Chanukah Dvar Torah
Here's the Dvar Torah i gave at our family dinner. I heard this devar while in Yeshivah.
The miracle of Chanukah is two things. One, the fact that the menorah oil lasted 8 days instead of one day. And two, that we were saved from destruction. What's the difference between our miracle of being saved on Chanukah and the miracle of being saved on ( Read more... )
Our primary response was physical battle and revolt. A physical response to a spiritual threat.
PURIM: The goal of Haman was to eradicate the Jewish PEOPLE. Just as Hitler did not care if a Jew was religious or not religoius, Sephardic or Ashkenazic, so too with Haman. He didn't care about our spirituality - he just wanted all of us dead. Our PHYSICAL lives were being threatened.
Our primary response was 3 days of fasting and praying. A spiritual response to a physical threat.
WHY?
First of all, there's some GREAT mp3 talks on this topic by Rav Tatz and by historian Ken Spiro found at http://www.SimpleToRemember.com
I recommend most the following mp3 lecture called "Providence & Responsibility" by Rav Gottlieb. Here's the download link from SimpleToRemember.com
http://audio.simpletoremember.com/gottlieb/Providence-n-Responsibility.mp3
Secondly,
If you want a real understanding, you should listen to the mp3s above. But a simple explanation would be this:
The entire reason that a soul comes down into the physical world and into a physical body is to grow spiritually. If you take away the spirituality, the soul has no reason to be here; the soul my as well leave the body and go back to where it came from.
So if a Jew's spiritual life is being threatened, it is worth dying for.
So then you ask, "Yeah, but if Haman KILLS a person, then the soul still loses its ability to fulfill its purpose for coming into this world!" And THAT's why you gotta listen to the mp3s above!
In my own words, if a person is killed by Haman, his soul and body both return to their source: the body to the earth, and the soul to where soul's come from. Also, G-d says in the Torah that he will never completely destroy the Jewish people. So they KNEW that Haman would not be able to kill Judaism because G-d guarantees that there will always be Jews who survive and rebuild.
But if a Jew is assimilated by the Greeks, he stays alive, but his soul is trapped! Trapped in the body of a helenized, greekified, pagan god-worshipping, pig-eating, morally debased Jew. In that sense, the soul doesn't just lose the opportunity for growth that it came here for, rather, it is degraded beyond what it bargained for!
The terrible fate they faced in Chanukah was far worse than they faced in Purim.
Hence we know that a great number of Jews in the Chanukah story died for the sake of keeping the mitzvot. They would rather die than defile their souls so terribly, death before breaking the contract we made between us and G-d at Mt. Sinai.
For the record, Jewish law says thus:
If a person is faced with going against the mitzvot or death, he is SUPPOSED to choose to go against the mitzvot and save his life! There are 3 exceptions for which death takes precedence: 1) Sexual immorality 2) Committing murder 3) Idol worship. If the choice is doing any of the above three or death, a Jew is to choose death.
However, if the threat is in public, and not in private, such as in the Chanukah story, and in many stories from the holocaust and Europe where Jews were put on trial in front of whole towns or cities - a Jew is supposed to face death before breaking even the "smallest" of Jewish laws. Many rabbis say that if he choose to go against the mitzvot in public he will be forgiven, but that his optimal choice is death. Just as in Chanukah.
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