It’s the last night of Chanukah.
I want to give you a gift.
The gift is one that is handed down to us from the first Chanukah and it is relevant to each and everyone of us.
Our Sages actually instituted the holiday of Chanukah a year after the events that occurred.
Why did they wait a year?
In our long Jewish story there are many miracles that have taken place.
Yet we don’t have a holiday commemorating each one.
How did the Sages pick the ones that got memorialized?
Each holiday has a special energy that is created. If that spiritual energy becomes palpable and part and parcel of that time, the Sages understood it was to become a holiday.
Therefore, a year later, one year after the holiday of miracles, the Sages understood that the quality of the miraculous was still present and so Chanukah was established.
Every year at this time we feel
the power of the miraculous and we need to tap into it.
There was a story that went viral last year on Chanukah.
A young man by the name of Tamir Hershkowitz returned to his parent’s home in Kibbutz Beeri. Tamir’s parents were brutally murdered in the attack on October 7 and their house set aflame. It burned and smoldered for three days. When the fire was finally extinguished, Tamir went looking among the ruins to see if there was any items to salvage. Remarkably enough, there was a Menora which survived. So, on Chanukah, Tamir went back to the remnants of his home and lit the Menora.
He said it was very important that the light emanating from the house should not be one of destruction, but one of hope and promise.

The picture of Tamir and his family Menora evoked another image, that of a photograph that was taken at another bleak and seemingly hopeless time.
It’s a now famous picture, taken in Kiel, Germany, on December 11,1931. Rachel Posner, a Jewish wife and mother, took a picture of the family Menora on the windowsill of her apartment. In the background of the picture is a large swastika which dominates and overpowers the little Menora.
After she developed the photo, Rachel Posner wrote on the back, “they say Judah (the Jewish people) will die! Judah will live forever!”
Mrs. Posners family ultimately moved to Israel. When the photo of the Menora became famous, Mrs. Posner’s family were asked by Yad VShem if the picture and Menora could be donated to the museum. The family offered a compromise. They allow the Menora to be in Yad VShem, except on Chanuka. Then they take it home and light it as a symbol of their family’s salvation and the power of light overcoming darkness. In his interview, one of the family members tearfully exclaims that Rachel Posner had no idea how this dark period of history would end. She never could have imagined a State of Israel, let alone the thought that her grandchildren would live there.
These were miracles beyond her ken. Yet she inscribed
“Judah will live forever”
because she believed in miracles which beyond her rational comprehension.
The Menora is taken to be lit in different places and was lit recently in the Gaza Envelope.
There are 92 years between the two stories of the Menoras.
But their common denominator is the belief that light can overcome the most intense darkness, that there is hope in the darkest of times.
As we pray on Chanuka,
“In those days and in ours”, may the miracles of then be miracles now.
So here’s the 🎁.
Make the most of tonight and tomorrow.
Pray for miracles.
Pray that our hostages come home.
One actually isn’t allowed to pray for a miracle, but on Chanuka it’s already there, latent, dormant, waiting to burst forth.
The miracles are there!
The gift is seeing them all around us.
Happy Chanukah and an early Shabbat Shalom and so much love!