Not One of Them Resembling Another

About This Talk

Chapter 3 tells the whole of the Chanukah story in two paragraphs, the Greek decrees against the faith and the seizure of property and daughters and the defiling of the Sanctuary, the Hasmonean priests who overcame them and returned sovereignty to Israel for more than two hundred years until the destruction of the Second Temple, and then the single cruse of pure oil found on the twenty fifth of Kislev that burned for eight days, which is exactly as long as it takes to crush olives and press oil that is pure; the Sages of that generation ordained eight days of happiness and praise with lamps lit in the evening at the entrance of the houses to publicize the miracle, forbade eulogy and fasting on them as on Purim, and set the lighting at the level of a Rabbinic mitzvah like the reading of the Megillah, with three blessings on the first night, two thereafter, and blessings even for a man who lights nothing and merely sees a lamp. The remaining eleven paragraphs are Hallel. The Rambam defends reciting the words commanded us over an ordinance of the Sages, rules that a blessing accompanies every definite Rabbinic obligation but not one established out of doubt such as the tithing of demai, counts eighteen days of full Hallel and twenty one where the festivals run two days, excludes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as days of repentance and awe rather than extra celebration and Purim because the Megillah does that work, and demotes Rosh Chodesh to a custom said only in a congregation, read with skips, carrying no blessing, and not to be begun by an individual, though one who has begun completes it. He then rules that pauses never invalidate Hallel even when they exceed the time it would take to say the whole of it, while reading it out of sequence does, records the responsive practice of the early Sages in which the people answer Halleluyah one hundred and twenty three times, a number remembered by the years of Aharon's life, and closes by reporting that he has seen the customs differ in every place he has been, not one of them resembling another.