Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Eight Nights, One Lamp, and the Human Need to Argue With Physics

Hanukkah is, at its core, a holiday about stubbornness. Holy, principled, well-documented stubbornness. It commemorates a small group of Jews—the Maccabees—who looked at the world’s largest empire at the time and said, essentially, no thank you, we’d prefer not to abandon our religion, culture, or identity today. This alone qualifies Hanukkah as one of history’s great underdog stories.

The holiday celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after it was reclaimed from Seleucid Greek rule. According to Jewish tradition—not the Gospels, which have nothing to say about this particular lamp problem—the Maccabees found only enough consecrated oil to keep the Temple’s menorah lit for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days, long enough to prepare more.

And thus, every winter, Jews light candles, eat foods aggressively fried in oil, and remind the world that survival itself can be an act of resistance.

The Miracle (Or: Don’t Touch the Lamp)

The miracle of the oil appears in the Talmud, written centuries after the events themselves, which already tells us something important: this isn’t a laboratory report. It’s theology. It’s memory. It’s meaning. The story exists to say something mattered here, not here are the combustion metrics.

But humans, being humans, cannot leave well enough alone.

Was there actually more oil than they thought? Was the wick smaller than usual? Did ancient lamps burn less efficiently? Was someone rationing the flame and calling it divine intervention? Could impurities in the oil have slowed combustion? Was olive oil in the 2nd century BCE somehow thicker, denser, or blessed by really good agricultural practices?

Possibly. Very possibly.

And none of that ruins the story.

Science Has a Bad Habit of Explaining Things Without Meaning Them

From a scientific standpoint, the miracle doesn’t require the suspension of physics—just incomplete information. Ancient measurements weren’t standardized. Lighting conditions were different. Oil quality varied. Human expectations were based on experience, not precise calculation.

In other words, the oil lasted longer than assumed, not longer than possible.

Which is true of many “miracles,” if we’re being honest.

Science explains how something could happen. It does not explain why the story survived, why it mattered enough to be told, retold, ritualized, and passed down through persecution, exile, and history’s repeated attempts to erase a people.

Why Hanukkah Still Works

Hanukkah isn’t the biggest Jewish holiday. It’s not the holiest. It’s not even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. And yet it persists—eight small flames against the longest nights of the year.

That’s the real miracle.

Not that oil burned longer than expected, but that people kept lighting lamps when it would have been easier to sit in the dark. That identity was preserved not through dominance, but through refusal. That the lesson wasn’t “God intervenes whenever physics fails,” but rather “sometimes survival itself feels miraculous.”

So yes, maybe the oil burned longer because of chemistry, wick design, or human miscalculation.

But Hanukkah doesn’t celebrate oil.

It celebrates continuity.

It celebrates defiance.

It celebrates the deeply human habit of seeing hope flicker and deciding—against all odds—to keep it lit one more night.

And if that’s not a miracle worth celebrating, scientific explanation and all, then we’ve missed the point entirely. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️