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Writer Chaim Potok remembered one Hanukkah in 1938 "when darkness almost overpowered the light." Read an excerpt from "Miracles for a Broken Planet" in CELEBRATING THE JEWISH HOLIDAYS edited by Steven J. Rubin (Brandeis University Press, 2003):
I remember my father chanting the blessing over the first candle on the first night of the festival. He was short and balding, and he chanted in a thin, intense voice. I stood between him and my mother, gazing at the flame of the first night's candle. The flame seemed pitiful against the malignant darkness outside our window. I went to bed and was cold with dread over the horror of the world.
The next night two candles were lighted. Again my father chanted the blessings before the lighting and the prayer that follows when the candles are burning: "We kindle these lights on account of the miracles, the deliverances, and the wonders which thou didst work for our fathers. … During all eight days of Hanukkah these lights are sacred. … We are only to look at them, in order that we may give thanks unto thy name for thy miracles, thy deliverance, and thy wonders."
I wanted a miracle. But there were no miracles during that Hanukkah. Where was God? I kept dreaming of burning synagogues.
On the eighth and final night of the festival I stood with my parents in front of the burning candles. The darkness mocked the light. I could see my parents glancing at me. My mother sighed. Then my father murmured my name.
"You want another miracle?" he asked wearily.
I did not respond.
"Yes," he said. "You want another miracle." He was silent a moment.
Then he said in a gentle, urging voice, "I also want another miracle. But if it does not come, we will make a human miracle. We will give the world the special gifts of our Jewishness. We will not let the world burn out our souls."
The candles glowed feebly against the dark window.
"Sometimes I think man is a greater miracle-maker than God," my father said tiredly, looking at the candles. "God does not have to live day after day on this broken planet. Perhaps you will learn to make your own miracles. I will try to teach you how to make human miracles."
I lay awake a long time that night and did not believe my father could ever teach me that. But now, decades later, I think he taught me well. And I am trying hard to teach it to my own children.
Novelist and essayist Annie Dillard recalls a visit to the traditional Bethlehem spot "where Mary gave birth to a son … whose later preaching caused the occupying Romans to crucify him." Read an excerpt from "Bethlehem" in WATCH FOR THE LIGHT (Plough Publishing House, 2001):
In the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people passed. The floors were black stone or cracked marble. Dense brocades hung down old stone walls. Oil lamps hung in layers. Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone the darker the space.
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Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol. The stone dome bounced the sound around. The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.
Descending once more, I passed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes. Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite. At a lower level, in a small room, I peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.
Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues. The music threaded the vaults.
Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest basement: The Grotto of the Nativity. The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level. This was the place. It smelled of wet sand. It was a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it. Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor. People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.
A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall. This silver star was the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant got born. Two thousand years of Christianity begun here, where God emptied himself into man. Actually, many Christian scholars think "Jesus of Nazareth" was likely born in Nazareth. Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy. Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy. It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.
In the center of the silver star was a circular hole. That was the bull's eye, God's quondam target.
Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole's flat bottom. When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole. I could feel some sort of soft wax in it. The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide Petri dish. I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God's presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps -- some human's idea of elegance -- bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.
"Every day," said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, "the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement."
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