Imagine if you could experience your wedding day every day…
Chanukah offers a tremendous opportunity to meditate by the lights of the menorah, and the flame of a candle makes a beautiful visual analogy for the experience of life on earth. If you stare into the flame of an oil lamp or candle, you become fixated by the flickering fire, the way the flame defies gravity in its graceful movements. It seems to want to fly away, pulling upwards as if inhaling a breath of fresh air, yet it remains anchored to the wick below. Each upsurge is followed by a corresponding retraction, followed by an even greater resurgence… until it seems as though the flame is going to burst forth off the wick and explode into a psychedelic skyscape. But then the flame is calm once again.
This is the ebb and flow of life.
Our Soul, the core of our being, is like a flame. It wants to always surge upwards, to disengage from the limitation of its wick, the body and the physical world that keep it grounded; it wants to engage in unbounded inspiration beyond what the body can contain, and return to its spiritual source. It reaches for ever-increasing extraordinary heights, reaching an ecstatic climax that puts it at the brink of bursting out of its bodily box. But at that very moment, the Soul comes down to earth against its will. It knows that the ultimate purpose is to make all that inspiration and ecstasy dwell down here in the physical world.
In this vein, we struggle for a lifetime, dancing on the fine line between our desire for otherworldly euphoria and our mission to plough through the rough earth and make this world a spiritual continent.
Without oil, the wick will quickly burn out, utterly consumed by the intensity of the flame. It is the oil that enables the two to coexist, and fuels the flame while it is attached to the wick. So, too, the oil of Torah, especially the way it is illuminated by the mystical teachings of Kabbala and Chassidus, provides fuel for the Soul’s fiery existence and enables it to perform its ultimate mission – to remain united with the body and be spiritual within a physical world.
The giving of the Torah 3300 years ago was the wedding day of G-d and the Jewish people, and it is an event that is relived every time a Jew plunges into the wisdom of G-d. Every day presents us with the opportunity to experience the energy of our cosmic wedding day – exactly the way it was originally, and even higher – by experiencing the light of studying the inner dimensions of Torah.
May we have a Chanukah that is infused with spiritual pyromania, riding the waves of light to a future where our awareness of the Infinite will permeate the earth like the waters cover the sea – literally.