ZOT - THIS is Chanuka! But we can and do read much significance into the name. THIS is Chanuka! And what were the first seven days? Not Chanuka? Of course, all 8 days of Chanuka are CHanuka. But we also have a sense of counting through the first seven in order to arrive at the full-Chanukiya of the 8th day. Each day is special on its own - that's why we can say full Hallel on each day. If the days were just "another, another, another...", we would not have the necessary justification to say full Hallel. This is one of the reasons given for the reduced Hallel (a.k.a. Half-Hallel or Hallel with Skipping) of the second through seventh days of Pesach. In last week's Lead Tidbit and else- where, we made the case for the significance of Chazal's choice of 8 days for the celebration of the victory of Traditional Judaism over the forces of Greek culture and religion in particular, and over the allure of assimilation in general. Let's add a few things to pot (as if we spun a PEI in a game of dreidel). The Gemara in Avoda Zara tells us that when Adam HaRishon perceived that the days were getting shorter and shorter into the winter, he feared that this was his punishment for having disobeyed G-d and that he was the cause of the world returning to TOHU VAVOHU. He accepted upon himself 8 days of fasting and prayer. When he saw that the days were beginning to lengthen, he realized that it was the natural cycle of things and he celebrated for 8 days. His celebration was "for the sake of heaven", but subsequent generations perverted it for idol worship. With a strong feeling of "there is nothing new under the sun", we can see in our 2145 year old holiday of Chanuka, a sense of a revival of a 5767 year old holiday that the Jewish people restored "for the sake of heaven". And then there is the ZOT - see page 6. It is with ZOT that we earn the Chanuka miracles. [The Parshat Miketz Homepage]
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