“Imagine your cell phone is at 6 percent, but it lasts for eight days. Now you understand Hanukkah.” This refers to the most well-known miracle of Hanukkah; that the small cruse of oil found in the desecrated Holy Temple — which was only enough to last for one night — lasted for eight nights, long enough for more oil to be found and pressed. It explains why we light the eight-branched candelabra known in Hebrew as a chanukiah, also described as a menorah, but it doesn’t explain why we celebrate Hanukkah to begin with. In fact, Hanukkah as a festival isn’t mentioned in the Hebrew Bible; we know about it from accounts in the two “Books of Maccabbees,” which are part of the canon of the Catholic Church.
Interestingly, neither book mentions the miracle of the oil; one account tells that Hanukkah was a delayed celebration of the harvest festival of Sukkot, which is an eight-day festival, and another that the Hasmoneans, which the Maccabee family was part of, entered the Temple with eight iron spears that they covered with wood and lit for eight days. Whether the story of the oil is true or not is beside the point; we like it, it works and our ancient Sages preferred to glorify a miracle wrought by God as opposed to a military victory.
In Hebrew school, we were taught that the miracles of Hanukkah were “too many to count,” so I’ve never tried. However, aside from the oil lasting for the eight days, there’s the miracle of “the few against the many,” the small band of Maccabees who prevailed against the much larger and more powerful Syrian-Greek army, and a victory against assimilation. As I’ve said before, the short history of every Jewish holiday is, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”
In a 2011 article for the Huffington Post about the Miracle(s) of Hanukkah, Rabbi Laura Geller wrote, “What is the real miracle of Hanukkah? It is the miracle of human courage that empowers us to take risks for the future even in our imperfect, uncertain world. It is the courage, even in the darkest of times, to create our own light.”
What does this mean? Well, if the miracle of the oil is that it lasted for seven days more than expected, why do we not celebrate only seven days? Why the eighth? According to Rabbi David Hartman (of blessed memory), the miracle of the first day was that the people had the courage to take a chance and light the lamps, knowing that the oil might not last.