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Imagine a most delicious waterfall of forgiveness, cascading over Mrs. Mistake, caressing her wounded, crippled soul, cleansing her open wounds, smoothing out wrinkles of worry and lines of despair, loosening the layers of smallness and pettiness inscribed in her heart, dousing the burning coals over which she has raked herself — and you can easily picture why the Jews of Chanukah burst into song at the miracle of the lights.
What more appropriate response to that avalanche of love that forgiveness signifies than song? As the Sfas Emes points out, it was the bnei binah, the ones steeped in understanding, who knew enough not just to sing but to establish (kavu) this song (shir u’renanim) for all of history. They understood that by reaching up to the heavens and pulling down the fertile lights of the holidays into the barren months of the winter, by refusing to be left in the dark, we could light up the galus. Aharon’s gift would be the gift that keeps giving down through the ages. Strangely, the word galus, exile, is related to the word galui, “revealed.” It is in the he’eder, in the chasheichah, that new life is born, and light shines.
Miriam Kosman is a lecturer for Nefesh Yehudi, an outreach organization that teaches Torah to thousands of Israeli university students. Her book, Circle, Arrow, Spiral: Exploring Gender in Judaism, presents the paradigm on which these columns are based. Parts of this article are based on a shiur given by Rabbi Yitzchak Kirzner, zt”l. L’havdil, the title of this article is the first line of a well-known poem by Dylan Thomas
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