Speaker 1I haven't forgotten my time yet. First of all, do you want to pass the mic? Do you want to listen? We began last week looking at the subject of Chanukah, the question of Nisim, miracles. And we began to look at the perspective or the dimension of the change in the nature of miracles. We said, if you remember, that the Chanukah was a time when the process of the history, if you like, of miraculous revelations, miracles in the world underwent a significant change. If you remember, the concept is that the world has been through two main phases. The first was the phase during which prophecy was in the world. Prophets were around. The world was at the level, the voltage, if you like, the level of prophecy. That is synonymous with what we call Torah Shabik Zav, the written Torah. During the time when the Torah was given by dictation, in written form, taken down, as it were, by dictation by the prophets throughout those centuries. And then the world entered the phase of what we call Torah Shabal Peh, the oral law, the phase of the oral law, where the Torah became became hidden, as it were. There is no more prophecy. And the transmission of Torah, generation and transmission of Torah becomes a human matter, which invokes the amazing subject of a partnership between a human and the divine, and all that goes with it. And we tried to discuss that in some depth. But, the element to pick out in order to understand Hanukkah from this perspective is that when Hanukkah, when the miracle of Hanukkah took place, the war against the Syrian Greeks, and the light that burned for eight days, even though there was only enough oil for one, that signified the end, designated the end of the first phase of history during which prophecy was around. And they introduced the second phase where, in the post-prophetic or dark era of the world's history, and miracles changed. They changed from being the kind of nisim, the kind of miracles that we call revealed miracles, nisim neglim, to becoming what we experience now, which are miracles that we call hidden miracles, nisim nistarim. The difference, just by way of brief revision for you, is that a revealed miracle is one in which a law of nature is controverted, where physical law changes. A nista, a hidden miracle, is one in which something occurs which is highly unlikely. What we would call in modern jargon, we would say an extreme coincidence. We would say that something extremely coincidental, the statistical chances of those two things happening and coming together is so slight that you have to be extremely insensitive not to notice that something amazing has happened, but you can still, if you wish, remain skeptical and cynical and say, well, it's just a coincidence. Whereas when an open miracle occurs and a law of nature is changed, you have to take a different approach to that. Are we together on that? The example that we used, I think, last time is that you fell off a cliff and grabbed onto a branch of a cliff and just as it began to tear away from the cliff face, it just so happened that someone was up on top of the cliff practicing throwing ropes over the edges of cliffs that day and you caught the end of the rope and he pulled you up. That would be called a hidden miracle. Hidden because nobody knows. No law of nature is broken. It could well happen that someone could throw a rope over the edge of a cliff just when you need it. But you'd have to be tremendously insensitive to say that once every few million years somebody happens to be in exactly the place where a rope happens to be. You'd have to be very, very, I would say, irreligious to very, I would say the chances of you becoming a believer are scanty if that's the way you would approach such a phenomenon. However, that is possible. A revealed miracle is a person who falls off a cliff, holds onto a branch, the branch tears out of the cliff face and he levitates up and floats back onto the cliff face. That is what we call a revealed miracle. Yes, it's not a coincidence. It is a breaking of a familiar law of nature. In the truth, in the depth of these things, they are no different. But we respond to them very differently. Perhaps we need to try and go into this a little bit. But let me try to introduce the approach, to the subject, by reference to Hanukkah and see if we can try and work through this distinction between these two categories of miracles and see what it means. Last week we went into much more detail on the question of miracles that did take place in the post-prophetic era, even ones that do break the laws of nature. During Talmudic times, as I pointed out to you, this law seems to have been broken, that there were people, and possibly could still be people today, who could perform revealed miracles, even though there are no prophets around. And the Rambam makes it quite clear that the presence of a prophet is required for that sort of miracle. So that seems to be peculiar, breaks the rule. And last week we tried to explain in depth why there were miracles that appear to be revealed miracles, where laws of nature are broken, like revival of the dead, and splitting of rivers, and vinegar burning, and all those sorts of impossibilities that are very common in the Talmud, even though the generation was infinitely lower than the previous set of generations where miracles were revealed. That requires a special explanation, and last week we tried to go into that. But the basic distinction that, except with that aside, the basic distinction we need to bear in mind is the general concept of Phase 1, in which things were revealed, even impossibilities, and Phase 2, in which impossibilities are not revealed, only coincidental, sort of statistical impossibilities, as it were, are revealed, but not a physical impossibility. The concept that how Chanukah, which is almost with us, relates to this is as follows. The Greeks. You know, first of all, let's get one thing clear. That is that the battle between the nations and us is always a spiritual battle. It may manifest as a homicidal or genocidal type of battle. There's always the readiness to kill us and decimate us and wipe us out, but it's always. It's always based on a spiritual source. Sometimes the nature of the spiritual battle is to destroy us, like, for example, Purim, where the idea of the non-Jewish nations was to destroy every single Jew alive on one day. And sometimes the battle, the spiritual battle, is not manifest in a genocide type of activity. It is manifest in a spiritual type of holocaust or atrocity. And that's exactly what Chanukah was. Chanukah was not an attempt to destroy the Jews. The Greeks did not try to kill Jews at all. They didn't know what they were about. They did not try. They didn't try to kill or destroy the Temple. They weren't. The ideology of the battle was not to destroy the Temple and was not to destroy the Jewish body. The ideology of Greece was to destroy the Jewish mind. The sanctity of the Temple, that means the inner life of the Besamikdash, the sanctity, the Neshama, to contaminate it and defile it and make it a Greek. into a Greek type of Temple. And the battle was. The battle for the Jewish mind, not for the survival of Jews or not. They had no problem with Jews surviving. As long as we wouldn't be Jewish. As long as. As long as we