Our Modern-Day Chanukah Miracle

Already by the time our kids are around 10 or 11, we start scaring the daylights out of them.

Even before we start planning the bar-mitzvah, we are warning our sons about how much money they will need as adults in order to support a family in our community. This anxiety, sadly, frightens off some boys from getting married. There are some fine boys in their 20s who make plenty of money, but are too scared to get married or to have children because they’ve been hearing over and over again for some fifteen years about how they need a fortune to support a family.

The topic of finances in our community is a touchy subject, but also a vitally important one, and the celebration of the Hanukah miracle offers us a healthy perspective that could allay some of our concerns and help us come to terms with the high cost of living in today’s day and age.

The Eighth Day of Celebration

Undoubtedly the most famous question that has been asked about the Hanukah observance is the question posed by the Bet Yosef (Rav Yosef Karo, author of the Shulhan Aruch), as to why Hanukah was established as an eight-day celebration. The single jug of pure oil, the Gemara tells, contained enough oil to sustain the lamps of the menorah for one day, and yet they burned for eight days. The first day was not a miracle; the candles burned the first day because there was a one-day supply of oil. Seemingly, then, we should celebrate for only seven days, not eight.

Numerous answers have been given to this question.[1] One answer emerges from the story told in the Gemara (Ta’anit 25) of Rav Hanina ben Dosa, who one Friday evening saw his daughter looking upset. He asked her why she looked down, and she explained that she accidentally poured vinegar into the oil lamp, instead of oil. Rav Hanina told her not to worry, because “the One who said that oil should burn can say that vinegar should burn.” Sure enough, the candles burned throughout the entire Shabbat.

The message taught by this story is that there really is no difference between what we call “miracles” and what we call “nature.” In truth, nature is no less miraculous than miracles. The fact that oil burns is miraculous. The fact that two microscopic cells come together and develop into a baby with ten fingers and toes, a brain, a heart and everything else, is miraculous. The way our eyes let us see is miraculous. The taste buds in our mouths are miraculous. No less than a sea splitting or than vinegar burning.

This is why we celebrate Hanukah for eight days – seven days to celebrate the miracle of the oil, and one day to celebrate all the miracles that we forget are miracles.

When Hashem performs an open miracle, overturning the laws of nature, this is done to remind us that everything else is also miraculous. And so when we celebrate the miracle of the oil in the Bet Ha’mikdash, we reflect upon and celebrate also the other “miracles” – everything in our lives that we take for granted, but is actually no less miraculous than any miracle.

Yosef’s Moment of Reflection at the Pit

These everyday miracles, which we are to reflect on and celebrate on Chanukah, come in two forms:

· The first is the kind we already mentioned – the miracles of the natural world. Every cell in the human body, every function our bodies perform, and every blade of grass the grows from the ground, is a miracle.

· The second kind of “natural” miracle is G-d’s orchestration of events. Everything that happens in our lives is the product of some improbable sequence of events. The person we marry, the friends we have, the customers who buy from us, the job we have, the home we live in – and countless other things came to us through a long, convoluted series of events, and would not have come to us if any one of those events never happened.

A perfect example of this second kind of “natural miracle” is the story of Yosef, which is always read around the time of Hanukah. Yosef ended up being appointed the second-in-command to Pharaoh, becoming the ruler of the most powerful nation on earth at that time, and was thus able to support his father and his brothers. How did this happen?

It happened because of the following sequence of events:

1) His father favored him, making for him a special coat, which made his brothers jealous.

2) He dreamt strange dreams of leadership and told his brothers about them, which made them furious.

3) His father sent him to see his brothers while they were looking after the sheep.

4) His brothers decided to kill him.

5) His brothers changed their mind and decided to throw him into a pit, and then decided to sell him as a slave.

6) He was sold to people who then sold him to other people who brought him to Egypt.

7) He was sold to Potifar.

8) Potifar’s wife desired a relationship with him, and when he resisted and fled, she accused him of a terrible crime, and he was thrown into prison.

9) Two of Pharaoh’s officers committed crimes and were thrown into the same prison as Yosef.

10) They had peculiar dreams, and were troubled by them.

11) Yosef noticed they looked upset, and so he approached them.

12) Yosef successfully interpreted their dreams, one of which foresaw that the butler would be reinstated.

13) Pharaoh dreamt strange dreams and needed an interpretation.

