Podcast #45: Parashat Miketz and Chanukkah

Shlomo's grandson, Ezra, is an expert in podcasting and has his own studio. They discuss the theme of miracles in relation to Chanukah and Parashat Miketz. They define miracles as a change in attitude or perspective towards an event. They also discuss the scientific explanations behind certain phenomena and argue that these explanations are themselves miraculous. They believe that the formless continuously creates new form through ingenuity, which they consider to be a miracle. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Elisha. We have a guest here this morning, Shlomo's grandson, Ezra, who is an expert on podcasting and he has his own little studio at home. So while Shlomo and I are sitting one across the other, he's sitting controlling the controls and doing an amazing, amazing job. So this is a real treat this morning. Ezra brings us great light in Chanukah. He's multi-talented. He's a wonderful pianist. He's a soccer goalie and really good at that. And many, many other talents. Oh, and a baker. We baked an apple pie together this morning. And he also plays the violin. And the violin. That's incredible. And he even has time to come visit his grandparents in Zichon Yaakov. Right. So this week we have a double festive occasion. One is Chanukah and the other one this Shabbat is Parashat Miketz. And Shlomo, what do you have for us? So I think Miketz always falls on Chanukah. Is that right? Right. Elisha, the calendar always amazes me because it is so precise. Things fall into place perfectly. And this was done hundreds of years ago. It was done in Babylon. Amazing. It is. With incredible astronomy. But the theme of both Miketz and Chanukah, tonight is the sixth night of Chanukah, the sixth candle. The theme is miracles. We're talking about miracles. Chanukah is about miracles. And Miketz is about this amazing twist in the story. And in Vayeshev, which we talked about last week, Joseph is sunk deep in a dungeon and it's hopeless. The Jewish people, we've had it. There's a big famine and we're done for. And Miketz, he's the ruler of Egypt. One of the great powers in the world. Amazing twist. So let's begin talking about miracles, Elisha. What is a miracle, anyway? Yeah, what a great question. So this past Shabbat, in our study session on Shabbat morning, if you're ever around and if your Hebrew is good enough, then join us for our Torah study sessions on Shabbat. And we discussed miracles and someone shy asked, well, wait, let's first define what a miracle is. And we went around and everybody gave a different definition. There was one answer that this young teenager gave, which I thought was amazing, amazing. I'll just say a few words about her because I think she herself is a bit of a miracle. She had a bat mitzvah with us a year and a half ago. She's 13 and a half now. She had a bat mitzvah when she was 12 and she loves coming to those study sessions. And there she is with all the older people, the elderly people, the younger but certainly older than her. She'll talk and she always has the most beautiful things to say. So this is what she said. She said for her, a miracle, she said the following. If you look at reality, reality is reality. It's just what it is. There's nothing special about it. The miracle is not in reality. She suggested that 90% of every incident, rather I'll say differently, 10% of every incident is the incident itself, is what happened. 90% is our attitude towards it. We don't think of it this way. We think of an incident that happened. We don't make this distinction between actually what happened and my feelings about it, my attitudes about it, how I approached it. And she said a miracle is the fact that we can indeed change our attitude towards something. And all of a sudden the whole event totally, totally changes. Now that's not my definition of miracle but I think it's a beautiful definition of miracle. It is how much freedom and flexibility there is in viewing life and events. In this drashah that you have before you from 2019, for me a miracle is a very complex idea to explain, although in itself it's really simple. In Jewish philosophy, Jewish mysticism, all the form that we have around us, objects, things, a car is passing by, that would be a miracle if it just keeps on driving. It did. A miracle happened. So what we see around us is all the forms. The miraculous is the formless. And in Judaism I would argue that the formless creates the form, forms the form. And that's God's name. God's name is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. I will be that. I am the formless and I can be any form whatsoever. So the formless, the divine can be any form. That's the miracle. Here's my take on miracles, Elisha. Just to add one sentence to what you said. You've been teaching us consistently to look inside the clipah, inside the form, inside the exterior to see behind that. That's a crucial part of being, I think, a good Jew, a good person. And this is related to miracles, seeing beyond the physical event and seeing inside it, as this wonderful young lady said. You have a quotation on the wall in your other office by Einstein. The fact that you put it on the wall means it's important. So I looked at it carefully. Einstein said, some people see everything in the world as a miracle. Some people see nothing in the world as a miracle. Einstein himself, who was a religious man, spiritual man, said he prefers to be in the group that sees everything as a miracle. He once said, the only thing incomprehensible about the world is that it is comprehensible. We can understand it. That doesn't mean it isn't miraculous. So I looked up Wikipedia, Alicia. A miracle in Wikipedia is something without a scientific explanation. Really? Give me a break. It's the exact opposite. There are all kinds of scientific explanations and to me they're miraculous. I spent 44 years at the Technion. Almost everybody at the Technion is a scientist or an engineer. And by nature of the profession, they don't believe in miracles. They