Category Archives: Judaism

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Life is like an hourglass

January 17, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Imbolc Moon

hourglass

This is a short piece from a book, 365 Tao: Daily Meditations. It’s day 350. It fits so well with kabbalah, as I’m finding Taoism often does.

Life is like an hourglass

Consciousness is the sand

Imagine an hourglass.

Its shape is like the symbol for infinity. Its form recalls the double helix of DNA. Its two sections represent polarity. The material on one side, the immaterial on the other. The male on one side, the female on the other. Hot and cold, positive and negative, or any duality. (dialectic)

The sand runs in a stream, the same stream as the course of energy that runs up your spine, the same stream that is the road of life.

The movement of that sand is what we call Tao. Our consciousness alternates between the various states represented by the hourglass. It is as difficult to grasp as a stream of sand. Therefore, it is foolish to examine things minutely. It is unwise to focus on the material. It is wisdom to understand the movement.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel, Kabbalah, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Woolly Mammoths

The Grail and the Veil

January 14, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

Sumi Brush “The more I have looked into the Quest for the Grail, it is clear it is a Western form of Zen. There is no grail, it is understanding that the veil is the mystery of existence, it is nothing, but our interactions with everyone and everything.” Woolly and friend, Mark Odegard

Mark is an artist, an author, a sweet guy and a friend of 30 years. He’s done many retreats at a Zen Buddhist retreat center in Minnesota and done calligraphy with that giant brush Zen monks use. He has an ability to come at ideas from the side, or behind, seeing what cannot be seen; the Zen work has informed his sight in substantive ways.

He’s asking the Woolly Mammoths this New Year’s question for their next meeting:

“What personal tool/skill do I need to refine for my quest for the grail’? I will write down your answer to this, and ask you again at the end of the year.

The story represents our own encounter with the mystery of life (often occurring in our late teen years). The meaning is veiled for us, what do you need to lift the veil.”

Mark’s question made me start because I’d just written this, only two or three days ago here on Ancientrails:

“Torah study is about loving attentiveness. It is a way of engaging the sacred world which we can know first from within our own person and which permeates that which we encounter throughout our lives…

God lit up for me. Ah, if I do Torah study, if I engage in loving attentiveness to my Self, my own Soul, and those of others and of the broader natural world, then I can find the knowledge which permeates all things, that very same shards of the sacred that shattered just after the tzimtzum to create our universe. That is God being available everywhere. This is far different from the Latinate imponderable of omnipresence, sort of an elf on the shelf deity lurking in every spot, finding you everywhere. And judging.

No. God is another word for the intimate linkage between and among all things, from the smallest gluon to the largest star. God is neither a superparent nor a cosmic Santa Claus writing down your behaviors in the book of deeds; God is a metaphor for the sacred knowledge which permeates the perceivable, and the unperceivable, world.” Ancientrails

I’m not trying to revive the word God here, nor am I trying to reinsert myself into the thought world which includes God. I’m on the same grail quest I started years ago in Alexandria First Methodist sitting beside the huge stained glass window of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Back then I read the Bible as history, not as mythology. Back then it mattered if there was a Jesus who prayed in that Garden that the burden of crucifixion be lifted.

I pushed those beliefs away long ago, passing through a moment, a long moment of second naivete with them, then moving into the world of the Great Wheel and the cyclical, spiraling time through which all life moves, in fact, all things. Over the last year or so my intense program of Jewish immersion has taken me another big step along this ancientrail, a true Grail quest began when, as a sixteen year old, I began to doubt the stories I’d heard growing up.

Frederick J. Waugh, The Knight of the Holy Grail, c. 1912

My true philosophical (qua religious) home, existentialism, found me in the aftermath of that doubting and my first encounter with philosophy at Wabash College. When I went into my Christian immersion, through seminary and in the Presbyterian years, my faith went mystical, seeing the divine as divinely personal, as a bright light shining within the darkness of my inner world, a light whose purpose was not to dispel the darkness, but to integrate, Taoist style, both of them.