would be Hellenized, Greek, modern, intellectuals, whatever words you want to use. Right? The legacy, of course, of Greece is with us today. That is exactly what our battle is with the Western world now. Rome. Rome, the empire of Rome that followed Greece, did not add a new ideology. Rome did not come. The Roman Empire had no ideology or spirituality of its own. There was no. All Rome did was adopt the philosophy and the culture of Greece and spread that throughout the whole Roman Empire. Today, the culture that we experience, which is the Roman. The legacy of the Roman Empire, the exile in whose grip we are yet to this day, the underlying philosophy is the philosophy of Greece. And the battle, the philosophy of Greece, was pitched against the philosophy of the Jewish people and it was a spiritual battle. So what we're going to try and talk about this evening is a very deep, a cosmically deep spiritual issue. Right? It is not simply a power struggle. There's not. That wasn't the issue. Conquering a handful of Jews in a small country, that's almost insignificant in terms of its size or its power in the Greek Empire, that's not the issue. The issue is that the Jews represent something in the world. Right? Like one great genocidal statesman of the last century, the most famous of them, in his book, says that the Jews have foisted two wounds upon the world. Circumcision on the body and conscience on the mind. Right? That's an amazingly perceptive and absolutely correct statement. Not wounds, of course, but those two things inflicted or brought into human life. body and mind is exactly what we're about. They both relate deeply. So the battle really is pitched here. The battle is fought on the terrain of spirituality. Now, bearing that in mind, let's understand. The Rambam says, and it's brought down, and we say it in Al-Anissim, we repeat this every year, that the Greeks made decrees against the Jewish people. They made decrees. They came to darken our eyes. Yechshichu is a name that means they came to darken the eyes of the Jewish people. To make us forget your Torah. And they came to negate the dat, that means the religion of the Jewish people. That is what they did. But they did it in a particular way. This requires understanding. They did it by propagating decrees. By promulgating decrees against us that require explanation, because the decrees sound strange. The language of the Rambam is Pashto Yodayim. They spread out their hands against the Jews. Mamoynam, their money. B'noiseim, their daughters. And each of these words is specific. What they did was, the Greeks made certain decrees. The first one decree that they made, which is very peculiar. They said, Jews, write on the horn of an ox. You have to understand exactly what's going on here. Not simple. You have to write on the horn of an ox that you have no portion, you have no part, no share in the God of Israel. What means the horn of an ox and why it had to be inscribed on a horn, that also, all the details require explanation. But that's what they said. In other words, make it explicit that you disconnected from the higher world. We're not saying there's no God. There could well be. But that's got nothing to do with us. Greek wisdom is empirical, scientific, intellectual, philosophical. We'll assess the world and we'll come to grips with it with our own philosophy, with our own intellectual derivations, with our own measurements. We'll put things in the lab. We'll measure them. Empirical wisdom, empirical science, that's what Greece was. You Jews who claim that there's a transcendent source, a higher root, that the world is an expression of something deeper, that is what we have a problem with and we'll do whatever it takes and we'll kill you if necessary to get you to deny that. What we want is you to become Hellenized. We want you to participate in our world view. We want you to buy our world view, which is that the world is within the grasp of human intellect and human expression. Or rather, that part of the world that is within the grasp of human intellect and expression, that is the part of the world that's meaningful. If there's a divine reality, it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant to us. Maybe there was a God, maybe He created the world, but He is now busy doing something else. He's got nothing to do with us. And if He's around, you have no portion, you have no connection to Him. That's what the Greeks wanted. They stripped the body naked and engaged it in games. That was the expression. It was also a very deeply homosexual culture. It also needs to be deeply understood spiritually. Why was there that expression in Greece? And they, these are the things they brought. They also brought to the world the notion of art for art's sake. Aesthetics as an expression of nothing else. The purest concept in art today. You still hear it quoted sometimes in Latin, art for art's sake. The highest appreciation of art is art for its own sake. And of course, these are all part of what Greece was. And there's nothing that we could be more allergic to as Jews, to the notion that anything stands on its own. Our concept is that everything in the world is a vehicle for a soul, for a spiritual dimension. Particularly the aesthetic world. The world of aesthetics. The Torah notion is that Greece was brought to the world to be the vehicle of aesthetics for the purpose of holding a spiritual reality. The three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Jephes, right? Shem, the Jewish people, the Semitic people. Ham, the hot-blooded and sensuous earthy physical nations, whoever they are, or were. And Jephes, Greece, which is the zone that occupies the intermediate position. Not intellectual and not physical. The combination of the two. The combination of intellectual and physical is what we call the aesthetic world. The aesthetic world is where something physical shows something else. It expresses a thing called beauty. Beauty is an intangible thing. That is what Greece was brought to the world. I know that it's safe for Torah to be written in Greek, because it's the most beautiful language there is besides Hebrew. Yishkan v'yishkan v'oleh shem. The purpose of Greece was to reside in the tents of shame. That means that the proper purpose of aesthetics and beauty, even sensual beauty, and graphic beauty, tangible beauty, is that it's to be the perfect vehicle for a beautiful inner being. That's what it was. But Greece, of course, didn't do that. They came to the world not to make their beauty and their external beauty a vehicle for spirituality. They came to foist upon the world the notion that external beauty is its own justification and is not expressed something higher. That's what Greek culture was. How did they foist this upon the Jewish people? First of all, they made the Jews write, inscribe, that we have no portion in Hashem. Secondly, they made decrees against some very striking and unusual. They attacked Judaism in some very specific ways that need explanation. They made decrees against keeping Shabbos, for example, against circumcision. Jews in that generation risked their lives to circumcise their children. They also made two decrees that require even more explanation. One is they decreed that Jews were not allowed to celebrate Rosh Chodesh. Rosh