This was my D’var Torah for Shabbat Chanukkah coinciding with Parashat Miketz in 5786 (December 20, 2025).
Do you remember the Ice Bucket Challenge?
In the summer of 2014, people began sharing videos of themselves getting ice cold water poured over their heads and asking people to donate money to support people with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known commonly at Lou Gehrig’s Disease. People would post a video with their own public pledge and a challenge to someone else specific to do the same.
For about ten weeks, the Ice Bucket Challenge was everywhere. Like all such social mega-phenomena, the origin story is hard to pin down precisely. It definitely involves a young Boston athlete named Pete Frates, who had been diagnosed with ALS and became an advocate until he died. The first big leap into virality for the Ice Bucket Challenge came via professional golfer Chris Kennedy, whose cousin’s husband had ALS. From there it jumped to the highest levels of celebrity — everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Bill Gates to Taylor Swift to Lebron James to Weird Al Yankovic. President Obama declined to do the ice water, but made a donation; former President George W. Bush went all in.
These things of course have precursors, including something in Norway and even in New Hampshire, where the Penguin Plunge into the winter ocean to raise money for the Special Olympics is at least twenty years old. But the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS in 2014 is in a league of its own for something not a response to a natural disaster. Within the first three months well over $200 million was raised for various ALS-related charities. Donations came in at a rate something like thirty times what was contributed in the same period the prior year.
The long tail of the Ice Bucket Challenge is profound — the surge in funding enabled multiyear projects, including at least one that yielded a promising brand new therapy. At the same time, as quickly as the phenomenon emerged, it faded. Attempts to revive it a year later didn’t get nearly the uptake, and contributions for ALS returned pretty quickly to the level they had before.
In the Talmud Bavli, in Masechet Shabbat (21b), the Sages learned: The mitzvah of Chanukkah is one lamp for a person and their household. נֵר אִישׁ וּבֵיתוֹ ner echad ish u’veito. Those who want to beautify the mitzvah, הַמְהַדְּרִין hamehadrin, have a lamp for each person נֵר לְכׇל אֶחָד וְאֶחָד ner l’chol echad v’echad.
And those who especially beautify, הַמְהַדְּרִין מִן הַמְהַדְּרִין hamehadrin min hamehadrin, Beit Shammai says: On the first day one lights eight, and each night one less, and Beit Hillel says: On the first day light one, and each night add one more.
Beit Shammai, whom we don’t follow, are nonetheless onto something. They know how we often experience sudden bursts of light and hope: just like the Ice Bucket Challenge. Incredible surges of transformation, of strength and solidarity. Miracles of such things, miracles of generosity — completely unexpected. Everyone shows up right away, side by side, like the eight candles of the chanukkiah.
And then things fade, and go back toward how they were. Historically, you could say that about the Maccabees themselves — they threw out the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes from their land decisively but briefly, and if you read even the first two books of Maccabees themselves they don’t sugarcoat the Hasmonean dynasty and their relation to imperial power or to higher ideals of Judaism. That’s a whole story which I made an essay and video about. The original miracle in all its dimensions was transformational and unexpected, but it didn’t last for long. Within a century, Judea was dominated by the Romans.
To take an example from right now — as I let you know during the week, at this very moment there is a protest going on at an Israeli-owned bakery in Manchester, Dishon Bakery. In anticipation the Jewish community and even some others of our friends have gone up there in solidarity. And the initial turnout Thursday was so great that Evan, the owner of the bakery sent me a picture of his bread shelves and counter entirely empty. Sold out well before closing time. When I went in at the end of their hours Erev Shabbat, all they had to offer me was their last slice of pizza. Which was phenomenal! The question is: what about next week. Will we be there still to let them know they aren’t alone? Will we continue to be customers?
So Beit Shammai — give them credit. Chanukkah isn’t really about the history of the cruse of oil, so much as the symbolism of what it means to experience a sudden discovery of hope, a miraculous burst of strength and inspiration and solidarity. Beit Shammai’s position was not let’s act out what happened then, but let’s act out how it happens now. This is how such miracles often play out.
