Parashas Mikeitz, Issue #874 / CTD #11: Chanukah – By Pinchas Winston
And Yosef said to them, “What is this deed that you have committed? Don’t you know that a person like me practices divination?” (Bereishis 44:15)
HERE’S AN INTERESTING point. The last word of the Hebrew verse is “komoni,” spelled, Chof-Mem-Nun-Yud, which means, “like me.” If you count two letters to the right of the Mem of “komoni,” you will arrive at the third letter of the next word, “ahsher,” and the letter “Shin.” Count another two letters to the right and you will end up in the next word, “ish,” and the letter Yud. And finally, count another two letters to the right and this will bring you to the fourth last word of the verse, and the letter Ches. Combined, the four letters spell, “Moshiach” in reverse.
There is no need to go into the statistical odds of that “code” occurring, but I WILL just tell you that it is rare. If you want to know HOW rare, find someone who can work it out with you. But, before you do, make sure to explain the following as well. It is part of what makes this “find” so interesting.
The Hebrew words for “divination” are, “nachaish yenachaish.” Not coincidentally, the root letters of these words are the same letters as for the word “snake,” which is “nachash,” spelled, Nun-Ches-Shin. Also not coincidentally is that the gematria of “nachash” and “Moshiach” are the same, 358. As the rabbis teach, it was the original nachash who caused us to go into exile when it convinced Adam and Chava to eat from the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra—the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It will be its antithesis, Moshiach, who will make it possible for us to return there.
That was Point One. Point Two is that this reversal of the encoded word “Moshiach” perfectly describes Yosef’s situation. Yosef’s brothers had looked at him as if he was as bad as the snake that had steered the first man and woman in the wrong direction back in Paradise. They sold him into slavery to protect the future Jewish people from any damage he might possibly do. Yosef ended up being their “Moshiach.”
It was THE classic case of:
The stone despised by the builders became the cornerstone. (Tehillim 118:22)
The verse doesn’t just say that the stone was overlooked. It was DESPISED, you know, thoroughly HATED. And, we’re not talking about secular people hating religious people, or vice-versa. That’s obvious. This verse is talking RELIGIOUS people hating OTHER religious people. Remarkable.
The big question is, of course, how does that happen? The answer to THAT question, conveniently, is in the NEXT verse:
This was from God; it is wondrous in our eyes. (Tehillim 118:23)
There are many ways to describe the battle for life. Probably the BEST way is as a fight to remain appreciative of even the smaller miracles in life. These are the ones to which we refer everyday, three times a day, in the Shemonah Esrai, in “Modim”:
We thankfully acknowledge that You are God our God and God of our fathers forever. You are the strength of our life, the shield of our salvation in every generation. We will give thanks to You and recount Your praise, evening, morning and noon, for our lives which are committed into Your hand, for our souls which are entrusted to You, for YOUR MIRACLES WHICH ARE WITH US DAILY, and for Your continual wonders and beneficences. You are the Beneficent One, for Your mercies never cease; the Merciful One, for Your kindnesses never end; for we always place our hope in You.
Just ask yourself how many times you really feel much appreciation when you say this brochah. I mean REAL appreciation. It’s so easy to “fly” right through it because we simply do not realize how fortunate we are to have all the things we do in life until, of course, something goes wrong.
The Ksav Sofer explains that this is why the Talmud says that one who says Hallel EVERY DAY, which we started saying now for Chanukah, blasphemes God. BLASPHEMES GOD? PRAISES GOD the Talmud should say!
No, says the Ksav Sofer, BLASPHEMES God. This is because Hallel praises God for the large, OVERT miracles that have happened periodically throughout history. If you praise God for THOSE every day, then you basically say that the smaller, COVERT miracles don’t count or matter to you. That’s an aspect of blasphemy, says the Ksav Sofer.
It is no coincidence that people who do not appreciate every last gift in life tend to be arrogant as well, or vice versa. They don’t have to be obnoxiously arrogant, but just a little too self-believing, which does not sit well with the trait of humility. And, it is HUMILITY that allows us to see life as God does, and THAT is when we start seeing Divine “cornerstones” as Divine cornerstones.
