Sometimes the words we say most frequently are the words we understand least well. How many times this week have you said the phrase “Asher Kidshanu B’Mitzvotav v’Tzivanu…”? I hope many of us have said it many times because it’s the phrase at the heart of the mitzvah berakhah that we recite before performing most ritual mitzvot. [On another occasion we can discuss why there is never a berakhah before performing an interpersonal mitzvah like honoring parents, visiting the sick, or giving tzedakah].
The standard mitzvah berakhah, presumably enacted to ensure that we do not perform mitzvot by rote, orients us when we set out to perform a mitzvah. We address God, in the second person, and acknowledge that God has made us holy through the commandments including the specific commandment of X, Y, Z.
But what if the mitzvah was not commanded by God?
The Talmud asks this question concerning the berakhah for lighting Hanukkah candles. Where in the Torah does it say to light Hanukkah candles? Of course it does not, observing Hanukkah is a rabbinic mitzvah, the result of an enactment of the sages in the aftermath of the rededication of the beit hamikdash by the Maccabees. The Talmud’s answer, that the Torah commands us to listen to the sages in each generation, is another topic worthy of study and discussion, but today I want to discuss a second-order question that was posed by Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, the great twentieth century rosh yeshiva and existentialist philosopher in his volume of Pachad Yitzhak dedicated to Hanukkah.
Rav Hutner asks how it can be that the Talmud decides to focus on Hanukkah to ask what is a foundational question about the religious authenticity of rabbinic mitzvot that are not in the Torah but are rather the products of later rabbinic legislation. Lighting Hanukkah candles is not the first mitzvah added after the mitzvot of the Torah. The same Talmudic discussion could have been prompted by a dozen other instances in which a mitzvah blessing is recited and yet the discussion unfolds around the question of Hanukkah lights.
Rav Hutner answers that the very celebration of Hanukkah, the victory of Judaism over an oppressive Greek way of thinking, is intimately connected to the flourishing of the Oral Torah, and the rabbinnic project. Greek thought was scientific, and in uncovering the scientific laws that describe the universe, Greek thinking uncovered the rules set in place through the Ten Statements of creation through which God brought Heaven and Earth and all therein into existence. But the laws of physics and mathematics and chemistry, as they were detailed and described by the great Greek philosophers, are unchanging and eternal and fully mechanistic.
The Torah, by contrast, tells us of the Ten Commandments of revelation which build upon the Ten Statements of creation and introduce a need for human agency and human choice and the human freedom to choose to do what is right. Greek philosophy correctly uncovers so much that is true about the universe, but on Hanukkah we commemorate the victory of creative moral freedom over a deterministic, unchanging, and mechanistic worldview.
Throughout the period of Greek persecution Jews remained safe and secure in our ancestral homeland and the beit hamikdash was never in danger of destruction. For Rav Hutner, the Greek persecution was a time of darkness due to the Torah itself facing exile into the sea of Greek wisdom. When we emerged from that darkness, the establishment of new holidays and new mitzvot was a fitting response. Greek wisdom can describe the world as it is; the Torah exists to shape the world as it should be. To engage with Torah, in both its written and oral forms together, offers us a life of moral freedom and a life of creativity. We are indeed sanctified through the rabbinic mitzvah asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav of lighting Hanukkah candles, and God did command us to do so v’tzivanu by authorizing us to engage with the Torah in a spirit of midrash and creativity and infinite uncovering of new implications and new meanings.
We find ourselves now in a period of darkness. I don’t know that the Torah itself is in exile, but the mass murder of Jews in Australia weighs so heavily on so many Jewish hearts this Shabbat for all the ways that it was a shocking act of violence and for all the ways that it was utterly unsurprising in the context of the long and sad history of antisemitic violence. The cascading litany of tragic and criminal events occurring near and far over the course of the week was personally disorienting and frightening and made the cold winds feel more biting and bitter and made the darkness feel thicker and heavier.
We have to decide how we are going to respond and how we are going to ground ourselves, spiritually, in the face of a week like this past week.
