This week’s Torah portion contains the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel.

As the Torah portion begins, Jacob is about to be reunited with Esau. And he has no idea what he will find – hatred, perhaps, an angry brother, an army waiting to kill him. So Jacob arranged his family and his servants, like a general arranging an army.

And then suddenly, Jacob leaves his family and crosses to the other side of a river. “And Jacob was alone,” the Torah tells us, “and a man wrestled with him until dawn.”

The sages wondered why Jacob crossed the river. Why was he alone?

Perhaps, like a general, he needed time to plan his strategy. Or perhaps, he needed time to look into his soul, to come to peace with his life. But there was a Chassidic master, Bnei Yishachar, who told a different story.

According to Bnei Yishachar, Jacob had done everything he could. His army was organized. He had rehearsed his speech to Esau. And then suddenly, Jacob realized that he had forgotten something. He had left something on the other side of the river – something so important that he had to go back.

And what was it that Jacob left behind?

On the surface, it was nothing special – just a small bottle of oil. But it was a special kind of oil, an oil that could burn with the pure radiance of God’s light.

There would be a time, Jacob knew, when the world would be dark. And the light from this oil would be the only thing that allowed us to survive.

So Jacob took a chance. He crossed the river and rescued the bottle. And a thousand years later, that time of darkness came. The Maccabees reentered the Temple, and they could only find one bottle of oil. But it was the same bottle – that one, tiny bottle that Jacob saved. And there was a miracle, and the light lasted for eight days.

There is a special light, Bnei Yishachar tells us, the light of God’s presence, that has never gone away. A little of that light remains inside each of us.

We’re living in a time when the world seems dark, when it seems as if we stand on one side of a river and the entire world stands on the other. But Chanukah is almost here, and it will remind us that the world is never completely dark. In fact, says Bnei Yishachar, there is a little of that light from the first menorah in each Chanukah candle.

There was another Chassidic master, Netivot Shalom, who wondered about a passage in the Talmud. The Talmud describes the miracle of the oil and says that the following year, the sages established Chanukah as a time of thanksgiving.

“Why did they wait a year?” asked Netivot Shalom. And his answer was profound:

Because the light of Chanukah was a different kind of light, and they didn’t know if the light would last.  But the light returned the following year, and they realized that the miracle would last until the time of the Messiah.

The miracle of Chanukah is not in the lights, and it’s not in the oil.  The miracle is that God left one drop of pure oil inside the heart of every Jew, a small place inside us that can keep us alive with the help of community.  As long as we have that light, we can find our way out of darkness.

Netivot Shalom was right.  God left one drop of pure oil inside the heart of every Jew.  And when we come together and combine the light with each of us, we can survive every kind of darkness.

Shabbat Shalom,
Art