Happy Chanukah From Morningside Ministries!
Today Morningside Ministries celebrated the start of Chanukah by listening to the story and traditions of Chanukah, lighting the first candle on the menorah (the seven branched candelabrum), playing dreidel and enjoying assorted jelly donuts along with dark and milk chocolate.
Chanukah is the eight-day festival of light that begins on the eve of the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev, it celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over adulteration, of spirituality over materiality.
The story of Chanukah begins more than twenty-one centuries ago, when the Holy Land was ruled by the Seleucids (Syrian-Greeks), who sought to forcefully Hellenize the people of Israel. One day, agaisnt all odds, a small band of faithful Jews defeated one of the mightiest armies on the earth, and drove the Greeks from the land. The faithful Jews reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the service of God. When they lit the Temples’s menorah (the seven branched candelabrum), they discovered only a single cruse of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks: miraculouly, the one-day supply burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared under conditions of ritual purity.
To commemorate and publicize these miracles, the sages instituted the festival of Chanukah. At the heart of the festival is the nightly menorah (candelabrum) lighting. A single candle is lit on the first night, two on the second evening and so on till the eighth of Chanukah, when all eight lights are kindled.
The Hallel and Al HaNissim are added in the the daily prayers to offer praise and thanksgiving to God for “delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few and the wicked into the hands of the righteous.”
Chanukah customs include eating foods fried in oil- latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganiot (doughnuts); playing the dreidel and giving of Chanukah geit, gifts of money, to children.
