Addition to the Blessing for the Candles
Blessed are You, our God, light of the world, who gives hope through mystery.
These Candles – Hanerot Halalu
These candles we light are for the miracles and wonders and the actions and creations You performed with all of us in those days and in present time. Throughout Hanukkah’s eight days, these candles are sacred. They stand before us as a reminder of all the unexpected good we have received. They encourage us to continue to hope and to act to enhance good, beauty, and joy with every word and action in our daily lives, toward ourselves and toward our fellows.
The Nature of the Miracle
From the religious perspective, to believe in a miracle means believing that God can intervene in natural, everyday reality. It means believing in a God who can change the reality God created and who continues to create as an act of goodwill toward humans. But we can also think of miracles in a different way, as a digression from natural order as we understand it.
The main purpose of the Hanukkah candles is to “publicize the miracle.” This is why the Hanukkiyah should be placed by a window, so that passers-by can see it. From the religious perspective, to believe in a miracle means believing that God can intervene in natural, everyday reality. It means believing in a God who can change the reality God created and continues to create as an act of goodwill toward humans.
Are miracles for children?
In modern times, miracles have been relegated to the world of children – Disney movies and fantasy books. Believing in miracles feels a bit like believing in the Tooth Fairy: at some point, aren’t we supposed to grow up and leave it behind?
But the truth is that for centuries there has been a theological debate about whether miracles exist in the world. The doubts aren’t new: Aristotle claimed long ago that there are no miracles. Many Jewish thinkers, including Maimonides, struggled with the question and offered complex responses.
However, the question has certainly become more acute over the past generation. The modern, secular world rejected the existence of God and of miracles. In Israel, we all remember the brave fighter in the Hanukkah song who declares: “No miracle happened to us, we didn’t find any can of oil… We climbed the high mountain …” Belief in miracles came to be regarded not just as wrong, but as dangerous, weakening human faith in our own capabilities and strengths. Secular education sought to teach the individual to recognize their strength in the world, their abilities and responsibilities. A deliberate effort was made to extinguish belief in miracles.
It is certainly hard to believe in miracles today, in the simple sense of the word. It is hard for us to accept the idea that God can intervene directly, for an instant, to change the laws of nature – like in the parting of the Red Sea. But if we extend the definition of a miracle a little, we may find considerable room to believe.
Digression without Exception
We can find a great example in a remarkably modern article published in the Times of London in 1894. The article warned that the number of horses in the city was growing so rapidly that within 50 years, England’s capital would be swamped in horse manure. This was a serious and genuine problem at the time. It was solved by a “miracle” called the automobile. The car is an example of a digression from the reality of a given problem by redefining the problem in new terms, bringing new challenges and problems.
It may sound as though we are playing with words, but we can find this kind of miracle not only in the response to technological problems, but also in more profound fields. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Michelson declared that all the basic principles of physics discovered until then, and all the work of science, were intended solely to increase the precision of scientific measurements. There were various unresolved problems in physics at the time, but no-one could have imagined that the efforts to solve these problems would lead to the Theory of Relativity or quantum physics, which revolutionized such basis physical concepts as space, time, speed, matter, and energy.
The history of physics should show us that we do not understand nature as well as we like to think. Reality can be surprising. Sometimes, in order to understand and solve a problem, we need to digress: we need to offer solutions that at first seem unrealistic or “supernatural.” As Einstein said (and, unlike many “Einstein quotes,” this one is both genuine and relevant): “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” If this is true in physics, then it will surely also be true in psychology, politics, or economics.
This insight invites us to accept that we do not really and fully understand the world, and that miracles – digressions from nature, as it appears to us – are an integral part of the history of every field. As Ben-Gurion brilliantly declared: “any Jew who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist.”
At Hanukkah, the darkest time of the year, we light candles that offer trust and hope. We know that the days will get longer and summer will come around again. But we don’t have the same confidence when it comes to other darknesses in our external and internal reality. It is for these dark places that we light the light of miracle.