Hanukkah has always been the holiday of perspective. We light small flames not to illuminate the room, but to illuminate the past – and perhaps, the present. The story seems familiar: a tiny Jewish force defeats a vast empire; a jug of oil burns longer than the laws of nature allow; expectation breaks and history changes.
But Hanukkah’s real genius was never its history, it was its theory of history. Jews learned to see moments not as isolated incidents but as patterns, echoes across generations, and reminders that improbability is part of our grammar.
A tiny Judean population stood against the Seleucid Greek war machine. Today, 7.6 million Jews stand against coalitions exponentially larger: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, Iran, and the Houthis, all supported politically, financially, and narratively by vast regional networks and sectors of global opinion.
We are not meant to win these confrontations. Generals, diplomats and statisticians all say so.
And yet, here we are again, doing what shouldn’t be possible.
Modern oil in modern lamps
Consider a few scenes that belong, or should belong, in our liturgy.
Iran launched thousands of missiles in the last two years: Barrages that could have leveled cities, crippled infrastructure, and killed tens of thousands. Instead, Israel intercepted an unprecedented number, more than all other interceptions in the history of warfare combined.
The Iron Dome and Arrow systems literally shoot down missiles with missiles, sometimes outside Earth’s atmosphere – an act that even experts describe as bordering on the absurd.
We tend to credit the engineers. But pause for a moment. Israel has become the first country on Earth to even has such a defense system because it is the only country that has survived long enough to need one and then to build it.
When technology itself becomes folklore, perhaps something more than circuitry is at play.
A plague retold
During the September 2024 pager strike on Hezbollah, Israel executed a daring targeted operation that neutralized terrorists via personal devices without harming civilians. Analysts are still looking for explanations in their cyber warfare and intelligence networks. But Jewish memory reaches further back – to a night in Egypt when Divine judgment struck only the firstborn, sparing the uninvolved. In both cases, destruction traveled with precision uncharacteristic of war.
History is not repeating; it is rhyming.
Expectation vs outcome
When we were praying for the return of our hostages, many people whispered the truth: We are praying for what we think is impossible. And yet 20 living men came home, and almost all of the murdered were brought back to their families for burial.
This is not strategy; this is grace masquerading as logistics.
Military logic predicted disaster. Instead, enemies are fractured, their infrastructures have collapsed, and Israel’s cities stand. Rockets that should have hit major targets missed. Attacks that should have overwhelmed us were absorbed.
That is the language Hanukkah: What should have lasted one day lasted eight.
Today we read it: What should have collapsed, endured. What should have failed, prevailed.
If we still created rituals
Hanukkah gave us oil, doughnuts, spinning tops, and lights. If Jews still minted new rituals, perhaps we would commemorate the defeat of Hamas with a meal of hummus, followed by eight light displays from the Iron Beam laser – one for each of the eight threats felled or neutralized:
(1) Hamas in Gaza, (2) Hezbollah in Lebanon, (3) Islamic Jihad in Samaria, (4) Syria, (5) Iran, (6) the Houthis, (7) ideological hostilities from woke Western governments, and (8) media warfare from the BBC, CNN, and their like.
It sounds playful, but Jewish ritual is always playful – the dreidel is a toy whose message is rebellion.
The miracle may be bigger than we think
Hanukkah does not say “nature broke.” It says something subtler – that reality contains seams, hidden doors where faith and effort meet. The Maccabees stepped through one. So did the Israelis, in 2023 to 2025.
And perhaps the point is not simply to win but to notice.
The candles of Hanukkah are not there to help us see the world. They are there to help us recognize that improbable outcomes, precise salvations, and impossible survivals are not just part of our story but part of our identity.
Two thousand years ago, Jews lit lamps to honor a miracle. Today, we look at the Iron Dome missiles streaking across the sky; the return of hostages no one expected to live; rockets that should have killed thousands but didn’t; and we are watching another chapter of Jewish history being written.
The challenge of Hanukkah is not believing that miracles occurred then. It is daring to believe that they are still occurring now.
The writer, a rabbi, is author of The Seven Facets of Healing, which describes the positive steps that anyone can take following a crisis in their life. It is available to order on Amazon and in Israel at bookpod.co.il/product/the-seven-facets-of-healing.