14) The butler recalled Yosef’s ability to interpret dreams, and recommended that Pharaoh consult with him.

15) Yosef offered an interpretation which impressed Pharaoh, prompting him to appoint him his second-in-command.

16) Egypt was the only country that stored grain during the seven years of plenty, and so it was the only country that had food when the famine struck.

17) Yaakov and his sons found themselves without food, and so they went to Egypt to purchase grain. There they met Yosef, who eventually brought them to Egypt. The family was reunited and Yosef supported his father and brothers.

These steps were all part of a single chain reaction. If any one of them had not happened, the chain would have been broken, and Yosef would never have become the ruler of Egypt and been reunited with his brothers.

None of these events were “miraculous” in the sense of violating the laws of nature. But this chain is, without question, a great miracle.

The Midrash relates that after Yaakov died, and Yosef and his brothers brought their father for burial in the Land of Israel, Yosef stopped by the pit from where he was lifted and sold as a slave. He stood outside the pit, looked inside, and recited a berachah, thanking Hashem for saving him. As Yosef stood outside the pit and peered in, he reflected upon all that had transpired since that day. He thought about all the things that had to happen to get him from inside that pit, alone and helpless, to the position of ruler over the mightiest empire in the world. His heart was filled with gratitude to Hashem, and he recited a berachah.

This is an exercise that is worthwhile for all of us to do from time to time, especially on Hanukah, the holiday which reminds us that everything is truly “miraculous.” Our lives, hopefully, have not been as dramatic as Yosef’s – most of us were never almost killed by our brothers, were never slaves, were never thrown into jail, and never became second-in-command to a king – but we all have stories no less complex than Yosef’s. Everybody who is married got married because a long chain of events. Everybody with a job, or with a business, got to where he is because a long chain of events. So many things had to happen for us to earn every dollar we have. And each dollar is a miracle. The sea didn’t split for us, but the fact that we are where we are, and that we have what we have, is no less miraculous than the splitting of the sea. If we spend just a few minutes thinking about it, we will see just how miraculous every aspect of our lives is. And Hanukah is the time to appreciate these miracles.

Our Community’s Financial Miracle

To get a sense of just how miraculous our lives are, let’s do a little math, and try to get a rough estimate of the cost of living for a typical family in our community. We’ll take the example of a couple with four children, aged 17, 14, 12 and 10.

Let’s consider the following:

· They put down $400,000 on a $1.2 million-dollar home. Their monthly mortgage payment, including taxes and insurance, is $5500.

· They lease two cars for $400 a month each – a total of $800.

· The oldest has begun driving, and so their monthly car insurance cost is $400.

· Health insurance for the six of them costs $1600 a month.

· Utilities – water, electricity, gas, a landline, cell phones and cable – cost them $1200 a month.

· They spend $700 a week on food, or about $2800 a month.

· The three younger kids attend summer camp, at $3500 per child. We’ll round off the total to $800 a month.

· The big one, of course, is tuition. With two kids in high school and two in elementary, we’ll estimate that they pay a little over $100,000 a year in tuition, which we’ll call $9000 a month.

· They use around $50 worth of gas for each car each week, for a total of $400 a month.

· Then there’s the “miscellaneous” stuff – things like shampoo and conditioner, dry cleaning costs, house repairs, birthday presents, the kids’ seminars and other special programs, etc. Let’s estimate these at $1,000 per month.

· How about clothing? Most families in our community buy new clothing for all family members four times a year – Pesach, Sukkot, and before summer and winter vacations. Of course, the 17-year-old daughter expects more than one pair of shoes, and likely more than two or three. Let’s average that at a little over $20,000 a year, or around $1,800 a month.

· Since “everyone” goes somewhere for vacation in the winter, this family needs to follow suit. The entire family goes, and then the parents go away alone, separate from the kids, to recover. These two vacations cost a combined $20,000, or around $1,700 a month.

· The home can’t run without a housekeeper, which costs the family $400 a week, or $1,600 a month.

· The older kids get allowances: The 17-year-old wants $60 a week, and the 14-year-old, $40, for a total of $400 a month.

· Let’s not forget the weekly “eating-out night” on Thursday. If dinner for the family costs $150 a shot, then we need to add $600 to the monthly expenses.

· Even with insurance, there are medical and dental bills to pay. And the 14-year-old has braces. All this amounts to around $600 a month.