Chodesh celebration of the new month. If you were, if you were, cast your mind for a moment into the mold of an anti-Semitic tormentor who wants to take Jews away from their source, would you attack the custom of Rosh Chodesh? I mean, what? Presumably you're going to look for things that are significant, that are at the root of the enemy's culture. Rosh Chodesh, well, what is the significance of Rosh? It happens to be the first mitzvah in the Torah. It's true, but Rosh Chodesh is. How do we really celebrate Rosh Chodesh today? It's not like a Chag, like a Yom Tov that has the laws of. Shabbos you can understand, maybe, that the Shabbos is deeply identified with the notion of being Jewish, but Rosh Chodesh, what did the Greeks have against the new moon, the new month, the celebration of the resurgence, the recrudescence of the moon, where it begins to wax towards it? What is the problem they had with it? And finally, they made a unique decree that every Jewish girl getting married for the first time had to live with the Greek governor first, first before going to a husband. That was the decree. There was a big, a lot of energy expended in that generation of Jews trying to get married on days that the Greeks didn't know about. To escape this decree is also a tradition that the custom of married women shaving their heads completely. One of its points of origin derives from here, those communities that even to this day, for various reasons, still do that, is to make the women try to make themselves as unattractive as possible, so that they wouldn't be taken in this way. But that was the decree. A girl getting married for the first time on a Wednesday, which is that the Mishnah says that that's the day on which a girl should get married for the first time. Again, that doesn't necessarily apply today. You have to know there are many other reasons to get married on other days, too. But that's what the Mishnah says. The Greeks came along and said, right, those women getting married on those days, before they may go home, before the marriage may be taken home, as it were, and husband and wife live together, the girls had to go and live with the Greek, whoever the Greek authority was, or the governor, or the commander in that particular zone or area, that was a decree they made. Now, that is very peculiar. That's very peculiar. First of all, it's peculiar because the Greeks weren't particularly into sensual desire. They were, if anything, into the homosexual aspect of this area. And therefore, why would they make a decree here unlike Amalek? Amalek, the nation that comes to wipe out Jews physically, attacked the Jews with homosexual rape. That was what they did to the Jews in the desert. That was where the battle was pitched. That has a deep meaning. It's not easy to talk about these things openly. You have to be very cautious. But all of these things are based on spiritual roots. What was the meaning of this Greek, this particular Greek decree? So let's see if we can use this as a framework for building an understanding that will hopefully give us something deeper in Hanukkah this year than before. Let's begin with that decree interfering with Jewish marriages. The Mishnah and the Gemara that talks about this says that a woman getting married for the first time gets married on the fourth day of the week, Wednesday. And there there's a discussion about the reasons. In one of the great works of one of the great Kabbalists of the last two centuries, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Chave, in one of his works, in fact, in a commentary on the Talmud, he brings a deep reason for why a girl should be married for the first time, first marriage, on that day of the week. What is the reason? The reason he says is that on that day the sun and the moon were created. If you go back to creation, on the fourth day of creation, sun and moon were created on the fourth day. That's what he says. Now, that requires, I think you'd agree, a little explanation. Right? Because the sun and moon, the great lights that were created in the world, primarily to serve as the markers of seasons, of times and dates and seasons. Those great celestial bodies, sun and moon, the fact that they were created on a Wednesday, what on earth, on earth or beyond the earth, what does it have to do with the concept of a particular day of the week? Why is it that people want to get married on that day? Or that there's a special reason to do that? Let's see if We can put our heads into this. you see the sun and moon sun and moon sun and moon represent the primordial male and female in the world the world is built on an energy that is always a duality of male and female components it's always like that if you take it from the very biggest sense the very biggest dimension that you can conceive namely that we always refer to Hashem as male God in root terminology is always regarded as male I'm not now going to go into the meaning of what the Shekhinah is but Hashem is always referred to as male and the creation is always referred to as female the world, the earth, the land, the world is always called female the Hebrew words even for the earth itself, even a word like Eretz which isn't necessarily female like the word Adama nevertheless Eretz is always feminine in Hebrew the vessels, vessels are always feminine in Hebrew even the most basic vessel of the world which is Kabbalistically understood to be rocks and stones, stones, Avanim Evin, and Evin is always the building block of reality the Evin Masu Abonim the rock that the builders rejected Evin Shesia, the rock on which the world is founded, which becomes the altar at Mizbeach the building blocks of the world in this particular grasp of reality are always stones the word Evin in Hebrew which is not at all feminine in its construction always takes the feminine in Hebrew Evin Shtiyah, Evin Gedolah, etc that is always feminine in fact there are those who say that the word Evin is actually an amalgamation of the word Av and Ben the word Evin in Hebrew is a compressed version of Av and Ben which means father and son the word itself is feminine because that's where the transition from male to male generations takes place in the vessel of the female but it's a feminine word and therefore in the largest scale the world always manifests a duality between male and female the creation that is brought into being which most primarily represents that is sun and moon the concept here we'll have to spend a little while here discussing the spiritual nature of male and female sun and moon were originally created equal you know the medrash says that the sun and moon actually it's based on verses in the Torah it says the two great lights when the Torah says the two great lights the obvious interpretation is two equally great lights if you say two great lights then you're not saying one is larger than the other later the verse says the great light and the small light so there's an obvious discrepancy here the Torah first refers to sun and moon as equally great and later it refers to sun and moon as equally great it refers to the great light the sun and the small light the moon that obviously requires explanation so the medrash interposes itself in that gap and says this what happened was the sun and moon were created of equal size the moon said that there cannot be two rulers with one crown and Hashem said go and minimize yourself and the moon shrank to its present size which means it can no longer reflect all the light of the sun initially it was created to be a reflector of all the light of the sun and then it was created and now it can only reflect mark well that the moon was always a reflector she was not a source the sun was a source and she was a reflector that always was the case but she was able to loyally hold and reflect all give reality yes reflect give bring to expression all the light of the sun and after the minimizing miyotayarech after the moon is shrinking to a level of to its present size the moon can no longer reflect all the light of the sun she must reflect only can reflect only a small amount the ultimate process of history and that's a deep issue it's a deep source of spiritual pain in the world Hashem himself in an incredible statement God himself this is no can't go into this now but in the mitzvah of Rosh Chodesh the way the mitzvah expresses it is that Hashem says Haviu alayka para means I mean if it wouldn't have written we couldn't say this Hashem himself says bring an atonement for me bring an atonement for me God bring an atonement for me that I've minimized the moon and it's an amazing statement what does it mean a divine atonement what on earth does that mean that he did something that needs atonement what's being taught here what's being taught here but there's a tremendous pain in the fact that the moon is minimized and of course the history of the world requires that very minimizing what will be the ultimate history of this process is that the moon will one day wax and not go to a peak like it is now and then begin to wait again but will wax all the way to its original size in the future in which we will be able to once again see the moon reflect all the light of the sun we pray for that every month it's a special connection that a woman has to spirituality it's a reflection of the moon in our own our own physical cycle which is a cycle of the moon and the ultimate female in the world that the Jewish people identify with is the force of the moon now what exactly does this mean there are many questions here first of all what's the minimizing of the moon why was it created equal and then shrunk if it's meant to be shrunk then create it shrunk quite sort of big and then small small only to get big again what does all this mean correctly understanding this of course is the correct understanding of the spiritual root of male and female in the world and the relationship between them but let's at least try to grasp it in its root one has to be very cautious about going into the practicalities and discussing details about marriage and so forth that can be that can be risky and problematic but let's talk about the root the concept is that two great creations begin the history of the world one is the ability to give an infinite light and the other is the ability of the world to reflect that light the purpose of the world is to be a perfect vessel the notion in the deeper source is that you always have lights and vessels what's called oires and kalim always lights and vessels everything in the world is constructed of a light inside a vessel what better example could there be than the human being the human being is a vessel of a body and the human being is a vessel of a body animated by a soul dimension a neshama that is its light within the vessel is always the full expression of the light you can't see the neshama you can't see the soul the only aspect of a human soul you can see is a very very faint glow on the face of an intelligent human being very very small something small you can see in the hands and something you can see what's called skiva saikoma that means the fact that we stand vertical and we're not horizontal creatures there are vestiges and clues but the place where it comes to its greatest expression is what's called ziv hapanim the glow on the face that is accentuated in a person of spirituality a person who's learned to control sensuality a person who's risen above the body there's a very special glow on such a face it comes into its most stark expression when you witness a face just before death and just after death even though there's been no physical change at all imperceptible physical change but there's a light that's been extinguished however that's a very very faint and very very faint very hard to see it's not requires sensitivity on the part of the viewer as well unlike when man was originally created when man was created originally man and woman the vessel was so faint and the light was so bright that the duality the balance was exactly the converse of what it is today when man was created originally when you looked at him or them all you saw was the light today you have to understand when you look at a human being today all you see is the vessel and if you look extremely perceptibly you can see a faint light when you looked at Adam when he was created all you saw was an overpowering light and if you looked extremely sensitively you could make out the wisp of a body that's how the vessel is only there to hold the light that's all it's for but now that the moon has been diminished the vessel cannot reflect the light and all you have is a vessel that's what you have all you have is a great darkness with a very small amount of light there's no problem with the giver he's giving all the light it's never been minimized the problem is are you there to see it can you hold it and reflect it can you project it in the world that's the problem the problem is what is it that obstructs the light it's called ego that's what it is it's your own sense of self most of us are so busy trying to shine the light that we keep getting in the way that's the problem but that's not our purpose this evening let's try to understand the root the sun was that creation which reflects is the reflection in the world is the focus in the world of the source which gives the sun is the source of all life all life and the moon was the source of that being who's given the light the task it is to hold and reflect and produce the result which is a perfect reflection of that light that's what male and female are supposed to be I mean again without getting into details the male begins a process the male the nature of maleness we're not talking about men unfortunately there aren't many male men left there aren't that many real women left either but but at least our sources say that women are doing women have retained a closer women have remained closer to their spiritual natures throughout history than men also needs explanation but maleness the concept of maleness is that there's a a a the concept of maleness is that there's a source that is unlimited. That's the nature of the male notion. It's the beginning of a process that's unlimited. The concept of the female is the ability to make it specific. The beginning is always infinite. But there needs to be a vessel that brings it down into reality. Let's put it this way. Maleness represents the pole of potential. Potential is always infinite. When you wake up in the morning, there's an endless amount of things you could do today. You could do today. But you can only do what the day