Now, with Rabbi Jamie, I’m studying the kabbalah. Like Zen it insists on not seeing with eyes alone, but with the heart, with a poetic sensibility that understands religious language, I think all religious language, as metaphor, even and especially for the kabbalists, the written Torah.

The veil is a very important metaphor in kabbalistic thought. Like Mark observed above the kabbalists know there is a veil between us and the mystery of existence. The veil underscores the humility necessary for this work and without humility the quest will fail.

This idea is ultimately significant. Or not. We cannot penetrate the veil. Ever. Yet we all stand together on the other side of it. To see through the veil, to actually find the Grail, is not given to us, yet that place which we see through a glass darkly is the place where we stand right now. Yes, right now the Grail is in our hands, a cup from which we can drink at any moment.

This ancientrail, the quest for the Grail, the turning of the Great Wheel, the lifting of the burden of our crucifixion, flowing up and down with divine energy through the Tree of Life, is our life, is the life of this world, this cosmic pulsing brilliant reality. Yet we let so many things: work, fear, hope, pride blind us.

The Woolly Mammoths have been my companions, fellow pilgrims, on the way to Canterbury. Or, fellow Tibetan Buddhists inch worming their way around the sacred mountain, Meru. Or, my fellow Torah scholars, davening as we read the sacred texts. Or, fellow Lakotas, our skin pierced and tied to the world tree during the Sun Dance. Or, friends traveling through this life together until it ends.

“What personal tool/skill do I need to refine for my quest for the grail?” Out of far left field, I’m going to answer, “A Sumi brush, rice paper, an ink stone. And the courage to use them.”

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mussar, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Reimagining/Reconstructing

January 12, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

Alan James Garner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https commons.wikimedia.org — Alan James Garner Own work, CC BY SA 3.0, https commons wikimedia org

Last night, third night in a row at Beth Evergreen, was the MVP, the mussar vaad practice group. Tuesday was the unveiling of the third stained glass window. Wednesday was the first class of the third in the first year kabbalah curriculum, the Mystical Hebrew Letters. On a personal, physical level this many evening sessions, which extend well beyond my usual 8 p.m. bedtime and then require a half hour ride home afterward, exhaust me. But on a psycho-spiritual level the nourishment I receive more than compensates.

As I wrote this last sentence, I looked up at Black Mountain and noticed a pink glow, a penumbra at its peak. A good symbol for the new understanding that is beginning to dawn on me.

In the mid-day mussar class, where we are near the end of the Messilat Yesharim, the path of the upright, by the 18th century kabbalist, Rabbi Moshe Luzzato, Jamie commented, “Remember, these are kabbalists. They include proof texts as an invitation to rethink them as metaphor, not to accept their literal meaning.” Jamie has said this before, in the kabbalist classes especially. “The Torah is a metaphor, not history.”

A bit later, he asked, “What is Torah study?” This was a topic we covered over a year ago when beginning Luzzato’s work. Torah study is not about content. It is not, in other words, limited to scholarship about Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah study is a method and it involves paying close attention to the person next to you, to the sunrise over Black Mountain, to the cry of a sparrow, to the way a lodgepole pine sloughs off snow, to the needs of the dog sleeping beside your chair. to the nature of fire crackling in the fireplace. Torah study is about loving attentiveness. It is a way of engaging the sacred world which we can know first from within our own person and which permeates that which we encounter throughout our lives.

And, again, aha! The sun, the sacred sun with its life-giving light, just lit up Black Mountain and showed me a sign, a way of illustrating a literally dawning awareness. The wind, the finger of the sacred blows as the ruach, the breath of spirit, the breath of life and moves the lodgepole pines in our front yard. The pines themselves erupt out of the stony Shadow Mountain ground, able to express life in a soil mostly barren of the rich nutrients available in the farmlands of the American Midwest.

Marily, Tara, the Burning Bush — Marilyn, Tara, the Burning Bush

I find this means I can read the word God in a new way. Shortly after Jamie commented on Torah study, we read a sentence in Messilat Yesharim that included the English word omnipresence, as in God’s omnipresence. I asked Jamie what Hebrew lay behind this translation. He looked it up, “Hmm. Something like, permeated knowledge.”

hist_univ No. God is another word for the intimate linkage between and among all things, from the smallest gluon to the largest star. God is neither a superparent nor a cosmic Santa Claus writing down your behaviors in the book of deeds; God is a metaphor for the sacred knowledge which permeates the perceivable, and the unperceivable, world.

