I shared this D’var Torah on Shabbat morning, December 14, 2024, about a week and a half before Chanukkah.
Muhammed Asefi is a physician from Afghanistan, who is an artist-in-residence this year at Arizona State University. Dr. Asefi, before he was a medical doctor, wanted more than anything to be a painter. So he did both, and by the mid-1990s in his thirties he was already a well-respected doctor and a prominent painter, with actually hundreds of his works on display in Kabul in places like the National Gallery and the Foreign Ministry.
When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they imposed a ban on the depiction of living creatures in art, in line with a particular interpretation of Islamic law. In fact as soon as they took over they came upon several of Dr. Asefi’s paintings, I believe at the presidential palace, and they tore them apart. He knew that it was only a matter of time before other works of his and many others would be destroyed. Dr. Asefi wasn’t particularly an activist to that point in his life, but he began to work on a scheme to save as much forbidden art as he could. Sometimes he would do something like take a portrait from the National Gallery, and hang in its place a landscape of the same size, hoping a not-art-savvy official wouldn’t notice that anything had changed and sniff around.
The more audacious project he came up with was actually to cover up forbidden aspects of paintings and leave them hanging in the same galleries. With the help of a patron, a businessman named Muhammed Saber Latifi, Dr. Asefi began experimenting to see if he could use watercolor to paint over parts of an oil painting. The idea was that to create a temporary hiding place within the painting itself, something that could be removed later on if conditions changed.
And that’s what Dr. