Almost like a jelly doughnut

Tomorrow night is Chanuka, and in honor of that I made a new label, "Chanuka", which contains much Festival-of-Lights-Goodness. Here's an excerpt from some of those posts, containing a newly freshened-up bit about my favorite Maamar of all time, Al Hanisim '29:

There are two main points of this maamar. The first is an explanation of the war between the assimilated Jew peoples and the faithful-to-their-father-in-heaven peoples. What was the root of their argument? The Greekifieds refused to accept the existence of G-d. Simple, no? You would think that things would've change in the last two thousand plus years, but I suppose that wise King Solomon was correct when he asserted that, "There is nothing new under the sun." The Greeks asserted the primacy of reason, as does our culture. If they didn't understand it, well, obviously it couldn't exist. And even the particularly enlightened ones, who acknowledged that reason is not the be all and end all of human existence, refused to accept a higher power. Even when they acknowledged that they didn't know everything, and even more so, that it is impossible to know everything, that intellect and logic can't explain all there is, they still refused to accept a higher power. Why? Presumably because they were having too much fun attending toga parties. But seriously, they had major issues with Kabbalos Ol. They couldn't accept anyone telling them what to do without a good reason. If they had known there was a good reason, just they couldn't understand it, that would have been ok, but for there to be no reason? This they couldn't accept.

So what is the way to fight this invidious form of human behavior? There's only one way: with Mesiras Nefesh. And that doesn't mean giving your life up either. It can also mean deciding to say Tehillim after Davening instead of running to breakfast and getting runny egg yolk from sunny side up eggs all over your freshly laundered shirt. Which happened anyway, as it turned out, but I suppose that's one of the reasons for sweaters.

Mesiras Nefesh means that you have to do something which is crazy, to tap into your internal soul-powers, to go beyond intellect. That's really the whole point, isn't it? To do something that makes no sense. Not to you, and not to your mother either.


The second part of the Maamar deals with a mystical explanation of the advantages of the horn, getting into a whole thing about Dovid and Shlomo vs. Shaul.

Also, a big Mazal Tov to Shmuelie Schapiro, brother of our great leader, who was not only in smicha last year in Motown but also came to the TRS+le7 wedding! At the lchaim I thanked him for getting engaged to a Crown Heightser so that I could repay the favor easily, and he said, "Repay the favor? It was worth every penny!" I thought that was very sweet.