Our deeds are, of course, written in the very real book of our life, so they have consequences, not only on our life as whole, but as they impact others and that same world which we all inhabit. You could also see God’s judgment as the manifestation of those consequences, in their positive and negative natures, not as a divine finger shaking or outright punishing, but as ripples from one instance of the sacred to the another.

Faith and Spirituality, General, Judaism, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

In the Beginning

January 12, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

Kabbalah last night. The first session of Mystical Hebrew Letters. Rabbi Jamie began teaching kabbalah at the Kabbalah Experience with this class several years ago. It moves from the broader conceptual fields of Soul and Space, the first two classes this year, to the particular examination of the Hebrew alphabet.

As with all the kabbalistic material, the subject matter gets complicated fast. We began with an overview of this ancient language. According to recent scholarship Rabbi Jamie says, it is the oldest alphabet in the world. Like most early languages, Chinese for example, it began as pictographs.

aleph Aleph, the first letter, was an ox-head. The word aleph means ox-head, or head of ox, also learning and chieftain. Prior to the use of Arabic numerals each Hebrew letter stood in for numbers with the letter aleph as number one. The word aleph means 1,000. Thus, aleph symbolizes the philosophical notion of the one and the many.

It is silent. Not sure why, but aleph and ayin, though used in the written language, are always silent. As silent and first in the alphabet, it also symbolizes the silence out of which came everything.

(next day) Stopped writing this yesterday when my need for sleep overcame my ability to write a coherent sentence.

The big idea I took away from this class involved aleph and my reimagining/reconstructing emphasis on incarnation rather than transcendence. Jamie introduced the notion of the alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, as a funnel flowing from aleph in the ein sof (unlimitedness), its silence standing for the space created when the ein sof contracted, the tzimtzum, and filled with ohr, the first light of creation which fractures and travels down through the tree of life with its 22 channels (connecting lines) to the tenth sephirot, or malchut/shekinah, which is this world. Its letter is tav, the 22nd and last letter.

At first I thought, oh this emphasizes transcendence, the physical world developing in a top down fashion from a realm unconnected to it save by the thinnest of conceptual threads. Then Jamie began to introduce the location of the letters on the tree of life and aleph did not appear above the keter (the crown at the top of the tree of life), but on the parallel line of connection between chesed and gevurah, essentially the middle of the tree of life. Huh? How could this be?

These two images represent the two different ways of understanding this idea:

EinSof

This one shows the first representation of the funnel idea that came to me. It does in fact emphasize transcendence. But, when we remember (difficult to do when material is presented on paper) that the tree of life is three-dimensional and can be seen as a sphere, another possible image presents itself.

aleph

As the rabbi likes to say, Aha! The nub of creation, the contraction of the unlimited ein sof, the movement from the quantum world to the Einstenian/Newtonian this world, the shattering of the ur-ohr, the first light of creation, happens in the center of the sphere and radiates outward. Yes. The divine moves from within all to create, in an outward push, the shekinah, the divine manifested in created matter. This is big-bangy. The tzimtzum just proceeds the big bang which radiated outward from an unfathomably concentrated spot in the beforeness of whatever it was, the ein sof, to create literally everything we know.

This puts the sacred neither above nor below but within. In order to access sacred nature we do not need to cast a prayer upward toward the heavens or outward to a religious institution, but inward to the aleph in our own soul, to that silent spot in ourselves where resides our shard of the ohr, the first light.

Here is an image of the tree of life that shows the location of aleph between chesed and gevurah. Remember that the tree is three dimensional like the DNA helix.

tree_of_life2

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Seek? Yes. Claim to have found? No.

