Mai Chanukah? ask the Sages in the Talmud, “What is Chanukah?”
Chanukah is: stubbornly kindling lights in the encroaching winter’s darkness, filling the cold nights with luminescence and warmth.
Chanukah is: eating latkes, sufganiyot, and sharing sweet times with family and friends.
Chanukah is the sum total of the past Chanukahs in our lives, the memories of celebrations going back to our childhoods, and sharing the holiday with those whose physical presence may be gone, but whose memories endure.
Chanukah is also: the Maccabees, fighting the world’s oldest battle for religious freedom against an insatiable tyrant, who 2,188 years ago was (already) asking the Jews: How is it that you still exist?
Chanukah is also: the miracle of the oil, reminding us that sometimes a flickering light endures even when we least expect it, and the light of love and hope has a way of lingering much longer than anyone anticipated.
Chanukah is also: a spinning dreidel, and the recognition that our fortune or misfortune is often as random as a game of chance; the difference between a windfall and a bad medical diagnosis is rarely something we earn or deserve. So we might as well adopt a posture of gratitude and appreciate what we have.
Chanukah is also: “Ma’oz Tzur” and “Mi Yimallel” and “Anu Nos’im Lapidim” and “I Have a Little Dreidel,” the abandonment and delight of singing together with pride. (Where, outside of religious life, do people gather just to sing together these days?)
Chanukah is also: the Jewish self-confidence to stand up for ourselves and be countercultural, no matter how small in numbers we may be compared the to the culture around us. It is the stubborn insistence that sometimes the weak can overcome the mighty, the few can overtake the many, and good can defeat evil against all odds.
Chanukah is also: putting the Menorah in the window, on public display, unabashed and unafraid.
Chanukah is also: increasing, not decreasing light, because in matters of holiness we are instructed always to add and not detract (Talmud, Shabbat 21b).
And ultimately, Chanukah is about miracles, because all those other things I’ve just listed qualify as miracles. There are miracles from ancient times and miracles that persist today, every day, even just waking up in the morning; miracles of which we are perpetually aware and those to which we are completely oblivious.