So, what does this have to do with Chanukah, which celebrates the BIG miracle? Well, does it? Yes and no. It DOES celebrate a HUGE miracle, but part of that celebration is because of what it means about the smaller miracle: the finding of the jar of oil.
Had the Chashmonaim “only” won the war, Chanukah would not have become a national holiday. Had they “only” found the undefiled jar of oil, they would also not have declared a national holiday. But, when the oil burned for seven extra days, OVERTLY miraculously, it revealed, retroactively, that even the smaller covert miracles are HUGE AND OVERT, if you allow yourself to remain sensitive to them.
In the end, this is what the oil-miracle was about. It was God’s way of saying, in a prophetless time, “Just as I performed a miracle for you with the oil, I perform miracles for you ALL the time, whether you can see them or not. TRUST Me, even when you feel like I’m not there. I AM, and ALWAYS care about you.”
Chanukah Samayach.
CONNECTING THE DOTS – Issue #11: In Discussion, Volume 2: Sefer Shemos
Sefer Shemos is almost upon us, b”H, and I have uploaded the next volume of “In Discussion” to the Amazon store in preparation for this. This time the vehicle to discuss the parsha is a young man who left Torah Judaism due to a lack of answers to his questions, and his return later in life when exposed to the deeper side of Torah. The following excerpt is from Parashas Tetzaveh, but it’s Chanukah-oriented, so I am using it here.
IT WAS NEXT week’s parsha, but TWO years later. The yarmulke was a full-time addition for a while already. So were the tzitzis, tucked into his trousers. He now prayed three times a day, and to his relief, there was a minyan for Minchah just one building over. Once upon a time, he only looked at the sun in terms of its physics properties. Now he kept track of it for halachic reasons.
He would like to have kept his return to religion quiet, for the very same reasons why he could not. When a smart person becomes religious, it raises eyebrows. When a PhD does, it creates controversy, and that brings attention. It’s one thing to be religious and BECOME a physicist. It is something altogether more dramatic to be a physicist and BECOME religious.
Then came the article. He wanted to turn it down, but Josh insisted that it would be good for others to hear his story, even a Kiddush Hashem. “You’ll inspire others,” Josh told him. “To do what?” Daniel asked, somewhat sardonically.
One article led to another. He was even invited to speak on a local talk show, which he did, again at Josh’s insistence.
That was an experience of its own. He had innocently accepted the invitation to the show, having no idea that it had been the host’s plan to make him look silly. Had he known that the host was an atheist, he would have declined the invitation. Finding out mid-sentence had not been convenient at all.
Fortunately for him, the talk show host had thought he knew more than he did, and had a bloated ego to boot. By the end of the show, the only question left to answer was why the host was STILL an atheist, after all Daniel had answered and pointed out.
After the show, Josh told Daniel that he did more good that day than probably his entire life! Daniel wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad news. “Good news!” Josh told him. “Like Avraham Avinu in Ur Kasdim, you probably made a lot of believers today!” Daniel blushed.
Needless to say, Daniel was NOT invited back to the show. To THAT show, at least. Others were calling him to talk on theirs, especially Evangelists. It was all becoming too much for him. He was still a scientist, and with a job so far. He had work to do.
Then came a phone call, THE phone call, actually. It was from a man he had never met before, and after five minutes it became clear why he had called: a shidduch.
His first reaction was to say no. But, as Josh and his wife kept telling him, he was not getting any younger, only wiser. In fact, he couldn’t help but wonder if Josh and his wife had something to do with the call . . .
In the end, Daniel agreed to meet the girl. Three months later, they were married. The wedding his parents once feared he would have was instead a beautiful traditional Jewish wedding performed “according to the da’as of Moshe and Yisroel.” His father wasn’t sure anymore if he had already died and gone to Heaven.
Now it was a Monday afternoon, and the reporter from a national Jewish newspaper sat across from Daniel, laptop open and ready to go.