January 6, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

It is not the seeking after God that divides but the claim to have found God and to have discovered the only proper way of obeying God and communing with God. M.M.K., Reconstructionist Prayer Book, page 125

Been thinking about religion. Again. Still. Always. Considering it from a different perspective this last week. I’ve said other times that I believe religion is the philosophy and poetry of the common person, a way to understand deep questions like: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What’s good behavior? Bad? Who am I? Who are we?

Religions are a language a group of people can use to have conversations about these questions, a set of ideas and concepts, history and tradition which give weight to possible answers. We are here to repair the world, to bear the burden of the other. A Jewish response to some of the questions. We are here to love one another as we love ourselves. One Christian answer. We are here to detach ourselves from the world, to float free of attachment and eventually find nirvana. One Buddhist answer. We are here to submit to the will of Allah. We are here as part of the natural world and best served when we align ourselves with it. We will head toward heaven or bardo or the endless wheel of reincarnation or the return of our elements from whence they came.

winter solstice4 Inside the particular Jewish or Presbyterian or Unitarian or New Thought or Tibetan Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim community to which we belong we use this language and create a sense of belonging. As we use the language, part of which is ritual and dress, part of which is expected behaviors, we create a semi-permeable membrane, often not very permeable at all, for outsiders. To cross into our community they have to penetrate the language, learn the customs, adjust themselves to the patterns. The membrane works both ways, obscuring our vision as we look out from within our particular tradition. We see a world shaped by and often determined by the assumptions of ours.

This membrane tends to make dialogue across it difficult, sometimes impossible. My point here is that in the world there are many, many of these membrane covered communities. The very thing which makes them rich and wonderful to their participants makes them difficult to understand for outsiders. And, they can’t all have all the answers. Common sense says so.

Many of the new atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) have taken these sort of observations and come out with ideological guns blazing, considering themselves in a High Noon battle with the forces of ignorance. I disagree.

Last night at Beth Evergreen, during the Shabbat service, I read through various pieces of commentary in the Reconstructionist Prayer Book. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist Movement and a religious humanist, appears as M.M.K. In a derash, or homiletical interpretation of the Aleynu, the closing prayers for a service, Kaplan’s initials appear below this quote:

I think MMK and I could have been buddies.

Judaism

Discussion at the Synagogue Tonight

January 5, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

Reconstructionist Statement on Trump Announcement Recognizing Jerusalem as Capital

News

Posted on December 6, 2017

Jerusalem

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College / Jewish Reconstructionist Communities and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association are concerned over the possible impacts of the timing and the unilateral manner of President Trump’s decision for the U.S. to formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital outside the framework of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. In our movement we have long understood Jerusalem to be the capital of modern Israel, just as we have long understood the need for careful and constructive diplomacy by the U.S. when dealing with a place as utterly unique as Jerusalem, where deep religious, historical, and national claims overlap. For many years now we have also advocated for the day when a negotiated peace agreement ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would lead to the formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, not only by the U.S., but by nations all over the world. Many of us have envisioned that day as one in which the international community would even be celebrating the establishment of two capitals in different parts of the Holy City — one of Israel and one of Palestine — ushering in a new era of coexistence and mutual recognition. Our concern is that this abrupt disruption of the diplomatic status quo by the U.S. on this unusually sensitive and explosive issue may lead to dangerous unintended consequences, including renewed escalations of violence and terrorism.

Israelis are politically savvy and have long understood that the need for skillful diplomacy, and not the denial of the centrality of Jerusalem to Israelis, has been the rationale for the U.S.’s decades-long holding pattern on this particularly charged issue. We hope that today’s announcement will not ignite new rounds of violence or damage the ability of the U.S. to use its influence to support the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian and regional peace negotiations. In his remarks today, President Trump pledged to do everything in his power to pursue those goals, and we hope he will follow through vigorously and constructively.

As Jews, we are tied to Jerusalem historically, spiritually, and emotionally. Jerusalem is in our prayers and represents our people’s deepest yearnings for peace and redemption for all of humanity. We call on the president and American political leaders who care about the wellbeing of Israelis and Palestinians alike to focus their efforts on rebuilding trust, dialogue, and negotiations so that we can more speedily arrive at a time when Jerusalem will truly be a place of peace, reconciliation, and coexistence.

