This Is About HANUKKAH
Sunday, November 20th, 2011The Bible tells us several times that God wants to have a place “to make His name dwell therein.”
[NOTE: A reference for a Temple where offerings are made.]
And it’s interesting that it does not say, ‘I will dwell there,’ but rather that, ‘my Name will dwell there.’
It is true that everything is God, that everything is in God, and that everything, i.e., the whole cosmos is not separate from God. And yet, in all of creation, a Temple is a special case because, for those who enter therein, there is a concentrated, stronger focus of the quality of divinity.
[NOTE: The primary setting of the Hanukkah story is the holy Temple. Therefore, Reb Zalman begins by providing us with a sense of how a Temple functions to better equip us to hear what he later wants to tell us about Hanukkah.]
Although God is in everything there is and although everything, each thing that is, broadcasts its own quality, that which we call a Temple is a special case. It was a broadcasting tower from which a signal went out to the world:
The carrier wave was a field of blessing. The message stream was the way in which God would like to be able to see the world, i.e., a world in harmony, receptive of that field of blessing. In the broadcast, there was a certain kind of beacon of giving meaning to life and a sense of justice and compassion for the world.
And in each human being there is a receiver for that broadcast, (God’s divine compassion broadcasts on human wavelengths). So the beacon helps a person who is open to God, a person who wants to be open to receive it in this way and to recalibrate her/his moral and ethical life.