Tonight, we kindle the 2nd light of Hanukkah.
A long time ago in a Temple not-so-far away, a ragtag resistance took on an empire, reclaimed their sacred space, and discovered that one small light can outlast any regime….
Now, my dear friend Cantor Emma is really our clergy expert on all things Star Wars, but I know enough to know that on its surface, the Hanukkah story reads like it could have been the very first episode: Rebels fight empire, win, reclaim Temple, rededicate. End of story.
Even if George Lucas does not decide to adapt it anytime soon, we will again retell this tale. We will tell it as a religious tale, as a miracle, but really—Hanukkah is interesting and powerful precisely because its story is so relentlessly human. It’s war, politics, assimilation pressure, state violence, religious coercion. It’s Jews making decisions inside the empire. If you read the source material straight, you don’t get a miracle story first. You get a survival story.
But the story we tell, the story of the oil and the Temple and the light? That’s the miracle story—and our rabbis wrote it to stake a claim in interpreting reality. The rabbis of the Talmud, who wrote the Hanukkah story as we know it, knew firsthand what it feels like when God doesn’t show up the way you want God to. So they developed a Jewish way of reading that doesn’t require obvious divine intervention in order to still speak about divine presence. They were not rewriting history—but actually offering something more ambitious. They were cultivating spiritual perception, saying: don’t mistake the apparent surface of events for the full story of what’s happening. Einstein supposedly said you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is. The rabbis are basically saying: choose the second stance, not because it’s naïve, but because it keeps you spiritually awake.
And these centuries later, they are asking us to do the same thing.
Hanukkah and Purim are unique amongst our festivals—both because they are later festivals, but also because their stories, at least on the surface—exist without God. And so, it is only on Hanukkah and on Purim that we add the paragraph known as Al HaNisim to our Amidah prayers. In these two moments, the rabbis are teaching us how to read those kinds of stories—and by extension, how to read our own lives. They’re saying: when history looks purely human, don’t rush to conclude that God is absent. Look again. Train yourself to notice holiness operating through human action.
Because when we read Al HaNisim, we are reminded that God is not only found in supernatural rescue. God is also found in the human decision to resist erasure, in the rebuilding after desecration, in choosing covenant over despair. We are reminded that sometimes, divine presence shows up most reliably inside human willingness to carry light forward. So where is God in Hanukkah? Maybe, God is in the refusal to read history as only human or only divine. Maybe, God is in the partnership, not the shortcut. No version of Hanukkah promises that light appears out of nowhere; history and theology insist that light appears when we kindle it.
So tonight, when you light your candles, know that the practice is not just remembrance. It’s reorientation. It’s asking ourselves, without sentimentality:
Where is the wick that needs tending?
Where is the flame I can offer?
Where might God be waiting for me to begin?
We light because the rabbis wanted us to become the kind of people who can spot God in a story that looks like history.
May the Force—sorry, the Source—be with you.
Chag urim sameach.