Whoever came up with the original Hanukkah may have made a mistake. It is possible that Hanukkah is too long by exactly one day. How so? The miracle of Hanukkah is that when the Maccabees took back the Temple, they wanted to rekindle the Menorah. They found enough oil for only one day, but miraculously it lasted for eight days. Not coincidentally, that was just enough time to procure new oil. Now, if it was natural for the oil to burn for one day and was miraculously extended by another seven days, shouldn't that be the length of the holiday, seven days?
No. As it turns out, Hanukkah is not too long. It is exactly right. The reason is that miracles in the Jewish tradition are not just some events that defy the natural order, some occurrence occasioned by God that changes the course of history or turns regular burning oil into slow burning oil. Rather, the Hebrew word for miracle is nes, which also means sign. Just as in the English language, where "sign" comes from the same root as "significant," a nes is a significant event. It does not have to connote the suspension of the laws of nature. Rabbi Harold Schulweis writes, "To witness the miraculous is to observe in an ordinary event extraordinary significance, an event so important that it cries to be raised up and celebrated." In a great many ways, that is where the best lessons of Hanukkah are to be found: in the extraordinarily significant actions of ordinary people. If a miracle were just about what God does, perhaps Hanukkah should be only seven days. The first candle, however, reminds us of the important role of people.
One such person who did something extraordinarily significant was a man that nobody knows anything about. We don't know his name, few people talk about him, as far as I know, Peter, Paul and Mary never wrote a song about him, and yet he is one of the heroes of Hanukkah. I am talking about the individual, probably a priest, who hid away that small jar of oil to begin with, the jar that would later be found by the Maccabees and used to rekindle the Menorah. All that we know about him is the action that he took, hiding the oil. Had he not done it, there would be nothing to celebrate starting tomorrow night. What the priest did contributed to the miracle. It would have been easy for him to fall into despair. Alexander the Great had conquered so much, spreading out from Greece all the way to Egypt and the Levant and Persia. Hellenism, the Greek way of life that included not only art and philosophy, but brutality and violence as well, was being forced upon the people by Antiochus Epiphanes. Not only that, but Hellenism was being willingly accepted by a great many. It would have been easy to despair. Yet that priest, who hid away the oil, committed a small act of rebellion, a small act of revolt against the Greek Seleucids. It was also a small act of faith and hope, an ordinary act, committed by an ordinary man but it ended up having extraordinary significance. That is why we start off by lighting only one candle and then the light increases, night after night, because the miracle of Hanukkah began small, with that lone priest and only then did it grow when the Maccabees took a stand for religious freedom. We saw in their eventual victory the hand of God and proclaimed a miracle, but it began with an ordinary man, who didn't necessarily pick up a weapon or publicly denounce the government. He did something as simple as hiding a jar. When I look at the Menorah, and I see it all lit up, I don't just think of the power of God, or the might of an army, even a rag-tag one like the Maccabees, I see the hope of a common person and how his hope changed our future. Living during one of the darkest hours in the history of our people, he hid that jar because he hoped that at some point in the future, the hidden oil would be used to rekindle the light of Judaism and the light of the Jewish people. The light was rekindled, and over two thousand years later, that light is still burning, and the Jews still have their original mission as given in the Torah: to be a holy people, a light unto the nations, with the Menorah as one of our enduring symbols, on the official emblem of the State of Israel and represented in every synagogue with the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Light. None of that would have happened without hope. The great miracle of Hanukkah comes from the power of hope.
We learn from this a great lesson. Partnering with God, people have a role to play in the miraculous. Doing so, for Jews, is a mitzvah, a sacred obligation. Judaism does not simply say, "Trust in God, God will provide." Rather, Judaism teaches that we have to do our part. Our tradition has always asked action of us, that we live out our faith. It has asked that we not simply hope and believe in the possibility for a better tomorrow, but that we work towards that better tomorrow.
Some people dedicate their lives to improving the world and are heroes like the Maccabees. Day in and day out, they wake up and get to work trying save, protect or improve someone else's life.
We don't all have to see ourselves as Maccabees, though. We can be like that priest whose modest contribution made all the difference. We can do our part, by being kind and caring, by being generous and patient, by doing the little things that have an out-sized impact. When I served a congregation in Quincy, Illinois a congregant told me that he saw everything he did as tikkun olam, repairing the world, from how he ran his business, to how he interacted with family, friends, his employees and strangers. When we accept the power that we have, that we can be something special for someone else, that our ordinary everyday actions can be extraordinarily significant, we are doing God's work and that is miraculous.