animals all the all the everything from by the way they say it's an interesting V they say between every one of the four types of creation that was as of job to bring to the entire creation e there was nothing that's not Hashem and FIS by the way is a very Advanced mathematical number didn't happen till much much later in time people didn't have those numbers that might be why there was no mispar when ysep was counting the grain of MIT mispar was because the known Egyptian numbers were cracked there was no way to push them forward because e they hadn't reached the concept of Fes FES nothing absolutely nothing is not hash not including our very Souls our very bodies Our very Minds okay so if that was his job e we need you know we need to spread some of this but there was a kak in the world a couple of coops that came along the Spectrum so as the rambam teaches Christianity in its Essence and Islam even more so were ways intermediate stages to go to the fifth level domain means mineral life plant life Botanical life right so uh high is animals mid is humans yel like it says in the Kari there are five levels but in those in the middle of those levels there's always some things in between there's transitional so for example from minerals toward As you move towards uh but easier like this when you get to plants there are plants that act like animals for example the Venus fly trap eats meat it's a plant how's that eat meat are predators since a plant a predator right is there you ever running away from a plant run away from a plant why it's going to attack you yeah it can attack maybe not you but on a on a smaller level transition you go from to there are animals that are resemble human beings monkeys chimpanzees high level intelligence they're in between they're a transitional creation moving towards the next level between Adam who's a m and Israel there is intermediate levels so according to uh the rambam for example you could say Christianity and Islam which taught monotheism which taught the concept of Messiah to the world they both aired on either side which is why I believe Muslims Keep Friday day Christians keep Sunday Jews keep shabas one went to the right one went to the left because because the Christians um who keep Sunday right what was their problem they went right to the concept of Rahim but no Mitzvah nothing right they trashed everything and then including Brisa the essential Jewish identity and then on the other side the isim were coming from a place of din yes Brisa yes modesty oh by the way they'll kill you if you don't wear your head covered that's not exactly our way they're twoo extremes they went to Friday they went to Sunday the way of Torah is so but at the same time they did represent some sort of transitional idea between aod Zara and this concept of ulas so the fact that Greece was super effective in conquering the world int sexually and also physically a healthy b and a healthy mind and healthy body although they left out the dimension of Shona they left out the dimension of MAA many of the many of the Jews replaced their MAA to participate in the Olympic Games that even King Herod would later buil after theay Dynasty his was his was the final Dynasty were 103 years Herod was 103 years and the Bas of was destroyed but by time Herod comes around Rome is fully in control Isel went from a Greek Province to a Roman province uh from aayan province which was independent and when was it independent here at the time of Alexander yanai what does that mean the coins of Alexander yanai and the celebration of his malus in the city of eure show things reaching mik El poel there was a Jewish State there was a bet mikdash there was a Kahuna now it is true that King Yan ended his life as auki but that was so to speak the decline but at year 25 where these coins were found everything was still in full potential he wasn't a stuki he was a yid and he took the coin and he put it in the Jewish language of Aramaic and then he put it on the other side on the language of Greeks fulfilling the whole potential that Yakov and ASA were spoke most to fulfill which we still struggle with today that's maybe why right we see for example the mix of Hanah the concept of Hod and this huge lumus in the bris about how H mitzah works is it essentially connected to the Mitzvah does it exist as a as a supplement to the Mitzvah but not directly connected that's all the lambdas however the concept is yes we can do this and we did do it for a short brief period of time we broke free from the Yoke of Gus ofet of the Persian kings of kores and of dares and certainly of aash of aash and even Alexander the Great and we Shone through we reached our fullest potential and that was hod and that's what Kaneka was that was the time in which we did touch a taste of what the Jewish future is going to be like before we descended slid backwards into the what became the Roman Exile so so why is uh zos Hanukah so important if it's the day as the rebi explained that we reach our fullest potential then it's the it's the Alexander Yan moment it's the moment where everything is good it's the moment where we we've touched back to shmin Shi is it's the place it's the it's the mikdash it's the miracle of Kaneka which makes no sense which had no place in the Greco Roman world and yet happened anyway because CLA Israel was doing its job of Ms declaring that's what this did declaring Hashem is our King not anybody else not any other country not any other ruler no other Empire no other power no other politics no entity like our United Nations means nothing we are F we we we are not at EP but we are at EMS malano at all times and that's that's the promise of Bill and z khah um I'll just add that the in his writings on Kaneka Nim says that zos is something visible visible tangible it happened right we said mik it's real says sikim onosaka can see to a level of hasem they can see hashem's hand and everything they can look at you and tell you this is your journey this is your tikon this is your life this is what you need to do go to aad get a and that's maybe why we say the end of judgment is z khaka why is the end of judgment Z khaka because now we move from we've reached the end point on where we say now our year which we started rashash reaches its full fruition in which we can in this collapse time and space just for that one day and say we want a new world Hashem we want a second chance we want to touch the future on this day so it should be in hashem's aem's will that the message that he sent us a little Kaneka gelt and the understandings of that the Kaneka gelt go on the fifth Hanukah the day that's not chabas we're a little bit more involved in the G but that's not the end of the story we're going to get to Z khaka on which we touch our full potential actualized don't forget to understand your full potential is what you could do this year to serve Hashem to Proclaim hem El uh uh right Ms MCU Hashem is truly my king truly my king if he's my king I have to do his bidding I have to learn Torah I have to do MIT I have to do I have to do a better job I have to doidos I have to speak up for Israel I have to defend the fellow Jew this is the day this is the day where we we Proclaim Ms Malu but it's also a day where we touch maybe from a distance maybe from through a time capsule the coins of Alexander yanai the full fruition before he turns sour of the dream of the of ma makab and here are the coins coins are real Hashem should provide us the power the monarchy the budget the success the clarity that will return our full Kingdom our full independence with chuva with masim toim with leaders that respect Torah mitzvos who try to emulate them and steer people away from the direction that they're going and say instead EAS Hashem is everything Hashem will get us out of this war Hashem will get us the the house stitches back Hashem will get us independence from our and and freedom from our enemies which attack us notice we were attacked on seven fronts not eight he can't touch us on the eighth front that's our Z khah should give blessings on this day give a little St if you didn't give on Z on the fifth day do if you can a personal CH accept as your and through that we should be to the [Music] oh n n n