Chanukah: Purity at the Beginning of Every Service

1“This was the dedication of the altar on the day it was anointed.”¹ My holy ancestor, zt"l, asked a question in his holy sefer Toldos Adam.² Why are these days called “Chanukah,” after the dedication, the chanukah, of the altar, as the Maharsha explains?³ Why are they not named after the miracle? After all, the main miracle was with the oil, and the name Chanukah says nothing at all about the miracle.

2aHe explained it as follows. The Shulchan Aruch writes, “The women are accustomed not to do work while the lamps are burning.”⁴ The reason is that when the Chanukah lamps are kindled, those who are privileged to feel the holiness of the light sense in it the lights of holy Shabbos. That is why the women do no work then, as on Shabbos. The lamps point to the miracle, and through the miracle Hashem showed that there is no such thing as nature in the world: He always runs the world through miracles, and everything is His power alone. This is also what Shabbos is about: work is forbidden on Shabbos because Shabbos shows that all forces are nullified before Him. It shows that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world entirely by His power, as the verse says: “For in six days Hashem made … and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.”⁵

2bSo when the Chanukah lamps are kindled, the holiness of Shabbos is awakened and flows down. That is why these days are called Chanukah, a name that points to holy Shabbos. Chanu, “they rested,” is in the spirit of “and He rested, vayanach, on the seventh day.”⁶ And kah, the letters kaf and hei, whose numerical value is 25, stands for the twenty-fifth of Kislev. In other words, the power of the lighting on the twenty-fifth of Kislev awakens the holiness of Shabbos. A person then comes to believe that Hashem created the world, and he recognizes and sees that everything is a miracle, coming from His power, entirely above nature. Those are his holy words.

3The question can also be answered another way. The Pnei Yehoshua asks a well-known question: why was a miracle needed at all?⁷ Impurity, the Gemara says, is permitted in the service of the community,⁸ so they could have lit the Menorah even with impure oil. He answers that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to show how dear Bnei Yisrael are to Him, so that they would fulfill the mitzvah in purity and in its most beautiful form, with hiddur. That is why He performed the miracle. But we must still ask why Hashem performed a miracle only on Chanukah. It appears that on many occasions offerings were brought in impurity. [The responsa Chacham Tzvi proves this from what we learned in the Gemara: “If one was standing and offering a meal offering and it became impure in his hand, we say to him, ‘Be clever and keep quiet.’” See there further.⁹] Why, then, did Hashem deal with Israel with hiddur on Chanukah in particular?

4So we must add a further point. At that time they were dedicating the Beis HaMikdash anew with the holy service, and Hashem did not want the beginning of the service to be done in impurity. He therefore performed the miracle so that the service would begin in purity. For we know how much the beginning, the reishis, of every mitzvah matters, since “everything follows the head.”¹⁰ The holy sefarim likewise teach that one must take care that the beginning of the day be in purity. As my holy father and teacher, zt"l, wrote in his Seder HaYom: “The main thing is the beginning of the day. As the sefarim say, the way to fulfill the mitzvah of bikkurim, the first fruits, nowadays is to sanctify the beginning of the day to Hashem.” So far his words.¹¹ It follows that the whole miracle came mainly because of the dedication, the chinuch, of the Beis HaMikdash. That is why the miracle was named Chanukah, after that dedication. The name shows how much the dedication, the beginning of a mitzvah, matters: above all, the beginning must be in purity, and for its sake the miracle was performed.

5May Hashem grant that we always be privileged to serve the Creator in purity at the beginning of the day and at the beginning of every mitzvah. Amen, may it be His will.