Sublime

From earliest rabbinic times there were such institutions as the tamchui, or mobile kitchen, which distributed food daily to whoever applied,

Everywhere we go, we still bring our Torah with us. We live our mitzvot and whirl the ancient dance of halakhah—observance, study, commentary, life. Our

exponents of Lubavitch lore—in line with other Ḥasidic masters who trace their way of thinking to the Beshṭ—have repeatedly stressed that all of reality is infused with divine light, and that the telos of human existence, which is fulfilled most perfectly in the rituals of the Jewish people, is to liberate these holy sparks from their encasement in

Chassidism teaches that the vitality, and indeed the entire existence, of the world depends totally upon G-d. Every element of creation is one with G-d. Without this Divine energy, nothing could exist.

The late eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov teaches us, “If you want to return to God you must make yourself into a new creation. You can do this with a sigh.”9

We are not the first to connect these two lights—the primordial light of creation and the Hanukkah light. The rabbis of the Kabala, the Jewish mystical tradition, claimed that these lights were one and the same, that the light we contemplate on Hanukkah is in fact the Or Genuzah (literally, “the light that was stored away”), the primordial light of