is long enough to do. You can't do all of them. Again, again, again. The male moment is when you wake up in the morning. What can you do today? Choice of anything. All of those things, the female component is the decision of which one will be done and bringing it to reality. All the others turn out to have been only theoretical potential potentialities. Are we? The female component is the component of making a thing specific. Yes? If I say to you, if I give you potential, I say quote a figure and I'll pay you. Give me a number. Any number you like, I'll pay you that amount of money. You have here an amazing tension between male and female drives. Because the male drive is any figure you say. It could be more. But until you say a number, you get nothing. As soon as you say a number, you have a problem. On the one hand, you have a bracha, a blessing. Is that now you get that sum. But on the other hand, it cannot be more. The Hebrew word for female means to make a finite number specific. Like in last week's Parsha, Lavan said to Yaakov, quote me your wages. Nakva in Hebrew means, give me a figure. Fix your wage and I'll pay you. The word nekeva in Hebrew means female. Female means making a thing specific, giving it a finite specific limitation. The curse of femaleness. The word nekeva in Hebrew means a curse as well. It means limiting a thing so it can no longer be more than what it was before. The blessing of femaleness is that you bring reality into existence. But until then it was only potential. The curse of maleness is that it's just potential energy. The blessing of maleness is that it's just potential energy. The curse of maleness is that it's unlimited. But one without the other is completely useless. The ability to make a thing tangible without anything to make tangible is useless. The unlimited potential without a woman to make it real is also useless. Can you see? Hashem has at worst infinite potential. And the world is the version of reality that He's chosen. He only chose this version of reality as far as we're concerned. What He's doing in other dimensions we don't know. But in terms of our experience, He's made the world just this big. Just this big. The Kabbalists ask why the world is this big. The world is not bigger or smaller. Why there are as many stars as there are. There's a lot of room for more. There could have been less. The answer is He chose the number that's the perfect number to show His oneness. But nevertheless, it's a specific number. His maleness is His infinite potential to do anything. His femaleness is that He chose just this one. Is the message clear? In a finite physical world, you can't have all things. It wouldn't be finite. You can only have the one version of it. This is the tension and the beauty of the relationship between men and women. You can only have the one version and the beauty of the relationship between men and women. Again, without going into too much detail. In the mammal, in mammalian creatures, male seed is generated and given by the billion. And female, only one at a time. Only one at a time. The same tissue that in a little embryo, an unborn embryo, becomes the factory that will produce over. Yes, that in a woman. In a woman. In the. In the. In the. In the. In the female of the mammalian species. Every month, there will be given and made available only one. And what will be made available from the male is an unlimited, uncountable. Even though it starts from the same tissue, it develops in those two opposite directions. That's what it is. Maleness is an infinite electric potential. And femaleness, that's all maleness is. The Hebrew word zachar, which means male, is the same root as the Hebrew word zecher, a memory. A memory. The Hebrew word nekeva means to make specific and realize in the world. The Hebrew word zachar, male, means zecher, a memory. Because all that dimension is, is a memory of what the previous generation was. That's what he is. He just brings over the memory of the previous generation, but she's the one who gives it life. She brings it to reality in the world. The Hebrew word zikaron, which means a memory, is the same numerically equivalent as the word zera, meaning a seed. Because a seed is just a memory of a previous generation. If you open an acorn seed, an acorn, you don't see a small oak tree. All you have is a compressed memory. You don't have a compressed memory of what an oak tree is. The sun is that creation, right, which is the giver of potentiality of light. The moon is that being in the world, right, which holds it and reflects it and gives it its expression. But today the world is not like that. After the moon is shrunk, what happens is the world can no longer reflect its source entirely. The source is there. The sun is all there and all being made available. But the world, human beings, the physical world, our minds, our spirit, can only hold an infinitesimal amount of all that there is. That's the problem. That's the root of evil in the world. That's why an atonement is necessary, as it were, for this. The root of evil in the world is that. But you see, the root of evil in the world is also the root of your ability to be a free agent. Because if you lived in a world. Imagine for a moment living in a world where the sun was the same as the moon. It means that the world would reflect all of its source. You'd have no free will. You'd be here beaming in the reflection. You'd be beaming back the reflection of total reality. There'd be no place to move. Any movement would be away. It would be out. The only reason you have any freedom is because you live in a world where it looks so dark that you think you can have an independent existence. You can make your own choices. You can do this. You can choose good. You can choose bad. The beauty of the minimizing of the moon, the incredible consequences that you are a free agent in the world, the danger and the damage of the reduction of that thing is that you can only reflect a small amount of the reality and that's the beauties you free and the damages that you could choose wrong. Judaism is the teaching that the world is meant to reflect all the source. That everything that He gives and generates we are here to reflect. Our work is to swell, to bring the world back to its ability to reflect all the light. Even though you can't see it, but we are witnesses. Our job is to witness, to testify. That there is a source that transcends all physical reality. And what you see here is only a small reflection of that. And our job is to polish this world. To polish that dimension of ego until it is completely transparent. To generate a reality that this world raises itself to the level that it can reflect all of the source. And the Greeks came along to say, that's exactly what we won't let you do. Because the world, what you see is what you get and there is nothing else. This world is as big as it is going to be and there is no reflection of anything else. And your job is to declare, what we are going to force you to do, is to declare that there is nothing else. We want you to sign that and inscribe it. And we are going to interpose ourselves at every place where there is an expression of a higher connection with a lower connection. Where the lower takes on the loyalty of expressing the higher. Or where