· Let’s allocate around $400 a month for wedding and bar-mitzvah gifts, and an occasional piece of jewelry for Mom.

We’ll ignore for now things like shul membership, High Holiday seats, and the inevitable parking tickets…

If we pull out a calculator and add this all up, we arrive at a total of around $30,000 per month, or $360,000 a year.

When we take federal, state and local taxes into consideration, this family needs a gross annual income of some $550,000 just for these monthly expenses.

In 2014, the average household income in the United States was $72,000.

We think a jug of oil burning for eight days is a miracle? How about our community sustaining itself with these kinds of expenses, requiring $550,000 a year per family?

This is not a joke. It’s truly a miracle. An extraordinary miracle. It’s really unbelievable.

Let us not forget that we are a community of immigrants. Some of us arrived here 20 years ago, some 80 years ago. But we all came here relatively recently, fleeing from the Middle East, with hardly anything. And we’re flourishing, somehow coming up with $30,000 every month per household.

Hanukah, the holiday of miracles, is the perfect time for us to stop, take a few moments, and reflect upon this amazing miracle, how our community continues to “burn” despite this outrageous financial burden. It is simply miraculous.

So, What Do We Do?

Of course, alongside our appreciation of this extraordinary miracle, there is a great deal of anxiety about finances, which is completely understandable. When we consider the costs of tuition, housing, healthcare, clothing, groceries, and everything else listed above, it is frightening. So, what can we do about it? What should our attitude and approach be towards the exorbitant cost of living in our community?

Most people handle the situation in one of three ways:

· They yell and scream about the cost of tuition, thinking that somehow their shouting will be more effective than the thousands of people who have shouted about it before them.

· They complain about the wealthy people in the community who go on expensive vacations, make extravagant weddings, drive luxury cars and live in magnificent homes – and who also happen to bankroll our yeshivot, shuls and charities…

· They tell their children to marry somebody rich so they don’t have to worry about it – without realizing that marrying into a rich family is not always possible, is not always a simple matter, and does not necessarily guarantee happiness.

Those who wish to embrace these “solutions” are welcome to do so, but they shouldn’t be surprised when they find that they don’t help too much.

I believe there are three points that need to be made about this subject, each of which is vitally important and can go a very long way towards easing the anxiety and calming the fears about the cost of living in our community:

1) Lower the standards.

The accepted standards in our community are utterly ridiculous. We need to be more realistic and exercise some common sense in differentiating between “needs” and “wants.”

When Yaakov Avinu left his parents’ home and made his way to his uncle, Lavan, he dreamt his famous dream of the ladder, during which G-d appeared to him and promised him a glorious future. Hashem told Yaakov that he would produce a large nation that would take possession of the entirety of Eretz Yisrael. In the morning, Yaakov made a promise to do certain things if Hashem took care of him and provided him with “bread to eat and clothing to wear.”

Yaakov was promised everything, all the blessings in the world, but all he asked for was “bread to eat and clothing to wear.” What he was saying, in effect, was, “All I really need is food and clothing. Anything else Hashem gives me is a special blessing, a luxury. “

If only we in our community lived with this mindset – telling ourselves that we’d feel content with “bread to eat and clothing to wear.” When we expect everything in the list presented above – eating out once a week, two cars, summer camp, a vacation every year, thousands of dollars a year in new clothing, a fulltime housekeeper, and so on – then we don’t appreciate it. We don’t appreciate our dinners out in restaurants, because it’s a given. If we expect nothing more than enough food to eat, clothing and shelter, then everything else becomes exciting, a bonus, an extra treat, a gift from Hashem.

In a way I feel bad for children who were raised in wealthy homes, who lived in luxury their entire lives. They look at the luxuries they live with as normal and standard, and so it is very hard for them to appreciate them. If a person goes on a luxurious vacation twice a year, it isn’t special. We need to live with Yaakov’s mindset of “food to eat and clothing to wear,” drawing a clear line between what we need and what we want. If we live this way, we will avoid stress-inducing expenses, and we will live with a much greater sense of appreciation for all we do have. We should be perfectly content with a car that costs $250 a month. Children should be able to wear an ordinary $100 pair of shoes, and without four extra pairs. A household should be able to manage with a housekeeper who comes just twice a week. There’s nothing wrong with luxury, as long as we recognize it as a luxury and don’t view it as a basic need.