believe that there are questions that we don't yet have the answer to. But we will find the answer and we will find the cause. And when you find the cause, it's not a miracle. And I disagree. Absolutely. Let me give you an example. Two examples very quickly. And they all relate to numbers. So there's a huge number of stars in the universe, Alicia. A million trillion trillion. But there's an even larger number of human cells on the earth. Cells of living things, not just human. Cells in anything alive. A plant, an insect, an animal, a human being. A million trillion trillion of them. And Alicia, these cells, the essence of life, are miracles. Because they have little motors inside them. And these little motors take food and energy. And they convert the energy into all the things that the body needs. And they do the things the body needs to do. We need to see. We need to hear. We need to move and lift things. And talk in a podcast. And the cells do all these things. And it's absolutely miraculous. Because these little cells have little photocopy machines inside them. And so they divide sometimes. And they have this double helix of DNA. And they take one helix with them and leave one behind. And it's a perfect copy. And that's how we have life. This is not miraculous. Are you serious? Give me a break. One more example, Alicia. I made a big mistake. I studied economics rather than physics. Atoms. So take gold, Alicia. Gold is the element number 79. The reason it's number 79 is it has 79 proteins inside the nucleus of a gold atom. A protein has a little particle with a plus charge. There are 79 of them inside the atom. Wait a second. We know from magnets, right? If you have two pluses, they repel. Likes repel. Like charges repel. How in the world can 79 proteins live inside the atom and not fly apart? And make the world fly apart? So that scientists, physicists, discovered something called gluons. And these are little particles inside the proteins. And they stick everything together. It's a force that holds the atom together. And that's why we are held together. Okay, we know this. It's fairly recent they discovered this. This is a scientific explanation. It's not a miracle. It's not a miracle? Right. I'm with you. I'm totally with you. We can go with Heschel who talked about being in radical amazement and viewing everything as miraculous, everything as phenomenal, everything as indeed ineffable in his language. And that's really, really beautiful. I love science. I'm certainly not a scientist. I love science. I love listening to science programs. There's one every morning on the radio, on the Israeli radio, which is great. They interview professors and researchers throughout the country on cutting-edge issues. And it's phenomenal. And I find myself being moved to tears very often when I hear their explanation. So I have a little story. When I was in officer's course, if I'm not mistaken, it was an army at some point, but it was deep into my army service. It wasn't the beginning, so it may have been during officer's course. We studied, we learned about a certain weapon. I can't remember which one it was at the time. And we learned the mechanism of how it works. Now imagine a bunch of really cool young soldiers or officers to be supposed to be really cool. And involuntarily, as they were explaining about the mechanism, a voice came out of my mouth. And I was like, oh, wow. And the whole platoon burst out laughing. You're not supposed to say wow about anything when you're in the army. Uncool, very uncool. Very, very uncool. And I think I went bright red and felt very, very embarrassed at the time. But it took me a few years to understand that, no, no, no, they just missed the whole thing. Here's this horrible device. It kills people, whatever that thing was. It kills people. And the wow was not about, oh, wow, that's great, it can kill a lot of people. But rather the ingenuity, the way that human beings created this structure that can do things with so much accuracy and impact. And yes, it can even, God forbid, take a life. And there's a miracle in that. But the question is, Shlomo, I think the question still remains, what's the miracle? Because we could say, okay, well, let's just be in awe. It doesn't mean that it's a miracle. And I think that ingenuity is the mechanism by which the formless continuously creates new form. And that's a miracle. The formless gets new, radically new form. So let me add to that and explain it a little bit. And I agree. You write that a miracle is not the object itself, but rather what constitutes its existence, its essence, the invisible formless life energy that constitutes everything in creation. So I spoke about the Technion, and all these brilliant people at the Technion who were inventing unbelievable things. And here, Alicia, is my example of a miracle, I think, because I think creativity is a miracle, that people get ideas that are absolutely unbelievable. Now, I'm a local patriot. Okay, so let me give an example of something that didn't come from the Technion, but it came from Israel. And Israel has so many brilliant inventions that save millions and millions of lives. Here's one example. So, Alicia, there's something called humidity. Humidity is the moisture in the air. And when it's humid, it's uncomfortable because then we can't sweat and cool off. But somebody found a blessing in humidity. So there are scientists and engineers who developed a little device, a simple, inexpensive device, and it takes water out of the air and condenses it, including in the desert. Even the air in the desert has water in it, maybe 20% humidity, but it's still water, and it's a lot. Watergen is a company that's device takes water out of the air, and it condenses it, and then people can drink it and use it. Wow. And thirsty people can live. It was developed by a military officer named Daria Kochavi. I don't know if he's a relative of the chief of staff, or not, it doesn't matter. But it was developed for armies operating in desert areas, and now it's in use all over the world. Really? So it's already in use. Oh, it's in use. So capturing the humidity in the air and turning that into running water. Yes. Okay, now where's the miracle here? Well, it's the device, but we know how the device works. The miracle is people who were creative enough to think about something that the rest of us never thought about. Humidity is annoyance. It's uncomfortable. Maybe we can make use of it. That's the essence here. The essence of a miracle is things that cause a blessing that come from the human mind, which has divine inspiration. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I think you're just indeed explaining how the mechanism of how the miracle happens, how the formless, which the formless being this idea that we don't even know where it comes from. Anyone who would argue that it comes from the brain is absolutely wrong and mistaken because no place was found in the brain where ideas are stored or thoughts are stored. They come through the brain. The brain processes them and then projects them out into language, et cetera, and action. But it comes from somewhere that we don't know. This miraculous idea, this miraculous thought, thought itself, every single thought is a miracle. We think of it, oh, yeah, I just thought about it. The ability to think where if it could have been proven that thoughts are stored in the brain, then maybe it would not have been a miracle because then maybe we were born with a billion potential thoughts in our brain and we use them at last until 120 when all our thoughts are depleted. That could be maybe the definition of Alzheimer's. I don't know. But that's not the case. The thoughts do not come from the brain. They come from the unknown. So every single thought, and then not to mention a great invention, a great divinely inspired thought. So here's Rabbi Sack's take on this, which I really like. He says there are two kinds of miracles, Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart from the time he was eight years old composed music and he did it without any effort. He just had a singing voice inside him and it just poured out of him effortlessly, effortlessly, and it lives on to this day. My grandson plays some Mozart piano song. But there's another kind of, and that was miraculous I believe, because he was a conduit from God getting all this beautiful music that makes us very happy today. But there's another kind of miracle, Beethoven. Beethoven was stone deaf toward the ending of his life and he wrote his greatest music when he was deaf and he struggled with it. He grappled with it, he fought with it, he changed, he scribbled, he revised. So Elisha, there are miracles done by human beings that are really, really difficult. They take enormous, enormous struggle and the miracle in a sense is also in the process where a deaf person like Beethoven who wouldn't give up, who persisted, who fought, he created a miracle and the process, not just the Fifth Symphony or the Ninth Symphony, which I love, but the process in which he created it is also miraculous behind the clipa, the miraculous way that people do great things including very unusual people, extraordinary people. Yes, yes, so beautiful. I love that. I love this idea from Rabbi Sachs on the two kinds of miracles, Beethoven and Mozart. That's beautiful, that's really beautiful. So let's talk about Pach Hashem, the little can of oil that was enough for one day and lasted for eight. And you point out correctly and insightfully that it was made up by Chazal, by our sages, maybe 180 BCE, common era, maybe well over 100 years after the events themselves and I heard an explanation about why they made this up and we can talk for a moment about making things up. So workplaces in Israel have been lighting candles and we lit candles at our workplace at Technion and usually my office mate Rafi, who is religious and knowledgeable, gives a little talk about the background of Hanukkah and he spoke about Pach Hashem and about the little can of oil and he said, we think the rabbis, sages, made it up because we were struggling again under the heel of the Romans at the time and the young people wanted to rebel and rebelling against the Roman Empire is a really bad idea. So the rabbis decided, let's change the narrative from the Maccabees and the heroic few against the many and how they won because that's dangerous. And let's talk about Pach Hashem and about the miracle of the oil to get the young people off this idea that you can really take on the Romans because we really, really can. Kind of a political setting. And Elisha, that raises a question and I want to ask you this. The story, let's call it what it was. It was kind of fake news. It was kind of fake news and many midrashim are not meant to be literally taken literally. They have a moral message. All miracles have a moral message inside them. So is it, we condemn fake news. Is it okay to make up a story because you have a purpose in mind? Was that okay? Is that what the Chazal, what the sages did in 180 in the Common Era? That's a great, that's a really good question. That's a great question. It's a lovely question. I love the question. And equating it with fake news, that's really interesting. Yeah, well, okay. I want to say the following. First of all, we can read the whole Torah this way. I believe even that if the Torah is read literally, that's a deep problem. We Jews do not read the Torah literally. We read it as a metaphor. It's metaphoric language and all the more so the sages. So the question is, can we read everything metaphorically? Can we open the news and listen or read the newspaper where let's say there's a factual description of what happened, which is rare. I mean, facts are always, you can always argue with the facts. But let's say it was pretty factual. Can we still read it metaphorically? And what would that do to us? Would that free us from the whole notion of fake news to begin with when maybe we can eliminate fake news if we read everything metaphorically? And that could be an interesting