the physical or the real takes on the responsibility of reflecting the potential and bringing it to its fruition and to its fulfillment. And that's where they put themselves in. And therefore, can you see what's happening? They made a decree that any woman getting married for the first time. Can you see? Marriage on the day, the fourth day of the week, is the perfect expression of sun and moon in that harmonized relationship. That's what it is. And that's why there is such a blessing for a woman. Blessing for a marriage that takes place on that day of the week when sun and moon were originally created in equality. Where he could give everything and she could reflect and give back and produce and realize everything. That's the idea of that marriage. And that's what the Greeks said. We said, we are going to interfere, we come there. Before this woman goes home to her husband, she has to be involved with the Greek. That means in the sensitive place of interfering. Why do you think they defied the temple? What did they have against the temple? The Beis Hamikdash is the place of intimate meeting between Hashem and us. The inner sanctum, the inner zone where people don't go, is the privacy of marriage. You know what that is? The inner, the Kurdish Kodoshim, the inner sanctum. Again, we can't go into detail. But I'll just say this. You know what was in the inner chamber of the Kurdish Kodoshim? Yes. Was a male and female angels, golden kruvim, on top of the array. Male and female kruvim, embraced. That means the intimacy of the relationship between Hashem and us. That's what the temple is. That's where the Greeks went and put their own image, their own contamination. It's sensitively to target exactly to disjoin, to take apart the world from its source. And of course, it's not hard to see what they had against Shabbos. Shabbos is where more soul dimension comes into the physical. It's very easy to see what they had against circumcision. What is Bruce Miller? Think about it for a moment. It's for circumcision. Bruce Miller is taking the most physical aspect, that area of human existence, human activity, which is most likely, most given to bring one down into physicality, and we sanctify that. On the contrary, that's exactly who we are. We sanctify that. Why do you think we do it on the eighth day? Why is Bruce Miller done on the eighth day? Why does the Torah come out? Because eight is always that which is miraculous. Seven is always the natural world. Seven days in the week, seven fruits of Israel, seven lights in the colors in the spectrum, seven notes in the scale of music that we use. 8 is always that which transcends we mentioned many times that 7 in Hebrew, Shiv-ah is 7, is spelling fullness, satiety and fullness, Shmon-eh which is 8 in Hebrew, first of all spells Shemen, which is the oil that we use for the Hanukkah lights, that's why you try very much to use olive oil you can use candles, but olive oil is the best Shemen is the oil, which always flows to the top and the same letters that spell Shmon-eh when you rearrange them, they spell Neshama, the soul no accident, and of course you rearrange them it spells Mishnah, because the Mishnah is exactly when the transition from the written law to the oral law, that is when the Mishnah begins, it was explained last week, the Mishnah becomes the process of oral law becomes paramount at that time so Hanukkah is 8 days long, because it symbolizes exactly that which transcends the natural world and Brismillah is exactly on the 8th day, because that's exactly what we are is taking the physicality and giving it the ability to become transcendent and to reach Kedusha, that's exactly what it is and therefore, that bond between husband and wife, that sanctity of the Jewish people, which is vested in Brismillah and circumcision in that covenant, that's exactly what they came against, incidentally you know I'm sure, that the Hebrew word for marriage is Kedushin the word we use for marriage is sanctification Kedushin, the same word we use for making Kedush on Shabbos you take a cup of wine and you sanctify the day that's coming in with a mundane reality of the week, becomes the transcendent spirituality of Shabbos, at that moment just like under the chuppah, you take a cup of wine and you do what's called Kedushin Kedushin, two people are getting married, that's what's happening you need to change your surname maybe, that's all we call it Kedushin becoming sanctified that's what our notion emerges and of course from here it's easy to understand why they decreed that Rosh Chodesh should go Rosh Chodesh is exactly when the moon begins its climb back to equality with the sun, that's exactly what the Greeks had against it, Rosh Chodesh would seem to be almost insignificant in the panorama of Jewish observance, but Rosh Chodesh is a Jewish statement, right, and we get out there every month and we look up at the moon, and we make a special filler that the moon should once again be as great as the sun right, I mean if that isn't strange, you know you see any Jews, you know the non-Jews driving past, there's this little group of Jews out there looking up at the moon, it's really and if they would come across and look at the text and see these Jews jumping up and down and reading out this text that says may the moon one day be as big as the sun like it once was, I mean they really would probably they'd leave us alone, that's what they'd probably do that is what we're doing, we're out there, we're out there expressing the idea, the notion that the moon can no longer reflect the light of the sun but it did once and it will do that again and this, the hope a Jew has, every Rosh Chodesh, right, which is exactly what a woman is, that's why it's such a unique time for Jewish women and that's why they were given the celebration of Rosh Chodesh as a gift, in the merit of not having participated in the sin of the golden calf with their jewels, the jewelry, and yes, having participated in the building of the Mishkan can you see the significance? When the men among the Jewish people began the idolatrous process of building a calf to worship, right, the golden calf, the women refused to participate. Later when jewelry was needed and gold was collected to build the Mishkan, the women participated. For not having participated there, and yes, having participated there, the women were given Rosh Chodesh as a special precious gift. That's why it's so special to Jewish women. What does it mean? That when it came to building an object, where transcendence is focused, where you raise yourself above yourself, and you move out, and you move up, Jewish women taught that we don't go in that direction which is idolatrous, we go in this direction. And what is the Mishkan? Isn't it nothing other than the sanctity of a home where male and female meet, where the Jewish people form the woman, who is the marriage partner of Hashem in the world, who reflects all that He is, that's what we're supposed to be? The women built that. And Rosh Chodesh is the expression of that's exactly what that is. So every month the disappointment of the moon, having shrank, shrunk down to being almost invisible, there's that hope, as it were, when the moon begins that process, symbolizing the Jewish people, who've waxed and waned, will ultimately