Fatalism about antisemitism or about murder is, fundamentally, a Greek response that sees only mechanistic and unchanging and eternal laws of nature with no room for human agency and with no room for human responsibility. But vulgar bravado in response to this darkness is also not the way of the Torah.
We can see two examples of how to respond to desperate times in Reuven and Yehudah’s attempts to convince their father Yaakov to allow Binyamin to go with his brothers to Egypt to purchase food during the years of famine. Reuven and Yehudah were both under intense pressure due to the enduring years of famine. But, as Sara pointed out to me, the family’s fear for Binyamin’s safety was because of the erratic and mysterious “Egyptian” they had interacted with who seemed to take a special interest in their family and, out of all the thousands of refugees streaming into Egypt to purchase food, singled out the children of Yaakov for special scrutiny and suspicion. Reuven and Yehudah were scared of antisemitism.
Reuven tries to assure Yaakov to release Binyamin by offering to kill his own sons if he cannot return Binyamin to his father. Rabbi David Weiss Halvini called this “over-confidence.” I would characterize it as “vulgar confidence.” Vulgar confidence is loud, absolute, and performative. It relies on displays of power and has no room for doubt of any kind. It treats human life instrumentally and as unimportant. Why would Yaakov feel reassured by Reuven’s offer to kill Reuven’s children? Those children are Yaakov’s grandchildren; their lives cannot substitute for Binyamin’s life.
Yehudah then steps forward, and in a statement that earns him the leadership of family, says quite simply:
אָֽנֹכִי֙ אֶֽעֶרְבֶ֔נּוּ מִיָּדִ֖י תְּבַקְשֶׁ֑נּוּ אִם־לֹ֨א הֲבִיאֹתִ֤יו אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ וְהִצַּגְתִּ֣יו לְפָנֶ֔יךָ וְחָטָ֥אתִֽי לְךָ֖ כׇּל־הַיָּמִֽים׃
I myself will be his guarantor; you may hold me responsible: if I do not bring him back to you and set him before you, I shall stand guilty before you forever.
Where Reuven externalized the risk to his children, Yehudah accepts the moral cost on himself. Where Reuven treats lives as interchangeable, Yehudah accepts responsibility for his brother and pledges himself to his father. In place of Reuven’s vulgar confidence, Yehudah offers the confidence of responsibility.
This is the exact same dynamic that Rav Hutner discovered in Hanukkah. We emerged victorious from the darkness of Greek oppression by creating obligations upon ourselves.
And as we come out of the darkness enveloping the world this week, we need to respond, not with the vulgar confidence of Reuven, not with bombastic and performative statements of rage and revenge, and certainly not with the fatalism that sees murder and massacre as eternal components of an unchanging universe. We should respond in the spirit of Yehudah and in the spirit of Yehudah HaMakabai and Hanukkah. With responsible confidence rooted in celebrating the human capacity to change and to discover, to accept responsibility and to create obligations to God and to one another.
Hanukkah, as Rav Hutner explained, is the holiday of the Oral Torah par excellence. The Oral Torah requires us to be receptive and open to receiving its message from our teachers and from our community. And it requires all of us to contribute what we know to our children, students, and community. The Oral Torah is sustained by relationships that enable that sort of communication and the Oral Torah is sustained by the hiddush of every true beit midrash, the innovative spirit in which new ideas are discovered and we give voice to understandings that have not been articulated before. When we are scared, we can revert to old patterns of reacting to the world. But change is the only constant in this world and the Oral Torah is what allows the Torah to survive.
Doomscrolling and social media are perfectly attuned to Greek fatalism and the bombastic vulgar confidence of Reuven. How much better to respond to the death of our brothers and sisters by organizing to care for the recovery of injured and surviving family members? How much better to respond to an attack on Jewish life and Jewish lives by investing in our own Jewish community and tefilah, Torah, and Hesed we nurture here?
The Oral Torah is the Torah created through the Jewish people, transmitted by the Jewish people, and that binds us in webs of care and concern for one another far beyond the 613 mitzvot of the written Torah. Let’s allow our love and concern and responsibility for one another to sanctify us through the mitzvot that God commanded us to impose upon ourselves.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 