Minority Rules

When a Jew celebrates Chanukah, he may be confronted: “You Jews are so few compared to the nations of the world. Yet you hold fast to your customs and commandments, ignoring what the billions of non-Jews around you think and do… Wherein lies your strength to stand in the face of such odds?”

The Jew finds the answer in the Al Hanisim prayer: “You, delivered the many into the hands of the few.” To G-d, it obviously makes no difference who is many and who is few. What is important to G-d is: what is right, what is luminous and what is just. He delivers the future of the world by the hands of “the few” — that fate be determined by the goals of the small nation which aims to make the world ever brighter, which kindles today one light more than yesterday, and tomorrow adds yet another light.