go back to that cosmic level in which it can reflect the entirety of the source. And that is the that is what the Greeks came to to annihilate. Greek culture was the notion that they foisted on the world incredibly successfully. It's still with us in the West. The East is another whole discussion. But in Western culture and all the lands of the West, we need to discuss someday what Eastern thinking, what Eastern culture is and where it fits in with our destiny or rather why it's separate from our destiny. But in Western culture the West is built, whether they call themselves religious or they don't call themselves religious nevertheless underlying their culture, the principle that they live by, is what you see is what you get. Religion to them is a personal subject of matter. If you believe it's okay, if you don't, you don't. Whatever you believe in is okay. It's not an objective reality. The concept they have, yeah, that whole sway in the world that is immensely powerful, it's almost impossible to hear any other voice in the West, is that science is reality. Intellectual and philosophical speculation and derivation that can be proven. You can work out a proof. That is what the Greek philosophers came to do. Incredibly successfully. The Rambam is not reticent to quote Aristotle in great, in explicit detail. He shows where he's wrong. Even where he says Aristotle's wrong, he says he's logical. Aristotle says that time has always existed. The Rambam says he happens to be wrong. It's not illogical what he's saying. It's just wrong. But they were immensely powerful. And they left the world with intellectual and philosophical legacy that what you see is what you get and there's no connection to anything else. And that is anathema to Jewish thinking. All we are, greater than the value of our lives, in fact, is to be here to make a statement that although we reflect now only a small amount of what the source can shine, we can only give expression as it were to a very small amount of that. But that is exactly our privilege. That's our greatness. If we lived in a world that was perfect from the beginning, we wouldn't have that role. Why is it that the moon was created equal and then shrank? Why that step? And in fact along the same lines you could ask the question, why was the earth commanded to bring out trees that taste the same as the fruit and in fact it sinned and brought out trees that are not edible? And fruit that is? And one day trees and fruit will taste the same? Why was the world originally predicated on a basis of Deen? That means Hashem wanted to create the world with Deen, which is meticulous justice and judgment, so that the world wouldn't survive and created it with an admixture of Rahamim, which means leniency and. Again, if those are the themes that are needed for the world to be created, why weren't they done that way in the first place? And very briefly, without detail, it's late and we started late this evening, but very briefly, the idea is like this, that the process of creation, the cycle of creation, the process of creation is always things are always brought into existence in their phase of perfection. That's always how they're brought into existence. The first moment, the whole of creation is a circle, a cycle, and things move inexorably always back to the point of their own formation. They begin in perfection and that's where they'll end. On the contrary, think about it well. If the world had not begun in perfection, how could it ever get back there? If it had never been brought into existence, how could it. You know, the concept is, and we've discussed it, in detail before, that all processes in the world are start perfect, and that start of perfection is your inspiration. And it lasts just long enough to convince you that it will last forever, then you lose it. All relationships are like that, all excitement in the world, all new experiences, the world is always built in such a way that first there's a free ride, there's an inspiration, there's an uplift that you do not work for, it's given to teach you what you could be, it's given to inspire you, don't work for it, and then just at the moment that you think it will last forever, it's taken away. And in that sense of abandonment and despair, even terror, that's where you become what you must become. When a father teaches his child to walk, he takes the child by the hands, and for the first time in his young life, he lifts him to his feet, and the child takes his first step. It's an ecstatic moment. Imagine the consciousness of a child who's standing there taking his first step, and he's never done before, but not only that, he's taken his first step, and he cannot fall. The step is guaranteed, his abba's holding his hand in his hands. That's a moment of tremendous exhilaration. And just as the child feels the thrill of that tremendous sense of power and exhilaration, that's when Abba leaves God, lets his hands go, leaves him. And then the child finds himself in this unfamiliar situation, fraught with fear and terror, and he feels only the sense of abandonment and despair. Not only that, he feels the betrayal, even, of the one who put him in this situation, the one who's left him. But that's when he learns to walk. And only after he takes that first frightened step on his own can he rush into his Father's arms and realize that in the moment that his Father left him was in fact a much deeper love than in the moment that his Father held his hands. And that's how the world is built. It's built in such a way that first you lift it to your feet, and when you think this exhilaration can never end, then someone lets go. But that's when you learn to walk. And all processes in life are built that way. The Gemara says that the child in the womb is taught the whole Torah. The child in the womb is taught the whole Torah. He knows everything he needs to know about the world. He has a light lit above his head. He sees from one end of the world to the other. And as he's born, Bab Malach, an angel, comes Shatra Elpiv strikes him on the mouth and he's born a child in the world who knows nothing. What's the purpose of being a child in the world who knows nothing? To build yourself through your lifetime to get back to that cosmic wisdom and deep consciousness you had when you were an unborn child. So why did Hashem give it to you if He's going to take it away? Why does a child, a fetus, an unborn child, why does he know all there is to know and then Hashem makes him forget it? And the answer is because if you didn't have it once, you could never fight back. If you didn't have that sense of inspiration, if you didn't know that, you know it already. You know, when you learn something spiritually true, if you have any sensitivity at all, you'll realize that you do not have a sense of learning something, you have a sense of recognizing something. And the reason is because you do recognize it. You realize then that you never put your finger on it, but it's always been there. You know, we quoted Aristotle. You know what Aristotle says in one of his writings? The most amazing insight. Amazing insight. Aristotle demonstrated, he brought a group of people together and he brought a set of people together and he brought a set of people together and he brought a simple slave