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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Carry the "ninth invisible flame" of hope, love, and faith forward, sharing it with others and refusing to let darkness extinguish the human and Jewish spirit. Rabbi YY Jacobson tells the story of an unnamed Jewish man who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and lit a symbolic Hanukkah menorah there in 1944 without oil, wick, or fire. The central message is that this spiritual light was a greater miracle than the original Hanukkah miracle.
Key Points
- The story is recounted by Rabbi Shimon Jacobson, who heard it from the survivor himself, and is retold by Rabbi YY Jacobson.
- The survivor's father died in the camp, and an older prisoner comforted him by framing Hanukkah as the victory of light over darkness.
- Despite starvation and horror, the prisoners gathered materials for a menorah: machine oil from a factory, a wick obtained by a uniformed prisoner, and fire from smoldering cinders.
- An SS guard caught the two men, confiscated the oil and wicks, left temporarily, then returned and took the older man away; the survivor managed to escape.
- The older man told him that they had performed a miracle greater than Hanukkah's: lighting the "ninth invisible flame."
- Rabbi Jacobson repeated this story to about 60 secular Jewish students during a trip to Auschwitz on a freezing Hanukkah, asking them to become ambassadors of light.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: The speaker's explicit guidance is to carry the flame forward: take it wherever you go, share it with people and the world, and tell others, especially people who were in the ghetto, about the flame lit in Auschwitz. He urges listeners to teach people who feel hurt, abused, or without potential that "your flame never dies."
- The Hanukkah miracle involved oil lasting eight nights; the Auschwitz miracle is described as lighting a menorah with no oil, wick, or flame, with eight candles plus an invisible ninth flame.
- The survivor was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.
- The Hanukkah visit with students took place in freezing conditions, around 20 below zero, and two grandchildren of Holocaust survivors helped light one or two candles in stormy winds.
Bottom Line
The story presents spiritual resilience as a flame that cannot be destroyed by even the worst darkness, and its lasting value lies in passing that light on to others.
