Do you ever walk into Home Goods and feel the exhilaration of all the pretty things around you?  Really, I don’t actually need anything but walking through yesterday I really enjoyed seeing so many pretty things.  We live in a material world and it is the Jewish way to embrace beauty and use it for good, thereby uplifting the world with beauty.  

The difference between the Jews and the Greeks, who both appreciate beauty, comes down to our goals.  Greece in Hebrew is Yavan, with each letter consisting of a line.  It begins with the yud, a short line, then Vav, and final nun and also straight lines, one longer than the next.

To contrast, many Hebrew letters have an inside, shaped more like a box, the letters of the Greeks are flat, there is no internal realm.  That is how they perceive beauty.  It was all on the surface.  For the Jews, Yehudim, we take the yud and the vav but intertwined are letters with physical depth.  We take the beauty of nature and use it to connect to our inner selves and our Creator.  We take the beauty of stuff and beautify our homes for the sake of creating a warm loving space, not a place where no one can walk.   

The menorah represents this idea as well.  The flame represents the soul, that eternal part of each of us that yearns with a desire to do good.  The wick represents the physical, our bodies.  How can we possibly tie the two together to work in tandem? Through the oil.  The oil miraculously can hold the wick and the fire simultaneously. We see this is in our menorah as it burns for hours, as long as there is oil left in the cup.  

How can oil accomplish this impossible task of uniting the physical and the spiritual as one, the body and the soul?  Let’s look at the creation of the oil that comes from olives:  How is it created? Through exertion! We take the olives and we crush them.  It takes effort and pressure on the olives that create this magical substance of the oil.  

Maybe that is the secret we can use to stay in the Jewish mindset of taking the physical and using it not for its own sake but to connect it to the spiritual as well, to use it and to grow from it.  Let’s push ourselves:  think of one way we want to grow and become better. By doing so we will create the oil to find that inner balance between living a physical and spiritual existence.