“It must have been quite the transformation?” the reporter asked him.
“A walk in the park,” Daniel joked.
“With a lot of hurdles along the way pro bably, I imagine. What was your biggest?
“My biggest hurdle?” Daniel repeated. “Me.”
“You were your biggest hurdle?” the reporter asked, confused.
“Aren’t we all?”
“I suppose so,” the reporter admitted.
“I mean, we like to blame others for our obstacles in life,” Daniel explained, “but at the end of the day, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we will see that we are the REAL source of our holdbacks.”
“In which way did you hold yourself back from being Torah observant?” the reported probed.
“Where do I begin?” Daniel said, exhaling a deep breath as he spoke. “There are plenty of examples, right Josh? he said, now speaking across the room. Josh looked up from his work and smiled, having listened to the interview with one ear from the distance. “He’s my hero!” he called back to the reporter.
“He’s just that saying that to be nice,” Daniel said. “Really he wants to say, ‘I told you so!’ to me, because he did, MANY times . . .”
The room went quiet for a moment, as Daniel considered what he wanted to say next. He had given it some thought earlier that morning, after Shacharis, but now wondered if he still wanted to use it. He did anyhow.
“Let’s use this week’s parsha to make a point,” he said, and the reporter liked the idea.
“At the beginning of this week’s parsha, Tetzaveh, there is the mitzvah of making the pure olive oil for the lighting of the Menorah, which he read and translated: ‘Command the Children of Israel to bring clear olive oil, beaten for the light, so the Menorah can burn continuously . . .’”
“That’s right,” the reporter confirmed.
“And that’s followed by the instructions to make the clothing for the Kohen Gadol, ‘for glory and for splendor’.”
“Right again.”
“As I am sure you are aware, many commentators ask why the mitzvah of making the shemen zayis for the Menorah is placed here, right before the mitzvah to make clothing for the Kohen Gadol.”
“I have seen it asked before,” the reporter said.
“This one you probably have not heard before,” Daniel told him.
“Why is that?” the reporter asked.
“Because I made it up,” Daniel, looking across the room at Josh, who smiled back at him. He had already tried it out on Josh, who liked it a lot.
“Well, everyone has their place in Torah,” the reporter told him.
“I sure hope so,” Daniel said, smiling, and then continued.
“Olive oil has a lot in common with our souls.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, both are hidden away from the eye, inside something very solid, and both can be a tremendous source of light. But only after they have been squeezed and extracted to the outside. Then they can be ignited and used to bring darkness to the light.”
“What does it mean to ‘squeeze’ and ‘extract’ a soul,” the reporter asked. “We get shemen zayis by throwing some olives into an olive press, and then crush them. I don’t think you mean to do the same with a person’s body!”
“The body requires a different kind of press,” he explained. “It requires mitzvos, which ‘squeeze’ the body and force the soul to come out for everyone to see.”
“That’s interesting,” the reporter said. “I never looked at it that way.”
“Our bodies are like the olive, wondrous creations that, on their own, don’t do too much. You can’t even EAT an olive unless you enhance it by pickling it or something. The body also . . . without the soul, just lies around, lifeless.”
“I’ve got children like that,” the reporter joked.
The three of them laughed.
“Much of the WORLD is like that,” Daniel said. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t accomplish things—they do. Lots. But WHAT do they accomplish? Mostly things with no real eternal meaning. As the Talmud says, ‘Evil people, even while alive are considered dead.’ I don’t think it just means evil people, but anyone who lives a non-eternal existence.”
“I hear that,” the reporter said.
“I’m always amazed by how selfish people can be, until a crisis comes along. Then people who just moments before were thinking only about themselves spring into action to help the people in need. They put their own needs aside. They drop the politics. They just focus on helping other human beings for as long as they are needed. They become like angels for the moment.”
“I know,” the reporter said. “It’s beautiful to read about . . .”
“Even nicer to experience,” Daniel said.
“So, you’re saying that the crisis ‘squeezed’ their soul out of their bodies?”
Daniel smiled, just thinking about it. “It sure looks like it. I mean, one moment all you see is a bunch of bodies doing what bodies do best: looking out for themselves. They’ll even fight one another for a seat on the train, butt in at the bank, or push someone who did. I’ve been there when a fist fight has almost broken out in the checkout line of a supermarket because someone snuck into line . . .”
“I almost got punched once,” the reporter recalled, “by some guy all because I had one item more than the Express Checkout allowed. It was an honest mistake, because I had miscounted in my rush!”
“And we’re just getting started. The newspapers are just stories about bodies doing their thing when the soul is not around to guide them. War is just the extreme of all this.”
Daniel paused for a moment, and then continued, “Then comes the crisis,” he said, “and all of a sudden, people are transformed, including the guy who might have punched you out for having too many items in the Express Line. It’s as if they wake up to a higher level of reality, and give of themselves to the crisis, as opposed to taking from others. The more life-and-death the crisis is, the more this is true.”
The reporter typed away, while Daniel collected some more thoughts to further make his point.
“But people can’t just live from crisis-to-crisis,” the reporter said. “You can’t live life like that, so people are doomed to live most of their lives selfishly?”
“They would have been,” Daniel answered. “But then God gave us the Torah, with LOTS of mitzvos . . . moral crisis, we can call them.”
The reporter made one of those faces that indicated that he was getting it, but not yet completely. So Daniel continued to explain himself.
“Most mitzvos, for most people,” he said, “go against the nature of their bodies. They ask us to do things like . . . get up for minyan when we’d rather sleep in . . . tell the truth when lying seems in our best interest . . . share what we want for ourselves with others. They tell us that doing the mitzvah is good, and the sin, bad . . . and that God sees everything we do and keeps track of all of it. In short, every mitzvah is a MORAL CRISIS . . .”
“ . . . Making us force our bodies to go against their natures and do the soul thing,” the reporter finished.
“Exactly. Mitzvos are to our bodies what olives presses are to the olive. And the result is the same: light.”
“Light from the shemen zayis,” the reporter surmised, “and the light of the soul through the mitzvah.”
“Correct.”
“I never looked at it that way. It’s brilliant.”
“Most lights are,” Daniel kidded to deflect attention from himself.
“That’s why the Menorah is the symbol of Chanukah,” Daniel added. “The Chashmonaim threw caution to the wind and gave up their personal safety for the safety of Torah. They used their bodies to fight like souls, so God acknowledged their heroism with miraculous oil to produce holy light like that of their souls. Even the word “Hashemen,” which means “the oil,” has the same letters as the word “Neshamah,” or “soul.”
The reporter typed at breakneck speed to keep up with Daniel’s words, and only when he finished did he finally realize what he had heard, and it really impressed him. But he could see Daniel wasn’t through yet.
“That was really the glory and splendor that clothed the Kohen Gadol,” Daniel explained. “He gave himself over completely to the service of God, putting all his personal desires aside to officiate on behalf of the people that he loved with everything he had. He lived to be a conduit for the light of God, which meant ALWAYS living the life of the soul. Now, I ask you, can there be anything more glorious or splendorous than that?”
“Wow,” was all the reporter said.
“This is nothing,” Daniel told him. “You should have been here a couple of weeks ago when I gave my Chanukah shiur. Then we really got into all the connections and deeper meanings.”
“You’ve really come a long way in two years,” the reporter said, clearly impressed.
“All I can say is, thank God He has infinite patience. Had it been me up there, I would have wiped me from history a long time ago. He waited, He opened my eyes, and now He’s showing me what I missed over all my years away from Torah.”
For the next 15 minutes they discussed the impact of his change of life on his family, before and after. They talked about his wife and how they met, and his close relationship with Josh, who was pulled into the conversation to give his perspective.
“Our time is almost up,” the reporter said. “I’d like to know before closing, at least for now,” he said, as if to leave the door open for another interview, “how all of this has affected your work.”
Daniel looked at Josh, who looked back at him, and they both smiled at the reporter.
“It hasn’t.”
