The miracle of Chanukah is a hotly debated topic in the classic Jewish sources. Depending on what you read, it was either a military victory, oil that lasted eight days instead of only one, or a second chance at celebrating the holiday of Sukkot. In most years, one of these ideas speaks to me over the other–and no matter what, it’s an excuse to decorate, dress up, and fill my home with loved ones. This year, though, each one of these theories is speaking to me in a different way. 

The Al Hanisim prayer that we add on Chanukah speaks of the holiday as a military victory. Yet, depending on which source you read, it’s not clear who is fighting whom. While the rabbinic texts are certain there was a military victory and that the Temple was restored in its wake, the Book of Maccabees, which is part of the apocrypha, and thus outside of the Jewish canon, gives us two points of view. Either the victory of Chanukah came when the Jews defeated the Greeks or it was about a civil war between the zealous Hasmoneans who beat back the rest of the Hellenized Jews. 

This machloket, or debate, speaks to me right now. First of all, because war is complicated, and military victory is never clear cut. But second, it feels particularly apt to consider who is fighting whom at this moment. In Israel and abroad right now, Jewish people feel that they are currently fighting wars on multiple fronts at the same time. Israel’s military is fighting Hamas. Jews worldwide are fighting a tide of antisemitism. And at the same time, we are all trying to sort things out among ourselves: Jews, Israelis, Zionists and anti-Zionists. There are certainly some days when this feels overwhelming and daunting, as if a Chanukah-sized miracle is needed to end the fighting. But the Talmud teaches us that we should not rely on miracles. And this year, Chanukah and its light are my reminder that we have done this before, and we are capable of doing it again.

The year that the Greeks took over the Temple and the battle of Chanukah was fought, the Jews were unable to go up to Jerusalem and bring their Sukkot sacrifices, as they would normally, in the Temple. So after the Temple was restored, they gave themselves a holiday to make up for the holiday of Sukkot that they missed. This year, we made it through Sukkot, but the eighth day of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah were marred by tragedy, ruined as a day of joy for so many of us. Chanukah this year can serve as an opportunity to offer ourselves something that feels like the ancient replacement for those days. The eighth day of any Jewish holiday is always my favorite, and Chanukah is no exception. Seven is considered to be the natural order of the world—eight is one beyond that, so that there is something special about the eighth day. The moment when our chanukiyot are fully lit, they draw down light and joy beyond the natural order. This year we have an opportunity to fully lean into that—to take the eighth day that we had stolen from us on October 7 and bring even more light, joy, and celebration to this year’s final day of Chanukah. 

There’s one more reason given by the rabbis for instituting the holiday of Chanukah. It is the one that speaks to me most of all, year in and year out, and this year most of all: the miracle of the oil. Unlike the military victory, there’s something  about this miracle that cannot be explained through luck or skill, no way to chalk it up to nature.  In our modern world, this might seem like it would make it harder for us to connect or identify with it. But Rabbi David Hartman in answering the question why we celebrate for eight nights instead of seven, suggests that there is a profoundly human element in this miracle. The Jews knew, he says, that there was one night’s worth of oil in the jug. So why celebrate the first night at all? It doesn’t seem to be a miracle. The miracle, he says, is that they lit the menorah anyway. There wasn’t enough oil, as far as they knew, and their task of lighting it for eight nights was doomed. But they didn’t  give up, they lit it anyway. The miracle of Chanukah is in their hope. 

It can be hard right now to put one foot in front of the other, to see any way that this war in Israel/Palestine ends well for anyone. It can be hard to see the faces of those held hostage, to hear the names of children and the elderly killed in Israel and Gaza, to listen to the hatred being spewed. It can be hard to imagine that there is something on the other side of this, but we must. We must have hope. 

And there is hope in the world right now.  This Chanukah, I find this hope in some of the work that NIF is doing, particularly with Standing Together (Omdim Beyachad–Naqif Ma’an), a movement whose members, Jews and Arabs, are doing something that seems to others like a fool’s errand: they are insisting on peace, solidarity, and a shared future. In their recent tour of the US, co-leaders Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli, and Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, shared messages of hope and visions of a shared Israeli/Palestinian future. At a national conference that I was at a few weeks ago, I heard first hand accounts of these gatherings and the hope that was ignited by the hope contained by the speakers. 

As the ancient Israelites stared down at this tiny jug of oil they did not only see insufficiency. They saw potential, they found hope. They saw the tiniest bit of what could be, and they decided to try. This is perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn in anticipation of this coming year: In a world that seems dark, light any bit of flame you can—and hold on. We must have hope for our shared future, however far away that might seem.