Shed a little light

I am struggling to digest. Struggling to digest all the donuts and potato pancakes I ate (it is customary to eat a lot of anything cooked in oil on Chanukah) and struggling to digest all the information I learned about the festival. What a beautifully symbolic holiday accompanied by a great story featuring Jew as victorious warrior, valiant strong-minded women, miraculous miracles, driedels a-spinning, candles burning low, everyone getting down on the happiness and light........ My favorite topic of discussion this year was olive oil. Let me preface the story with the fact that I love olive oil…extra virgin, first pressed, olivey oily olive oil.

So let’s talk about oil…as if it isn’t on the forefront of all your minds these days anyways with the price of barrels unsteadily increasing. The word oil in hebrew is “shamen”. Its properties are pretty unique; firstly, oil doesn’t mix with other substances. What happens when you pour oil into water? It separates. Another thing is oil’s incredible ability to penetrate. It seeps in, soaks through, and imbues itself into whatever material it comes into contact with.

Biblically, oil is also unique. It is what Moses used to inaugurate the tabernacle in the desert. It was used for anointing the kings, the only substance sacred enough to light the menorah with in the Temple (Beit Hamikdash), today we are not allowed to rub it onto our bodies during Shabbos, and even the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah) is closely related to oil since the name literarily translates to “the anointed one”. What’s the meaning of all this oiliness?

Oil is described in Kabbalah as chochmah.

(quick lesson in Kabbala: there are 10 attributes of G-d, meaning to say that the great and awesomeness of HaShem was too intense for the world to handle so through series of contractions, G-dliness was manifested into 10 character traits...3 intellectual and 7 emotional. They are the building blocks of the world and human psyche. If you’d care to learn more about Sefirot go to http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Sefirot/Sefirot.html )

Of the 10 attributes of G-d, oil is said to be like the one called ‘Chochmah’. What is chochma? Chochma is (simply put) wisdom. But it is more than wisdom, it is the actual conception of wisdom, the seminal point, the Aha moment, like lightning that appears to emerge from nothingness. Chochma happens before the mind has a chance to start processing and understanding, because once analysis takes over the thought moves into the seferot called ‘binah’ which is the cognitive faculty. But Chochma is more primitive than Binah’s. Chochma is also the spark of G-dly wisdom with every human being. And that is what oil represents.

I am skipping around but I swear this will come together to make a point soon...trust me. Today, I also learned that unlike all other Jewish holidays, there isn’t an actual established meal that should be eaten during Chanuakah….bummer, I love ritualistic eating. Chanukah is supposed to be a spiritual holiday, focusing on something internal, the light inside of us….but we eat anyways. We eat foods saturated in oil.

All fruits and vegetables, with the exception of grapes and olives, are considered to decrease in spirituality when they are squeezed into juices or other forms. For this reason wine has a special blessing. Following this line of thinking, shouldn’t olive oil have its own blessings? But it doesn’t have its own blessing…why? The reason is because olive oil isn’t eaten alone.

And here’s the big point: Oil is ungraspable, unfathomable, unknowable. Oil is transcendence. Oil can’t be eaten alone. The only way you can digest oil is if you fry it up in a latka or in chicken, slip it into the system through a backdoor. This kind of knowledge, chochma, can’t be approached directly; it’s the deepest kind of truth, the incomprehensible kind. And this is how G-dliness needs to be understood. It can’t be completely digested.

Chanukah is about the battle between the Jewish nation and the Greeks. The Greek's never ending search for beauty and wisdom relied too strongly on human comprehension. According to the Greeks, truth was solely based on human logic, that which could be tangibly felt and grasped by the human faculties. However, the sacredness of oil is that understanding G-d and truth is beyond human intellect. The infinite truth is separate and above all else, above the natural order, yet it manages to penetrate everything.

Personally speaking, the hardest part of my journey was taking that step from human reasoning and going beyond what is externally understandable, as the Greeks saw it. Yes Socrates was a brilliant man, but he limited his understanding by limiting truth to only what a human can perceive as within bounds of reason. (To any Greeks or Greek enthusiasts, I mean no offense and do not deny there magnificent contribution to civilization, this discussion is symbolic)

This blog entry is in dedication to a friend of mine who instilled in me the love of olive oil and the importance of the never ending quest towards it. On a vacation to Spain, we spent the last day on a mission to find the purest olive oil imaginable. Exhausting hours spent going from shop to shop, inquiring and searching until lo, we found some really good stuff. We almost missed the plane back to the US. My family thought I was completely nuts when they picked me up from the airport with a suitcase in one hand and 3 gallons of olive oil in the other…but as I see it, you can never have too much of the substance, the infinite wisdom.