2) Community and opportunity.

While living in our community is certainly expensive, it also gives us a significant edge over everyone else. Anyone growing up in our community has more connections than anyone outside our community. True, even in our community, not everybody can go into his father’s business, but if somebody doesn’t, he has an uncle, a cousin, or some close friend of his father’s with a business who might be interested in hiring. Being close-knit means we know so many people, and so each and every young man entering adulthood starts out with an enormous advantage.

Moreover, our community’s work ethic, energy, aggressiveness, business acumen and sense of responsibility are second to none. All around us, there are self-made businessman and professionals who succeeded with the sweat of their brow, who have so much experience to share, and who are setting great examples. “Making it” in our community is not as impossible as it seems, as long as one works hard, gets an education, and is determined.

3) We can ask Hashem for miracles.

One who forgot to recite the על הניסים prayer on Hanukah in the Amidah or in birkat ha’mazon does not have to repeat the recitation. However, the Rama (Rav Moshe Isserles) rules that if one forgot to recite על הניסים in birkat ha’mazon, he may add it at the end of birkat ha’mazon, with the following introduction:

הרחמן הוא יעשה לנו ניסים כמו שעשה ניסים לאבותינו בימים ההם בזמן הזה.

The Merciful One shall perform miracles for us just as He performed miracles for our forefathers, in those days, at this time.

It is worthwhile to read that short prayer text several times to appreciate what it is saying. We pray to Hashem to perform miracles for us – no less than that.

Yes, we can ask for miracles. We cannot ask for Hashem to split the sea for us, or do anything else that involves suspending the laws of nature. But we can, and should, ask for the other miracles – the kind of miracles that brought us all the blessings that we currently enjoy, the “miraculous” sequence of events that brought us our spouse, our job and our home. We can ask Hashem to orchestrate events to help us, just as He has orchestrated events to help us until now.

Most of us can look at our lives and feel that, despite the pressures and uncertainties that we struggle with, we’re managing. We have a house. Our children are in school. We have a car. We have enough food. We might not be able to eat out with the family once a week, but we’re not hungry. And we can even go out for ice cream from time to time and have fun family trips on occasion. We have our share of problems, as everyone does, but we also enjoy some degree of happiness. All this is miraculous. So many things had to happen for us to have all these blessings. If Hashem performed miracles to get us to this point, we can trust that He will help us going forward, too.

Let us imagine the kohanim in the Bet Ha’mikdash watching the candles of the menorah burning on the sixth day – the fifth day after they were expected to be extinguished. They knew it would be two more days before the new oil arrived. Were they worried at that point that the candles might not continue burning another two days? Of course not. The candles miraculously burned this long; they would continue for another two days.

The same is true of our lives. Hashem has somehow kept us afloat all these years, with all the ups and downs we’ve experienced. Is there any reason to doubt whether He’ll continue helping us going forward?

Our Father Runs the Program

A certain Rabbi ran a camp in the Catskills, and every summer the camp featured a special incentive program to encourage the boys to learn Torah. There were various optional learning opportunities, and the boys who learned during those periods received tickets. At the end of the summer, a major event was held when the campers received prizes based on the number of tickets they had accumulated over the course of the summer.

The Rabbi’s ten-year-old son was an enthusiastic participant of this program. He attended every optional learning session that he could, and excitedly collected his tickets. He couldn’t wait for the end-of-summer barbeque when he would cash in his tickets for great prizes.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer, he was in his family’s bungalow, and his mother and his 22-year-old sister were in the kitchen. The sister, practically in tears, told her mother that she had not had a date in several months, the dates that she had before then did not go well, and she was starting to get worried.

Just then, the ten-year-old brother stormed into the kitchen in a frenzy.

“Mommy!” he shouted. “My tickets! They were in my pants pockets, and you washed them. Now they’re ruined. How will I get my prizes? I’ve been waiting all summer for this!”

His sister looks at him like he was crazy. “Don’t you realize,” she said, “your father runs the program. You have nothing to worry about it.”

The mother then turned to the girl and calmly remarked, “Listen to what you just said. Your Father runs the program – you have nothing to worry about.”

Sure enough, just three weeks later, this girl met the boy she eventually married.

This is one of the important messages of the Hanukah miracle. Our Father runs the program. He won’t let us down, and so we have nothing to worry about.