First Chanukah miracle: Our belief in the future

It must have been an incredible moment; carefully brushing away the layers of dirt, the small team of volunteers responsible for this section of the dig had found something. After 2,000 years, the top of an ancient scroll — and as would soon be discovered, a pile of scrolls — was there, lying just beneath the surface, its tip protruding slightly from the ground. The year was 1964, the State of Israel was only 18 years old, and the former IDF chief of staff in Israel’s war of independence, Yigael Yadin, had returned to his true love, archeology.

Before his three year long excavation, skeptics were doubtful that the story of Masada was anything more than a fantasy of Josephus, And then, 2,00 years after the mighty Roman empire was determined to put an end to every last vestige of Jewish independence and sovereignty, the modern day commander of the first Jewish army in two millennium pulled out of the ground 14 scrolls, including portions of the book of Deuteronomy containing Moshe’s farewell speech to the Jewish people as they were about to enter the land of Israel, word for word exactly as we have it in the Torah scrolls we read today. 

To understand the most amazing aspect of this find, we need to look at a moment no less amazing in an entirely different story, of a completely different era of the Jewish people. 

T

his week we celebrate the festival of Chanukah. For eight days we will light our Menorahs, spin our dreidels and re-tell our children the story of how the few, representing a small Jewish army, took on the mightiest empire of the day, and fought the Greek army to a standstill, re-taking Jerusalem and rededicating the Temple in the year 165 BCE. 

And why do we celebrate this festival for eight days? We know the famous legend which appears in the Talmud tractate Shabbat, of how the Jews could not find pure oil with which to light the Menorah, finally locating one small cruse of oil, sufficient only to light the Menorah for one day. And we tell our children how this cruse of oil miraculously lasted for eight days, until new oil could be produced in purity and brought to the Temple, ensuring that the light of the Menorah would not be extinguished.