One Cruse of Faith: Purifying Thought and Speech

31The Gemara answers its question, what Chanukah is, with the story of the oil: the Greeks entered the Heichal and defiled all its oils; the house of the Chashmona'im grew strong, defeated the Greeks, searched, and found only one cruse, sealed with the Kohen Gadol's seal and holding enough to light for one day; and a miracle let them light from it for eight days.

32aRead as a hint, the account follows what the holy sefarim say: the kingdom of Greece wanted then to defile all the thoughts of Israel and Israel's very root, so that Israel would be remembered no more, Heaven forbid. All the more so since, as the holy Zohar explains, there had to be those standing ready against the orlah, the impure force of the foreskin.¹ That is, the Greeks led Israel into this sin [against the covenant]. As the Gemara relates, the decree was that every maiden who married must first be violated by the tifsar, the governor.² They also decreed against circumcision. All of it was meant to falsify, as it were, the King's seal, the sign of the holy covenant. Through this sin, Heaven save us, the light of a man's eyes is taken from him: he is distanced from the light of the face of the living King, and all his thoughts become confused.

32bThis is the hint in “they defiled all the oils in the Heichal.” Oil stands for thought, as the Tikkunei Zohar says: “Chochmah, the brain, is thought within.”³ The Heichal stands for speech. As the Gemara says, “Not as I am written am I read: I am read with alef-dalet and written with yud-hei.”⁴ So the Name we speak is Adnus (אדני), and Adnus has the numerical value of heichal (היכל), sixty-five. So it is in the verse “Hashem is in His holy palace (heichal)”:⁵ the palace is speech, and the inner part of the palace is the Four-Letter Name, which is thought. At that time the Greeks defiled all the inwardness of thought, and all of it through accursed philosophy, the Greek wisdom that probes everything with the intellect and will not believe. Through such probing they blemished every thought and spoiled the brain, which is hinted at in “Chochmah, the brain.”

32cAfterward, when the Chashmona'im won, “they searched”: they searched for a way to repair speech, and the remedy for it is to purify the thoughts. “And they found only one cruse of oil”: to unify His great Name and to believe with simple faith in the Oneness of the Creator, blessed be He. Emunah, faith, is called “one,” for it is the alef, the letter whose value is one. As Chazal said, Chavakuk came and based all the mitzvos on one: “The righteous shall live by his faith.”⁶ The first of the ways of Hashem and of His service is to believe with complete faith in the Oneness and the existence of the Creator. And faith and wisdom are one, as the Ramban explains in Sefer HaEmunah VehaBitachon. This is “one cruse of oil” [one faith that is also wisdom].

32dThey had repaired only the mind, while in truth the seven holy middos, the traits of the heart, had also been spoiled and blemished. Even so, “a miracle was done with it,” as the Kedushas Levi explains: nes (נס), “miracle,” has the numerical value of mah (מה), “what,” together with Adnus (אדני), for 45 and 65 make 110. That is, a person sets his heart on every thing and asks mah: “What is this? From where does it have this power?” It has it only from Hashem, Who is Adon, Master, over all; and so he cannot come to sin. He does complete teshuvah for the whole past and sanctifies and purifies all his limbs, and through this all his middos become holy. This is “a miracle was done with it, and they lit”: they set the middos alight and brought holy life into all of them, so that in every trait “the righteous shall live by his faith.”

33What we have said explains the line of Maoz Tzur, “Men of understanding, bnei vinah, established eight days for song and joyous praise.”⁷ Understanding means understanding one thing from another.⁸ From the force of the miracle they understood that nature too is a kind of miracle, and so they established all “eight days.” That is, the following year, when they saw that the light was awakened on the first night as well, they understood all the more that on the first night, too, there had been a miracle.

34As for Chazal's saying that Greece told Israel, “Write on the horn of the ox that you have no portion in the God of Israel”:⁹ the horn grows from the surplus of the brain. Through evil thoughts and the blemish of the covenant, a man becomes like a beast, as if an ox's horns had grown on him. But Yosef HaTzaddik, who guarded the sign of the holy covenant, earned “his horns are the horns of a re'em,” a wild ox.¹⁰ And the letters of re'em (ראם) are the initials of the angels Refael, Uriel and Michael.