Aging, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Health, Hebrew

Yesterday

January 3, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Moon of the Long Nights

The nearly full moon lit up the snow outside our bedroom last night. Soothing, gentle. This one presides over the longest nights of the year.

Two of our females had imaging work yesterday. Rigel got an x-ray, looking again for cancer since she has continued to lose weight in spite of therapy for chronic hepatitis. She’s eight, old for a dog of her size. Her condition, whatever it is, caused me to roll back through the death of many of our dogs just before sleep. Sad. Grief is the price we pay for love.

Kate had a makeup c.t. scan since the one she had last week was not done according to protocols for pulmonary embolisms. It required a contrast dye. Like the first, no contrast scan, this one showed nothing new, nothing menacing. Dr. Gidday now wants her to do a stress test, checking for possible heart issues. Don’t know when that will be.

She also has an appointment in late January with an orthopedic surgeon to discuss her painful shoulders, investigating possible shoulder replacements. She takes all this with a calm spirit, not bringing doom into the present, rather waiting for information. Her quick intelligence and vast medical knowledge could make it otherwise. An impressive woman, my Kate.

Ruth’s tonsillectomy seems to be loosening its grip. On day 6 or so the scabs fall off as healing progresses. This can be, and was for her, painful. Yesterday evening though she texted that she’s ready for empanadas. A great sign.

soup We have a cookbook, Twelve Months of Monastery Soups, and I’ve been making soups out of it that Kate thinks sound good. She has a favorite, vermicelli soup, a vegetable soup with noodles. I made some for her last night.

I’ve decided to give Hebrew this month. I’ll work on it everyday and see if I can get myself back to a place where it’s at least enjoyable. Right now, it isn’t. If I can’t get there in a month, I’m gonna drop it. Banging my head against this particular wall isn’t worth it unless I enjoy it.

GeekWorld, Health, Judaism

A Busy Friday

December 16, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Bare Aspen Moon

hearing-aid-alta2-nera2-ria2-minirite-silver Full day yesterday. Up at 4:45 though Kep had nudged Kate awake earlier and she’d already fed the dogs. Wrote, ate breakfast, came back to the loft and filed all my open tabs in Evernote. That took a while since I’m still fiddling with Firefox Quantum, too, changing zoom levels, color preferences, customizing the tool bar. Got to the new workout from On the Move Fitness about 9:30. Finished, after icing my knee, at 11:00.

After dressing and collecting the keys, I headed out for emissions testing and picking up my Rigel bitten hearing aid. The first emission’s place, Mountain Emissions, only did diesel emissions, not clear from their facebook page, and was closed. So, onto to the place I used three years ago after transferring plates and title to Colorado. While on the way there a thought occurred to me, how did it take so long to catch the VW folks software scam? I mean, the vehicle puts out emissions from the tail pipe. They’re measured in emissions testing. WTF?

emissions So I asked the technician. Turns out the specific tests at drive through testing facilities like the one I visited yesterday use a very specific algorithm, putting the car on rollers and then simulating different traffic conditions. The VW scam depended on the very specific, and standard, testing algorithm. They taught their cars to blow clean during the exact kind of testing done at state and county testing facilities.

The same technician, a loyal employee of his contracted emissions testing employer, said his company caught the cheaters at roadside testing. Not sure exactly who caught it though the suspicions were aroused in California. In roadside testing, IRL rather than in a calibrated testing facility, the tests were not predictable and some diesels began to fail. An odd, odd circumstance. Makes me wonder how much similar mendacity there is in the corporate world.

The Rav4 passed, by the way.

After the emissions testing, it was over to Hearing Rehab Associates to pick up my repaired hearing aid. I’ve been without it a week. Thanks, Rigel. Closed for lunch. So, I went across the street to a sushi place and had ramen plus salmon sashimi.

Picked up my now undented hearing aid. It looked shiny and new. When I put it in my ear, its sound quality was better thanks to a new speaker and a new microphone. On the way back to the mountains, all this was in Littleton, a southern burb, gas for the car at Valero.

