(Originally published in December 2020)
The Chanukah menorah is a kli, a vessel, to hold the oil or the candles that bring light into the world. Light needs a container. In order for blessing to enter this world, it needs a container.
In the book of Kings (II Kings 4), when a destitute woman approaches the prophet Elisha, he tells her to go gather from around the neighborhood kelim rekim, empty vessels. Only after she has these vessels can she receive the miraculous oil that fills them. Blessing requires a container to hold it.
The Sefat Emet suggests that the Chanukah menorah is a symbol for us, for our own capacity to be vessels that carry God’s light in the world. As it says in Proverbs, Ner Hashem Nishmat Adam — “the soul of a person is the lamp of the Lord” (Proverbs 20:27). The soul of a person — each one of us — is meant to be a ner, a lamp, a container to hold the light of God.
If we think about it, physically, we already do function as a container of sorts. Your body is an open vessel that continually holds and lets go of life-giving air; your lungs and your belly are empty receptacles; they fill up and then let the air out, making room for the next round, becoming a vessel again and again with each breath.
Indeed, when God created the human, God took earth from the ground and formed a receptacle and then breathed life into it. Vayipah be’apav nishmat hayim. “God blew into his nostrils the breath of life.” We were made to be receptacles for God’s gifts.
Expanding this notion, what would it mean to become — like the Chanukah menorah — a vessel for God’s light? What does it mean to be a container? How do we make ourselves into such a vessel to hold God’s light?
There are two aspects to any container, the structure that holds whatever is to be contained, and the empty space inside. On the one hand, we need to create space, to empty ourselves, to make sure that we are not too full to receive from above. On the other hand, we need to have the strength to actually hold the light, to contain it so that it does not just diffuse and disappear into the atmosphere. Space and embrace — both are needed to become receptive to the light from beyond.
I will examine each aspect in turn. First, space. We are so full much of the time, full of thoughts and feelings that have power over us, that take us over so that there is nothing left, no room for anything from above to enter. We are preoccupied by worries and plans and hurt feelings and jealousy and striving and attempts to control what happens. We are preoccupied with ourselves, and we take up a lot of room and energy in our internal systems. So creating space inside means finding some emptiness, some silence, amidst all the noisy swirl of the small self. Our preoccupations won’t disappear, and we probably don’t want them to, but they can be moved out of center stage, to allow room for something else to emerge, something that will only flow through us if we are empty enough to receive it.
Turning to the parsha for a moment, before Yosef could become God’s vehicle in history, he had to be stripped of his colorful cloak — a symbol of his small self with all its arrogance and ego-centric dreams — and thrown into the pit of emptiness and surrender. Vehabor reik, eyn bo mayim. “The pit was empty; there was no water.” The emptiness of the pit mirrors the emptiness that Yosef needed to cultivate inside himself to make room for God, to become a vessel. “There was no water” — no help, no recourse. Yosef was forced to completely surrender, to acknowledge his lack of control and total reliance on God. We don’t necessarily need to experience the emptiness and surrender in the same extreme way as Yosef, to hit bottom — the bottom of a pit — but this Yosef incident is a good metaphor for the work of emptying ourselves and of letting go of our colorful cloak, our ego’s peacock feathers.
It is interesting to note that the tradition reads the doubleness of this verse about the pit — the mention of the empty pit as well as the lack of water — as implying that there actually was something in the pit (snakes and scorpions); it wasn’t truly empty. This is precisely the point of emptiness; it turns out that there is indeed something in nothing, that to open oneself to emptiness is to open oneself — to connect oneself — to the greatest something in the world.
But being empty, letting go, is not enough. Oil can’t be poured into full jugs, but it also can’t be poured into thin air; we need a container, an empty one, but still, a container, a structure, to hold the blessing. Internally, this container is made of desire, of the positive energy and strength of wanting to serve, wanting to receive, wanting to be close to God, wanting to function as a carrier of divine light and love in the universe. While the emptiness requires a letting go action, a relinquishing, the containment needs us to embrace, to hold with both hands, to love. I am thinking of the Piasetzner Rebbe’s notion of the machshavah ahat tehorah, the one pure thought that a person should have at all times — a desire to be close to God. Everything else recedes to the background — we let go of all other desires and create space — but there is still this one strong yearning, and it is this yearning that creates a container inside us to actually hold the blessing.
There is strength here as well as energy. While the emptying is a release, the holding is an act of power and might A bag in a grocery store that is weak will not be able to withstand the weight of the groceries it is meant to hold; this act of holding and containing requires building up the strength of our container, the muscle of our faith and our presence.
Perhaps the best example of such a strong container is Avraham’s hineni — Here I am — at the akedah, the binding of Isaac. God was asking him to let go of his most favored possession, his beloved child — there was certainly a surrender here, a relinquishing — but there was also an embrace, a Presence, a sense of rising with energy and strength to meet the divine.
“Here I am.” The small self recedes, but something else emerges inside us. A new/old Self, an “I” that is strong enough to contain the flow from above, that was born to do precisely this job. Here I am. Ready to receive. This larger Self is born in the moment, in the “here” of presence, of being ready and present right now, at this very moment. to receive God’s light We may feel it as energy — to get up in the morning like a lion to serve our Creator — energy that flows through us, making our hands tingle, wanting to do something, wanting to make a container in the world through our actions, to bring the blessing out into the universe.
To become a vessel of light like a Chanukah menorah involves both these motions — the space and the embrace, the emptiness and the containment, selflessness as well as a strong Self. Yaakov had two intense divine encounters; in one, the ladder dream, he was lying down, totally open and receptive; in the other, he was standing up, engaged, fighting. To become a vessel for God’s light, we need both these gestures, both the stillness and surrender of the corpse pose and the strength and power of the warrior pose.
At this point, becoming a vessel may seem impossibly difficult, requiring a huge amount of effort, both of the letting go and of the holding on varieties. But Chanukah speaks to us of only expending a small amount of effort, and of doing it daily. Just light one candle and do it for eight nights in a row. Gradually you will be able to light more, a little more each night. Start small, with low expectations. Can we hold a tiny bit of God’s light inside ourselves for a short period each night? Just a glimmer of possibility, of the possibility that God’s light — like our breath — is in fact flowing through us at all times, but we have not noticed it. Maybe all it takes to become a container is to open ourselves to this possibility, to be, like a container, strongly but also simply, receptive.
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