Beit Hillel — that’s aspirational. What if however things started, we only went up from there. As a later Talmudic authority named Rabbi Yose explained it, מַעֲלִין בַּקֹּדֶשׁ וְאֵין מוֹרִידִין ma’alin bakodesh v’ein moridin, we push holiness up and we don’t let it come down. What if we treated miracles not as flashes in the pan, but a challenge to sustain.
The Torah this week puts this same what-if in Pharaoh’s sleepy head (Genesis 41). His dreams begin with bounty — seven fit and plump cows, seven robust ears of grain. But then the Beit Shammai scenario occurs only worse. Not only do the blessings disappear, they are replaced by the opposite, by far less than enough. This isn’t just an economic crisis that’s looming — to his credit, this Pharaoh is experiencing a spiritual crisis. At night, his mind ruminates — today Egypt thrives yet we seem powerless to sustain it. What if I myself am powerless to sustain my people?
Surely anyone could have interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams. Who doesn’t know that some of our dreams are thin disguises for our lives and our fears? I actually think all of Pharaoh’s fancy interpreters and magicians, his חַרְטוּמִים chartumim, did in fact offer Pharaoh exactly the same interpretation that Yosef did as his part 1.
It’s just that they all stopped part way. Yosef was the only one who said to Pharaoh, I get the whole thing. He spoke to Pharaoh’s heart — you don’t want Beit Shammai, you want Beit Hillel. You want מַעֲלִין בַּקֹּדֶשׁ וְאֵין מוֹרִידִין ma’alin bakodesh v’ein moridin. You’re worried about how we make this Egyptian miracle go on, even increase.
Yosef’s plan for Pharaoh and Egypt actually was part of his interpretation of the dream – Pharaoh’s dream was about that, about the miracles he hoped would do more than not dissipate.
This week, our chanukkiot have widened from one candle alone to six lights side by side last night, with more to come. We are being taught at our window sills to think about miracles of solidarity and strength and generosity in a different way from bursts and fads.
When someone is sick, to be there not only when they are in the hospital, when they first come home, but to be available and present for longer.
When someone struggles with mental health, with emotional wellbeing, to remember that healing isn’t a sudden all-clear but a process. That there may be ups and downs to come, and we should be there for intense times and milestones and the long haul.
When a cause hits our radar, captures the public attention, inflames our outrage or touches our hearts, it’s important to think about sustaining that — whether that’s a giving plan for donations going forward, or a strategy to sustain our own attention or to sustain the leaders and groups who make something happen.
When A. Phillip Randolph proposed the March on Washington in 1963, the leaders of the civil rights movements’ different organizations had a Beit Shammai/Beit Hillel debate. Some worried that a big event was a diversion from the work being done candle by candle in Alabama that year. Or that its afterglow would dissipate too quickly.
In the end, they managed to do both Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. Think of the iconic photograph of the Reflecting Pool that day, the maximum number of candles surrounding it, with the Washington Monument as the biggest shamash you’ve ever seen.
Then the newly activated people were channeled into roles in local communities and as lobbyists. The leaders who went from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House were more empowered because of who had come, and who had seen and heard about it in the media. Each partner organization took on a different role. From one at a time, the menorah spread, as each group deployed over the next year or so systematically in local actions or to catch senators at offices and even airports so that new laws would be adopted.
Rabbi Moses Maimonides says that if you have one hundred shekels to give for tzedakah, it’s better to give a single shekel one hundred times than to give it all at once. Because after one hundred gifts, you won’t be able to stop. That’s Beit Hillel’s approach — light one candle, then two, then eight, and when the festival is over you won’t want to stop adding. To grab more people to line up next to together; to find more days to show up yourself by the people around who could use you at their side.
The Talmud says that both Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai are the words of the living God. When it comes to the wisdom of the candles, Beit Shammai has something to tell us, about how the miraculous bursts into our lives and our world, as dramatic as an ice bucket suddenly poured over our heads.
But the Talmud says that the law of the chanukkiah goes by Beit Hillel. As our menorahs become brighter and wider, may we learn to become people who continue to show up together, who make today’s miraculous solidarity and generosity stronger with each new day.
Shabbat Shalom, Chag Urim Sameach, and Chodesh Tov!
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