All in Holidays

The Simcha Of Purim: Why Is There A Mitzvah To Make A Bride & Groom Happy?

Devir Kahan
Holidays, Purim

We are blessed to be a part of a religion that values and places great emphasis on happiness and joy. A common refrain is that one must be b’simcha whilst in the service of God, with Tehillim’s rather famous dictum of ivdu es HaShem b’simcha (100) as just one example. Indeed, a fundamental aspect of all holidays is that one must experience joy, with Purim being a day dedicated exclusively to just that...

Perspectives On New Year’s Day

Devir Kahan
Rosh HaShanah, Holidays, New Year's Day

The history of New Year’s Day is a complicated and most interesting one. The short version of it all goes essentially as follows: In ancient Rome, as the calendar was being formed and reformed, it was decided that a month should be named after the Roman God Janus who represented transitions, doors, gates, and beginnings. This month came to be known as January. Given the God that it represented, the first day of the month became the start of the new year, and was a day of festivities in celebration of new beginnings...

Oils Well That Ends Well: What To Do With Leftover Chanukah Oil

R. Jason Allen
Chanukah, Halacha, Holidays

Shulchan Aruch in Hilchos Chanukah (OC 677:4) cites a din from the Sheiltos that after Chanukah is over, the leftover oil from your menorah that did not completely burn needs to be gathered together and burned in one big fire. The reason, the Mechaber states, is because that leftover oil is "huktzah l'mitzvaso.” Or, since it was set aside for mitzvah use, it then becomes assur b'hanah (forbidden to benefit from), so the only thing to do with it is to burn it off. Maran then concludes with: "if that leftover Chanukah oil became mixed with regular (non-Chanukah) oil, and there isn't 60 times (shishim) the amount of regular oil to mevatel the leftover Chanukah oil, there are those who say that you cannot add the needed amount of regular oil to mevatel the Chanukah oil."...

The Missing Passion Of Chanukah

Devir Kahan
Chanukah, History, Holidays

There is something curiously missing from our telling of the Chanukah story. Rabbi Avraham Grodzinski points out that in the telling of the story of Purim — the other Rabbinically enacted holiday — there is a clear cause and effect; a continuum is very clearly identifiable. In the story of Purim we sinned by partaking in the extravagant feasting and by bowing down to idols. These sins were what allowed the evil forces to gain a foothold against us. This much is clear from Chazal. When we, in turn, fasted, we were led to salvation. There was sin, repentance, salvation — all connected along a clear line...

Amos 4:1-13 — Of Cosmological Sarcasm

Yaacov Bronstein
Amos, Chanukah, Holidays

This piece continues the theme of God’s ultimately futile attempts to distance the nation from sin. However, these attempts are not as those we saw previously in 2:9-12 — the orchestration of religiously encouraging circumstances and developmental experiences — but instead a series of national punishments which had been sent in order to forcibly revert the nation back to God. The retrospective reflection on these failed attempts occupy v6-11, the bulk of the piece. The introductory v1-5 serves to delineate the persisting current state of sin, and the concluding v12-13 imply a disastrous future on an even greater scale. This outline is parallel to the structure of the previously examined 2:6-16, a section with which our current speech bears a significant relationship. Through delineating the key discrepancies between these largely parallel pieces, the singular significances and specific natures of both pieces will be shown...

The Historicity Of The Miracle Of Oil

Devir Kahan
Chanukah, History, Holidays

Did the Chanukah miracle of a small jug of oil lasting for eight days really happen? Or was it a Talmudic invention? While the flagrant nature of these questions is acknowledged, there has been much recent academic and historic literature on the subject, and there does not seem to be a single compendium of all the various information, along with an intellectually honest analysis of the subject and its various conclusions and perspectives. That is what I hope this will be...

Chanukah: Where Are We Running?

Devir Kahan
Holidays, Chanukah

By all accounts, we have no reason to believe that the war of the Chashmonaim had no deaths or losses. Surely, the fact that the Jewish people triumphed in the war is miraculous (although we didn’t actually win the war — we just reclaimed the Beis Hamikdash), but the war itself was not. People were killed. Wives lost their husbands; children lost their fathers. War is never pretty, and neither was the war of Chanukah. Not many people think about this in their celebration of the holiday of Chanukah, though, and neither, seemingly, did those that actually fought in the war...

Parshas Vayeishev: Yehudah, Tamar, & Why We Can’t Benefit From Chanukah Candles

Devir Kahan
Chanukah, Holidays, Parsha

A joke: A scientist is in a room running some tests on a fly he has trapped in a test tube. He plucks one leg off of the fly and tells the fly, "fly". And so the fly does. It buzzes away, and the scientists records the affects of his little experiment on the fly in his notebook. He catches the fly again, plucks off another leg, instructs the fly to fly, and takes note of what happens again. He continues on like this until all six of the fly's legs are gone. With each leg painfully removed, the fly flies, and the scientist takes note. The scientist then removes one wing, tells the fly to fly, and when the fly doesn't take off, he concludes that after six legs and a wing have been removed from a fly, it can no longer hear...

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