STAM
TORAH
PARSHAS VAYESHEV
5777
“HOLY LIGHTS”
Yosef Begun, the noted Russian refusenik, wrote of his
experiences:
“It
was in the grim Russian winter of 1971 that I celebrated my first real
Hanukkah, in prison.
“I
was confined in the notorious Moscow Moscow
“Hanukkah
was approaching. Getting into the spirit, we enthusiastically discussed
battles and the ultimate triumph of the Maccabees. One of our more
Judaically advanced cellmates gave us insightful lessons about the laws and
customs of the Festival of Lights. It goes without saying that we had no
prayer books or other items with which to celebrate a Jewish holiday.
Hanukkah is supposed to be a holiday of gift-giving, family gatherings,
dreidels and songs. We had no practical means of celebration, and that
saddened us deeply.
“Fortunately,
we had among us a man who was a wizard at handicraft. Valery Krijzak -
now an engineer living in Jerusalem
“For
Hanukkah, Krijzak made a wonderful dreidel out of bread, engraving the four
Hebrew initials for ness gadol haya sham ("a great miracle happened there").
But it was the day before Hanukkah and we still didn't have any candles with
which to fulfill the mitzvah of the Festival of Lights to commemorate the
Jewish victory of over two thousand years ago. And without those lights,
Hanukkah is not Hanukkah.
“But then
the miracle of Hanukkah took place in our days in our cell.
“Without
saying a word to us, Krijzak began to bang on the cell door, calling for the
guard. When the small aperture was opened, he began to wail, "Call
the doctor. I'm in terrible pain." Within ten minutes, the
prison medic arrived. Krijzak moaned, "Doctor, I am having a
terrible hemorrhoid attack. Please give me some suppositories."
“Fifteen
minutes later, Krijzak received several suppositories. Now we had the
material from which to make candles. The rest was purely technical.
We pulled out threads from our prison garb and rolled them together to make
wicks. Then we placed the wax-based suppositories on our aluminum spoons
and lit them with matches (prisoners were permitted to have cigarettes and
matches) and melted them down. We placed the makeshift wicks into the
wax, which we then shaped into candles. We stuck the candles on a plate,
which we then placed on the table.
“Filled with
pride, we sat around our glowing table and sang Maoz Tzur. We sang more
Hanukkah songs, talked about the Maccabees' revolt and spun the dreidel.
We all had an immense feeling of closeness to each other and a strong sense of
unity with our fellow Jews.
“We may have
been cut off from the rest of the world, enclosed behind thick steel doors, but
we were still with our people.”
The story of Yosef and the brothers is from the
most captivating in the entire Torah. The dispute between these most righteous
of men is almost incomprehensible. The explanations of the great commentaries notwithstanding,
we still are left with a vague understanding of what occurred.
It is not only the Torah’s narrative of the story
of Yosef which is difficult to understand, but also the story of Yehuda. The
Torah interrupts its detailed account of the story of Yosef to relate what
occurred with Yehuda.
The brothers were aware that the future monarchy
was destined to emerge from Yehuda and they granted him a certain level of
leadership. It was Yehuda’s suggestion that they sell Yosef to passing
merchants. When the brothers saw Yaakov’s unmitigated grief and refusal to be
consoled they challenged Yehuda’s leadership. “Had you told us to bring Yosef
home we would have listened to you.” As a result of their disenchantment with
Yehuda he departed from the brothers and settled in Abdulam.
The Torah relates that Yehuda married and had
three sons. His oldest son Er married the righteous Tamar and died, then his
second son Onan married Tamar and died. Yehuda feared for his third son
Shaylah’s life and sent Tamar home.
Tamar was a righteous woman and knew, through
Divine Prophecy, that the Davidic monarchy was destined to descend from her. She
understood that Satan was doing his utmost to prevent that union from
occurring. Tamar decided that she had to utilize an unconventional means to
lure Yehuda into being with her. She posed as a woman of ill repute and sat at
the fork of the road as Yehuda approached.
The Medrash[1] relates that under normal
circumstances the righteous Yehuda would never have succumbed to such a ruse.
“Rabbi Yochanan said, ‘Yehuda sought to pass by Tamar. The Holy One, blessed is
He, dispatched the angel of desire to entrap him. The angel said to Yehuda,
‘Where are you going? From where will kings arise? From where will great men
arise?’ Yehuda then detoured to her by the road. He was coerced, against his
good sense.”
After that encounter Yehuda could not locate the
woman he was with. “He inquired of the people of her place, ‘Where is the
kedasha, the one at the crossroads by the road’? And they said, ‘there was no
kedasha here’.[2]”
It is intriguing that the Torah uses the word
‘kedasha’[3] to refer to ‘the woman of
ill-repute’, as the word is strikingly similar to the word ‘kedusha – holiness’[4]. What is the essence of the
concept of kedusha?
Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld zt’l[5] noted that, in his opinion,
the greatest challenge our generation faces is ‘desacrilization’. In his words,
“desacrilization is the violation and disintegration of the boundaries of
sanctity”.
The Hebrew word for sacred is ‘kodesh’. The
opposite of kodesh is chol, which means ordinary, mundane, and
commonplace. Shabbos is a day of kedusha,
while the rest of the week or days of chol.
To understand the depth of that distinction we must understand the etymology of
the words.
Chol also refers to sand. What is the connection
between the days of the week and sand? The most prominent feature of sand is
its particularity. Sand is composed of innumerable miniscule particles, each
being its own separate entity. If one takes a handful of sand and allows it to
run between his fingertips, there is nothing to hinder the flow of the sand as
it drains from inside his hand. Each grain is on its own.
The word kodesh symbolizes the opposite. Although
the word kodesh is most notably used to refer to holiness and sanctity, it has
other meanings as well. When the Torah states the prohibition of planting
kilayim – mixtures of different seeds that take root together it uses the word tikdash. “You shall not sow your
vineyard with a mixture, pen tikdash
- lest it become forbidden - the growth of the seed that you plant and the
produce of your vineyard[6].” The verb tikdash connotes gathering two diverse
things together, albeit in a forbidden fashion.
The concept of kedusha
is to connect and unite disparate elements. In that sense, planting two seeds
in the ground and merging them is an abused form of kedusha. On the other hand, the commandment that we sanctify
ourselves also utilizes the word kidshu,
because in doing so we are connecting and binding ourselves with G-d, the
source of all sanctity.
That is why the days of the week are called chol while Shabbos is kodesh. During the first six days of
creation, every element of creation throughout the cosmos was disparate. There
was no harmony of synchronous harmony between them. The world was in a state of
chaotic agitated turmoil, like free-flowing sand. But with the arrival of
Shabbos G-d ‘rested’, i.e. He infused into the world the energy and ability to
revitalize and regenerate itself. Suddenly the world had meaning and purpose.
The entire cosmos was suddenly transformed into a catalyst suited for the
sanctification of G-d’s Name. The world became united and integrated, an
organic whole. That is the meaning of kedusha;
cohesion and perfect integration[7].
A woman of ill repute causes a malevolent and
detrimental connection between two disparate components. Through her luring,
she fosters an egregious misuse of kedusha,
but it is kedusha nonetheless.
The moments when we light the Chanukah candles are
undoubtedly special and almost mystical. After lovingly kindling the hallowed
lights we recite the ancient declaration ‘Haneiros
hallalu’. In that paragraph, we declare, “These candles are kodesh – holy, and we have no permission
to use them; only to see them alone, so that we will thank, praise, Your great
Name, for Your miracles, for Your wonders, and for Your salvations.”
The Chanukah candles are not merely to commemorate
a past miracle. In a deeper sense those miniscule lights are great unifiers,
creating an invisible bond between every Jew in the world, in all four corners
of the globe. At the moment that we hold our candle to the wick atop our
menorah wherever we may be, we are binding ourselves to our brethren, as well
as our ancestors throughout the millennia of exile, dating back to the
Hasmonean Maccabes themselves.
Every Jew who lights the Chanukah candles merges
his light with the lights of the Menorah of the Maccabes, of Rashi, Rambam,
Maharal, Ba’al Shem Tov, Vilna Gaon, Chofetz Chaim, to our own ancestors – from
Babylonia to Crusade-ridden Europe, from Spain to Poland, from Bergen-Belsen
and Auschwitz to the gulag in Siberia, to the Israeli soldiers who light the
candles at their army bases far from home.
Chanukah always coincides with the Christian
holidays which also include displays of light. Their lights may be bigger and
even prettier, but their lights are chol, they are all separate. But the
Chanukah candles are kodesh, for they connect us to an internal spark within each
of us. It is the spark that our foes could not extinguish and will never
extinguish.
“Cut off from the
rest of the world, but still with our people”
“These candles are kodesh “
Rabbi
Dani Staum, LMSW
Rabbi,
Kehillat New Hempstead
Rebbe/Guidance
Counselor – ASHAR
Principal
– Ohr Naftoli- New Windsor
[1] Bereishis Rabbah 85:8
[2] 38:21-22
[3] As opposed to the more common word
‘zonah’, as used in verse 15
[4] Rashi explains that, as opposed to
a holy person who designates themselves to spiritual matters, such a woman is ‘mikudeshes – designated’ and prepared
for licentiousness.
[5] Rabbi Freifeld Speaks, p.
140
[6] Devorim 22:9
[7] See the remainder of Rabbi
Freifeld’s essay entitled “A Higher Kind of Fear” where he eloquently and
magnificently explains how our world has lost its sense of synchronism and
cohesion, which has caused rampant ‘desacrilization’.
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