Separations are a natural part of development. How we handle them determines whether they lead to dead ends or new life.
View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
It’s a most wonderful time of the year. Enchanting stories about bright stars during a dark night, a miraculous birth signifying hope, luminescent candles defying the constraint of time, and warrior heroes reclaiming sacred ground.
Historians have probed the objective parameters of these stories. But capturing our hearts have been not the facts behind but the meaning within the underlying events.
Chanukah has three foundational stories. Each presents a slightly differently reason for why we celebrate it for eight days.
The oldest written record of the holiday’s events, the Second Book of Maccabees, declares that the Jewish recapture of the Temple from invading Assyrian troops was celebrated for eight days in order to make up for the inability to have celebrated the eight-day holiday Sukkot during wartime conditions. The First Book of Maccabees, written a few years later, merely mandates that the rededication of the altar last for eight days. No reason for the length of celebration is given.
The third story is found in the Talmud, written over 500 years after the underlying events. Recitation about military battles and Maccabean heroism are greatly abbreviated. And no mention is made about Sukkot. Instead, we encounter for the first time a story about the miracle of one days’ worth of oil lasting for eight. This story is a substantial break from prior recorded rationales.
The refocus from Maccabean heroism to divine miracle was a rabbinic choice. By the 6th century C.E. the Jewish people were living dispersed across the Mediterranean world. They enjoyed no political sovereignty in any land. They lived at the sufferance of others. The rabbinic enterprise, as expressed through the Talmud, was to cohere a scattered and militarily and politically disempowered people. And to wait. For return, reunion and restoration.
To emphasize this disruptive shift from the militant armed Jewish nationalism of the 1st century C.E. to a more quietistic, faith-abiding approach, the early rabbis assigned as the haftarah reading for the Shabbat of Chanukah verses from Zechariah, including: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”
The rabbis shattered tradition in order to facilitate the eventual birth of the primal promise: to dwell in wholeness.
Heather Ernst grew up in New Jersey. As a child, she played with Lego and Erector sets, fascinated with the opportunities each gave her to conceive and construct. She attended architecture school and developed a successful career. But something was missing. Joy. Excitement. A sense of being purposefully alive.
One day, on a whim, she painted a semi-abstract image of fall trees, Jesen Shizzle, with an autumn sun that has ignited a grove of trees. Embers glow on a cooling forest floor. There is heat and coolness, combining in a passionate celebration of life. She sold the work quickly. And a new possibility opened before her.
Ernst has described the shift she experienced from being an architect to becoming an abstract artist: “As an architect, I planted buildings for use by code, via zoning, safely anchored to the ground, according to required, civilized mandates. When I make an abstract landscape come alive, I think of energetic parts of a living whole. I imagine shapes, colors and lines all having mischievous intentions….My imagination is way more vivid than the world I live in, and that’s what sets my mind on fire.”
Pictured here is her work Shattered. There is a burst out from a white hot center. Fragments from the explosion hurl outward toward dimensions of red, yellow, orange, green, and blue. These fragments are not damaged pieces of a greater whole. They are points of transmission creating something new. She describes them as synapses, junctions between neurons that allow the sharing of signals between them.
About the shattering described in her painting, Ernst writes: “The synapses in our minds carry the sparks of imagination….That’s where it all comes from. If your desire propels you to dance, to produce, to love, we create that which carries the earth through time. The sparks that appear to scatter and shatter from a sparkler are as much like the spirit each one of us has, as is the force of the sun’s heat sustaining the world.”
Ernst’s description of shattering in her painting evokes the kabbalistic notion of Shevirat haKeilim, the shattering of vessels that occurred with the big bang of Creation. In that sacred mythology, the breaking apart of containers of divine energy is not a flaw in the creative process. It is the very essence of creation: to bring about a separation of light into distinct qualities and attributes. They introduce multiplicity into existence. New forms do not obscure the unity of their source. They make it easier for those who seek it to see and connect with that unity.
The family of Jacob reaches a critical moment in this week’s Torah portion, Miketz. The very word which gives the portion its Hebrew name means “to cut into pieces.”
Joseph, who had been sold into slavery by his jealous brothers and unjustly imprisoned by his Egyptian owner, has managed to reach the pinnacle of power in the world’s mightiest empire through his skillful vision and management of resources. Now his brothers stand before him, begging for food. They do not recognize him, transformed in appearance from Hebrew shepherd to Egyptian nobleman. What awaits them: an avenging death or a redeeming life?
Their father has already vaguely sensed the tension they would face. Before their departure to Egypt in search of food, Jacob had told his sons that that was shever/sever in Egypt. Depending on how one vocalizes the same three symbols that construct those two words, they can mean either “brokenness” or “hope.” Or perhaps hope is to be found within the brokenness. As we watch the narrative unfold, we marvel at the display of courage and empathy necessary to birth new life out of the shattered vessel that is Jacob’s family.
“It’s A Most Wonderful Time of the Year” is a song that pervades the air at this season. First recorded in 1963 by Andy Williams, it was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle. Pola was born Sidney Edward Pollucsek, the son of Alexander and Ida Friedman Pollucsek, Hungarian Jews. Wyle was born Bernard Weissman. He began his musical life playing piano at clubs in the Catskills. Most famously, he composed the theme song for “Gilligan’s Island.”
Heather Ernst reminds us that while adherence to past rules and codes can build great structures anchored to the ground, shattering creativity can birth new lines of connection. Through Jacob and his family, Torah describes moments where disaster and revival stand on edge, awaiting the courageous display of empathy and responsibility that will enable life to prevail. And Edward Pola and George Wyle let us know that everyone carries within unknown stories rich for discovery. Miracles and mystery, illumination and enchantment. It’s a most wonderful time of the year.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday December 26 as we explore it’s a most wonderful time of the year.