proposition. When do you read something metaphorically? When do you read something factually? So when we want to operate a machine, we'd better read it factually. When we want to assemble something from Ikea, we'd better read it factually and not metaphorically. So when the sages wrote what they wrote 200 years after the event, it had to be metaphorical because what they were capturing was not the event. They were capturing indeed the formless, the spirit that was embedded, that was forming the event. So the story of the oil, Pach Hashemem, I usually tell like bar mitzvahs, it's a true story. Meaning, I'm not saying that it happened historically, but it still tells us the truth. The truth of resilience, the truth of life within, the truth that we have a lot more life within us, a lot more resilience than we think we have. We think we can only last for one day under this pressure and turmoil and war, etc. And we discover, no, no, we have a lot more holy oil inside of us, like a life force that lasts much, much longer. We're much stronger than... Now, is this historically accurate? It's not. It's mythologically accurate. It's the truth. But it's exactly what this young girl at the study said. It's that 90% of our attitude, if our attitude says that, you know, yes, there's more inside of us, there's more that we can bring forth, there's more that we can give to the world, then there will be more that will come forth. If our attitude is such that I just can't do it anymore, I just can't, I'm depleted, I'm done, then we're depleted and done. So, I'm going to think about this further, beyond this podcast, about this idea of fake news versus accurate news versus the notion of the depth of mythology. Yes. And your grandson is reminding us that we have five more minutes. Thanks a lot. I think we'll need him every Tuesday here, too. Every Tuesday. So, let's end by talking about Zionism, Elisha, because the state of Israel is a miracle. 600,000 Jews and a leader, Ben-Gurion, and they decide to declare a state and the Arab nations come and attack us and we have very few weapons and are totally outnumbered and it's hopeless and we win, we survive. Is that not a miracle? So, Elisha, you quote in your drashah, at the end of the drashah, the song that we sing, and the words and part of the song go like this, in Hebrew, on Hanukkah we sing, this is no miracle, guys. A miracle did not happen for us. We did not find a tin of oil. We hewed the rock until we bled and there was light. I looked this up, Elisha, it's a song by Aharon Ze'ev. Aharon Ze'ev was an educator and he became the chief educational officer of the army. He wrote the words and the tune, the song, the music, was written by Mordechai Ze'eva. And this is in the 1930s, so this is 90 years ago. And the message is, this was not a miracle, guys, we did it. We, Zionim, who were largely not believers, and this handful of people, and we lost 1% of our whole population in this war of independence. But miracles are created by people who don't believe in them. The Technion is full of those people. They don't believe in miracles and they do them every single day. So God works in incredible ways. And let me say something, Elisha, that many people may find really disturbing. We had terrible events two months ago on October 7th. And I'm trying to take the overview of this whole thing. And in a sense it was a kind of miracle because the Jewish people in Israel, we were hopelessly, hopelessly divided on the brink of almost civil war, Elisha. Demonstrations and anger and you name it. And all of a sudden we got this glue that's glued us back together. And it was a formative event because we will not go back to that again. It's not possible. We were permanently changed by this terrible event. And sometimes, Elisha, it takes an awful, awful event to produce something that is formative and mind-changing. And that's how I see it. And it's awfully hard to look at that now when I'm in the thick of it. But when we look back, I believe this will be the narrative. Yeah, I'm very curious what indeed will be the narrative of this era, this period. And you're absolutely right, that could be the narrative just as only in the last few years are people daring to say that the State of Israel came about thanks to the Holocaust. Now I have a real difficulty with that statement because I would not want 6 million Jews to be killed in order to have a Jewish state. It just doesn't sit well with me. But nevertheless, the narrative has evolved in this way. And you know, your grandson is probably telling us we have to end. So I would go along with what you're saying and expand it to our daily lives. Life is about challenges and difficulties. That's what life is about. Life was meant, you know, the way muscles... You know, you're good at sports and you do a lot of sports activities. That's how we build muscle, by tearing the tissue, by struggling, by working really, really hard. That's how we build mass. That's how we build the body. And there's something to be said about reality, like muscle building is a metaphor for reality. We evolve and develop through tearing tissue. And the tearing of the tissue can be really tragic and horrible. But if we understand that that's how growth happens, then we can get some kind of perspective on pain and suffering and stop expecting pain and suffering to end in the world, but rather to look at... So how do we indeed grow from pain and suffering? And that's how God works in miraculous and mysterious ways. And all of us go through that. We stumble. We make mistakes. We hurt. We tear things. And we pick ourselves up again. And that's what our country is doing right now. Yes. So your grandson is telling us that our time is up. So Shlomo, thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks, Elisha. And may we all enjoy the rest of Chanukah. By the time you're going to hear this, Chanukah will be over pretty much. I'm sorry. So we wish you Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom, everyone. And thank you, Ezra, for the help.