“It HASN’T?” the reporter said, clearly not hearing the answer he was expecting.
“Just kidding,” Daniel told him. “How has my return to Torah impacted my work?” Daniel repeated, and then said, “Incredibly.”
“How so?”
“You know,” Daniel said, sighing as he spoke, “most people think that when God told the first man not to eat from the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that He meant forever. They assume that the tree, whatever it was, and why ever it was, was forbidden forever. But that’s not true.”
The reporter didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head and then typed away, which told Daniel to continue.
“The problem was the ORDER in which Adam ate. He was supposed to have eaten from the Aitz HaChaim, the Tree of Life first, and THEN from the Aitz HaDa’as. He did it out of order.”
“Out of order?” the reporter stopped typing and asked.
“Yes, out of order,” Daniel answered.
“How did the order make a difference?”
“Because of what each trip represented . . .”
“Which was what?” the reporter jumped in.
“Well, the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra was knowledge about this world, how everything can be used either for good or bad, depending upon the intention of the person using it. On its most basic level, it is knowledge like mathematics, physics, medicine, music, etc. You get the idea. All of this knowledge is neither good nor bad, because these are terms that can be only used for evaluating the choices people make. The physical world itself, other than man, is inherently neutral.”
He gave the reporter’s fingers a chance to catch up before going on.
“A modern example of this is the Internet. Lots of people call it great, while many in the religious world call it evil. The reality is that it is neither. It just is. It has potential. Even the people who call it evil rely upon it when they make a visit to the doctor’s office, or buy a prescription at the drug store. The Internet is neither good nor evil, just CAPABLE of being used for either great good, or terrible evil. It depends on who is using it and why.”
“And the Aitz HaChaim, then,” the reporter said, “is what it always is, Torah, right?”
“Of course. But the question is, what is Torah, besides laws and stories?”
The reporter stopped to consider what Daniel was getting at.
“It’s the FRAMEWORK into which all other knowledge fits. It is like looking at a large wool tapestry, but very close up. From that vantage point, you can see many beautiful and colored wool threads, but not the picture they produce. If anything, they just seem randomly placed.”
“But step away from the tapestry, a few feet back, and it is a whole different story. All of a sudden, the seemingly randomly placed threads seem thoughtfully connected, and the picture they collectively produce is more meaningful and beautiful than any of the threads could be on their own.”
“This is the purpose of Torah, or as it is more appropriately called, ‘Toras Chaim—Instructions for Life.’ Torah is designed to provide mankind with a comprehensive and accurate intellectual framework, a vision of the ENTIRE structure of Creation.”
“As the midrash says, God used the Torah as the ‘blueprint’ for Creation. This means that the more Torah one knows, the more complete one’s vision of ALL of Creation will be. Torah expands a person’s intellectual framework, so that he knows where to place the knowledge of the Aitz HaDa’as.”
“Thus, after Adam ate from the Aitz HaDa’as before the Aitz HaChaim, he hid from God. More accurately, God became hidden from him. It resulted in an intellectual blindness and bias that many of my colleagues, and I too once suffered from. In short, science without God is like a body without a soul. It might be beautiful, but it is, ultimately, lifeless.”
“That’s really beautiful,” the reporter said. Josh had a tear in his eye, which he quickly wiped away before anyone could see it.
“Would you say, in summation, that the Tree of Life—Torah—leads to an intellectual framework. A Torah-based intellectual framework results in the ability to ‘see’ God, which leads to wisdom, and ultimately self-fulfillment?”
Daniel paused to absorb the words. Though he had said similar things before, it was nice to hear that the reporter had come to the same conclusion based upon what he had said. They just sounded more profound coming from someone else.
“Perfect,” was all he said.
“Glorious and splendorous,” Josh added.
“Well,” the reporter said, closing his laptop and preparing it for its return to its case, “I really want to thank you very much for this interview. I expected something good, but it was much better than that. It was amazing. So, thank you.”
“Thank YOU,” Daniel said. “It was a great opportunity.”
Pinchas Winston
Thirtysix.org