boy. He brought a simple slave boy who had no learning at all. And he took the slave boy through the derivation of Pythagoras' theorem. In front of the witnesses, he had this young boy who had no mathematical learning. He showed him the steps of deriving the theory of Pythagoras and as the boy put the pieces together, he said, yes, I understand. Aristotle turned to the crowd and he said to them, I'll prove to you that this boy was once a being who had no learning at all. He had no knowledge and he must have lost it. And he's just now regained it. Because if he never had it before, how could he light up and say, yes, that's true? How could he say that? By what yardstick? With what resonance? What resonates within if he never had it before? Aristotle was saying, if you never had it in you before, then a true fact and a false fact should both fall in the same way. If I tell you facts that you don't understand, they should go clunk in your mind. And if I tell you facts you do understand or are true, it should also go clunk. How is it that when you hear a false fact, it doesn't resonate? I mean, you hear something deeply spiritually true, it resonates, you know it's true. How do you know it's true? The answer is because it's only connecting with that which was already there. Aristotle proved that. That's exactly what the Gemara says. That the child must have had all that wisdom. And as he moves through life, his task is to find his own path, to find his own re-identify, to rediscover, to bring out. Even in English, I mean, even in English, which almost always translates these things wrongly. Almost always. You can rely on it. The word educate in English, to educate, which means to put in wisdom, the word literally means to take out. You know that? In Latin, educate means to take out, to duct, to lead out. Even they know. It's all there within. So what's the process? Can you see the same thing again? The child in the womb reflects all the light of the sun. He's a moon reflecting all the light of the sun. He's no lack. He knows it all. It's given and he holds. He holds it. Then he's born and it's taken away. And then he fights through his life to get back to that cosmic awareness that he had before. That's the purpose of life. The whole world goes that way. The sun and moon were created equal. The world was created in its. You know what the light looked like then? You know what the world looked like? Let's finish with this. Do you know what the world looked like when the moon reflected all the light of the sun? The world reflected all the light of the spiritual world. That's called Orhagonus. That's called the hidden light. The light that shone then was a light that came from the divine world and the world shone it back. That light was hidden. The light was nignas. It was hidden because Hashem saw that if the evil people would use that light, there'd be no survival for the world. So he hid it for the tzaddikim in the future time. And how long did man experience that light? He experienced it for the 12 hours of Friday that he was created. That means during the day of Fridays, the sixth day of creation, that light shone. And it shone all of Shabbos. This light is strong enough to shine on Shabbat, even after the sin. And on Saturday night, Motsi Shabbos, when the light, the sun went down, this light went out, man panicked. Adam thought the world was ending. That's when he discovered fire. That's when he lighted our dollar candle on Saturday night. That's what we do. It's a resurrection of the weak. That's what it is. But for those 36 hours, for the 12 hours of Friday, and the 24 hours of Shabbos, for those 36 hours, that's the only time in human existence, virtually only, was the time when human beings lived by that light at a level of perfection. It was once more in history when it was experienced. And that was when the menorah was lit. The menorah, the menorah, the candle labyrinth, was lit in the Mishkan, in the desert. The Gemurah says, "We need the light." Why do we need the light? Why do they light lights in the Mishkan? We walked by Hashem's light for 40 years. The Gemurah says, "It wasn't lit for light." The light that came out of the menorah was the Ora Gonesh. The Gemurah says explicitly that during those 40 years in the desert when the Western light burned, when the menorah was lit in the Mishkan, when you looked at an object, you saw through the object. You didn't see objects, you saw through objects. Because this is not a light, this is a light that doesn't bounce off things, this is a light that interpenetrates reality. And for 40 years, the Jews who received the Torah, what do you think the Torah is other than the hidden light? The Jews who could see the Torah, see that light, who arrived at Sinai, they walked for 40 years in a dimension where that light shone. But then the world went dark. And all we have today, all we have today left of that light which the world once saw, for those 36 amazing cosmic hours during which the world was illuminated in a way that we can. All we have today is 36 candles, that's all we have, 36 candles. One for each hour of the Ora Gonesh. Eight, plus seven, plus six, plus five, whether you're Ashkenazi or Sephardi, that's what we have. During eight days of Chanukah, 36 candles, says the Rokeach. Each one to bring back the concept, but which kind of light are we lighting? We're lighting the light in the darkness, we're lighting the second light. And the testimony that we do, what you light in your window, small olive oil flame, they're almost insignificant, that light. Compared to the Ora Gonesh, compared to that light by which you saw through things, we're lighting the light in the darkness. And that's all we have. This is a moon to that sun. And we give testimony by shining that almost pathetic light. That's called an act of mitzvah. And it's a mitzvah that we generated. This wasn't commanded in the Torah. This is a mitzvah of rabbinic origin. Human beings took that on. Human beings fought that battle. They went out to fight the Syrian Greek Empire, even though it was a completely hopeless battle. It was a completely suicidal battle, and miraculously they won. And the second miracle was that oil burned for eight days, eight days oil, not seven. And we re-enact that every year. And therefore the intention should be, of course, that when you light the lights of Hanukkah, on the one hand, you're just enacting a very small act, that's all. Just lighting the lights in the window, that's all. On the other hand, what you're doing is, you're sending out a ray of light into the darkness that defeats the whole Greek Empire. What you're stating, when you light that light, is that they're all wrong. They're all completely wrong. They all think that the world is one big accident. It's all interactions of atoms and molecules. They themselves are nothing other than accidental chimpanzees, that's what they teach. Even your mind is just an accident. No significance to anything. All divorced from any sense of meaning, that's what they teach. That you light a small light in the window, you're saying that they're all wrong, right? That means more than life itself does. That's the meaning, that's the beginning of insight, into the meeting of Hanukkah.
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