Nap-ish. Kate made a pasta dish with chard, yummy, for the Beth Evergreen potluck. A Hanukkah shabbat service. We all brought our family menorahs with four candles, put them on one table and lit them. Rabbi Jamie lit the much larger Synagogue menorah. We sang songs, including dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay and others unfamiliar to me. There were tables in the sanctuary and we ate the meal there.

Finally, home. A long day.

Cooking, Jefferson County, Judaism, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

what’s in your pot tonight?

December 14, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Bare Aspen Moon

vacation at home vintage poster After writing the post below, about slowing down, I realized I need a vacation. Time off. A break. A pause. I need to vacate the life I love for just a bit, to clear out the schmuz in my pistons. Confess I don’t know how to do that right now. Money. Visitors. Holidays. I’m considering how to do it.

So I’ve started cooking more. My joy in cooking is making stuff up. Last night I went through one of my favorite cook books, How the World Cooks Chicken. There were two large thawed chicken breasts in the sink.

Taking ideas from one recipe and adding them to another. I like that. So I saw quince in one, but you could substitute apples. I had apples. Parmesan cheese. Hmm. Sounds good. But, no parmesan. Well. Let’s see. There’s salmon in the freezer. Why did that come up? I like poached salmon. Wait. Why not? I could poach the chicken.

Two cups of water in the skillet. Some bullion. Paul Prudhomme poultry seasoning on the chicken breasts. Sliced up apple. Porcini and sea salt seasoning. Kate likes mushrooms. There was some Zatarain’s cilantro rice. That’ll go with the chicken. And some frozen peas. Easy peasy.

The poaching went faster than I thought so I had to toss the skillet in the upper oven, but everything got done. Not bad. Afterward I realized the chicken could get cut up, the leftover rice and peas thrown in with the chicken broth and voila! Soup. Nice. That was fun.

Anyhow that’s how I cook.

Afterward, kabbalah. Three presentations. One on the idea of the holy of holies. The temple looms large in Jewish thought, in many, many ways. One on the link between the ten sefirot and a Japanese inspired version of Chinese medicine, acupressure. One on the surprisingly pervasive influence of the kabbalists in the shabbat service. All were, in their own way, interesting. Having to come up with a presentation did cement the learning for each of us, that was clear. And, they led to interesting speculations.

The new class, ready in January, will be on the correspondence between the Hebrew letters and the 22 interconnections between the sefirot.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holidays, Judaism

Hanukkah

December 12, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Bare Aspen Moon

Ruth at Beth Evergreen, new year's 2017, end of Hanukkah — Ruth at Beth Evergreen, new year’s 2017, end of Hanukkah

Hanukkah begins tonight. I got a Hanukkah greeting from India where a mussar friend teaches English five months or so years to Buddhist nuns and monks. We’ll be celebrating with the grandkids and Jon at his house this coming Sunday and at Beth Evergreen this Friday. Kate has a large lit menorah that we put in our window and we say the blessing each night and light the candles.

Like the Christian festival of the incarnation, Christmas, the meaning of this holiday often gets obscured in gifts and parties, but both have taken on a similar characteristic more related to their month of observance than their specific religious meaning: lights. Hanukkah is the light in the darkness approaching the Winter Solstice as is Christmas, Diwali and shortly after, Kwanzaa.

In the case of Hanukkah the lights are integral to the holiday itself, a celebration of the miracle in the liberated Second Temple when a small cruse of olive oil, only enough for one night, lit the Temple menorah for eight nights. The original menorah described in the Torah was made of gold, had seven lampstands and stood, according to oral tradition, 5.3 feet high, 18 hand breadths. It, along with many other ritual implements, has been recreated by the Temple Institute, the specifications in the Torah and the oral tradition.

menorah replica of the original menorah in solid gold. Temple Institute

Tradition states that a menorah of seven lamps should not be used outside the Temple, so the Hanukkah menorah has nine lamps, four on each side, eight total to symbolize the miracle from the restoration of the Second Temple, and a shamash, or servant lamp, which is used to light the others.

The holiday memorializes the victory of the Maccabees, Jewish freedom fighters, over the Seleucid emperor, Antiochus IV, known as Epiphanes.