From the Chassidic Masters

The menorah, its lamps, and the flames they hold are the very mirror of our identity as a people, the way we interact with each other, and of the elemental strivings of the human soul

The deeper meaning behind the different opinions in the Talmud and commentaries regarding the menorah’s spatial alignment inside the Temple, and regarding the identity of its miraculous “western lamp.”

When a person's contact with death evokes in him a striving for life he would never have mustered without that experience, then the contact with death is transformed into a more intense involvement with life.

A group of Jews had found themselves in a state which, by divine decree, absolved them from the duty to bring the Passover offering. Yet they refused to reconcile themselves to this