For a recent podcast, I interviewed Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND snack bars and a judge on Shark Tank. He shared the story of his father, a Holocaust survivor from Dachau, whose life was spared by an unexpected act of mercy: a German soldier who slipped him a piece of bread each day.
Daniel says this story shaped the person he became — a man committed to building bridges and infusing kindness into the world. He laughed as he described a family debate: His sisters insist he speaks too often about that soldier. “Why focus on the exception,” they ask, “when so many were cruel?”
Daniel’s answer is simple: Our father chose that story. It was what allowed him to hold on to his faith in humanity despite having seen its darkest face. It was what enabled him not just to live, but to build anew.
The right narrative can shift self-perception from victimhood to agency, strengthening resilience in the face of terror and trauma. But narrative must never blur the truth or obscure the hard reality of what we lived through. What matters is how we give voice to those facts. Our tradition has always understood that how we narrate an event shapes its meaning.
Hanukkah is a perfect example.
The story of Hanukkah is one we have learned to tell and retell in many different ways. The rabbis in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) highlight the miracle of the oil, a symbol of Divine providence — the fire from above. The Al Hanisim prayer, by contrast, makes no mention of oil, focusing instead on the miracle of the battle and the rededication of the Temple — the fire from below, a triumph of human courage. Historical sources — Josephus and the Book of Maccabees (II Maccabees 10:3) — center on the heroism of the Maccabees, noting the festival’s eight days but largely omitting the miracle narrative. Step into a secular kindergarten in Israel, and you’ll hear a vastly different version than you would in a religious one.
These divergent accounts echo an ancient tension articulated by the second-century Christian theologian Tertullian: the pull between Athens and Jerusalem, material and spirit, human effort and Divine intervention — fire from below and fire from above.
But the story of Hanukkah teaches us what Tertullian may not have understood: Judaism stands between two worlds. It belongs neither solely to Jerusalem, the realm of mystery and metaphysical truth, nor to Athens, the world of reason and humanism. Judaism recognizes holiness in the everyday and the miraculous within the mundane. Through the biblical paradigm of brit — covenant — we create space for both human heroism and Divine presence. When we act in partnership, human agency becomes infused with Divine spirit.
In Judaism, seven represents the natural order, while eight signals something beyond nature — the covenantal promise and the intimate relationship between God and the people of Israel. (Think of the brit milah on the eighth day, or the dedication of the tabernacle on Yom Hashmini.)
One way to recount the Hanukkah story is to frame it within the natural rhythms of history: Empires rise and fall, battles are won and lost. Another is to understand our national story as part of a larger meta-narrative. For eight days, we celebrate the triumph of the few over the many and the weak over the strong. We acknowledge that our history transcends probability.
Faith is not simply about survival; it is about spirit — or, in the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book The Great Partnership, “Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility.”
The revolution of the Bible was not only theological — a shift from polytheism to monotheism — but also anthropological: the radical idea that God has faith in humanity’s capacity to act in the world and transform it. Covenant theology hands us agency while balancing it with humility.
And that brings us to the heart of the matter: our agency to craft the stories we tell. Storytelling shapes not only who we are but who we become. As we begin to narrate this challenging moment of Jewish history, the question is whether we can hold its full complexity, just as our ancestors did when they told the story of Hanukkah.
It is not for nothing that Hanukkah is accompanied by songs like Maoz Tzur and Al Hanisim. Sometimes words alone cannot contain such layers; we need other forms of narrative. Song allows divergent strands to coexist in harmony, giving voice to what prose cannot.
Today, modern Israeli musicians are already helping us integrate the story of the ongoing war into our long, tumultuous history. In weaving pain and resilience, human courage and Divine spirit into a tapestry of sound, they are shaping how this chapter will be remembered.
As Rabbi Sacks writes in Radical Then, Radical Now, “I am a Jew because, knowing the story of my people, I hear the call to write the next chapter.”
When we tell our story, we must remain deeply rooted in our past but also acutely conscious of our future. Often, it is not just what story we tell, but the way we tell it that defines who we are and determines what we will become.
Let’s choose to tell our story wisely.
