Hanukkah at the Crater of Ramon

This Friday night, we light the first Hanukkah candle. Last year at this time, I was in Israel, and I celebrated Hanukkah primarily in the forbidding landscape of the Negev. One of the highlights was a visit to the immense Crater of Ramon, which gave rise to this poem. A few--hopefully helpful--notes: Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the Macabees over the Greek Syrians in the 2nd century BCE, including the retaking of the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been defiled. The holiday's rituals of light (the menorah) and oil (potato pancakes) commemorate the miracle that a small vial of pure oil, only enough for a day, burned for eight days until new oil could be prepared to kindle Temple menorah. At Hanukkah, Jewish children play a game with a top called a dreidel, whose four sides are inscribed with Hebrew letters. In the Diaspora, these letters stand for “A great miracle happened there.” In Israel, the last letter is different, and the phrase becomes “A great miracle happened here.”

I try to believe a great miracle
happened here. This is the landscape
of awe, the open wound
from some cataclysmic walloping
by messenger? rowdy river?
who can say? The land is full
of outcroppings that cry out
for explanation—plops of sand
dribbled from the cosmic fist.
This one looks like a woman torqued
to gaze back at the mounds of salt;
that one might have been an altar.
The earth opens. The sun won’t set.
Algal blooms bloody the sea.
Maybe the miracle was not
the cities of the plain reduced
to this gray ash, the burning bush,
the oil lasting eight days,
but any mind sensing wonder
in this G-d forsaken place.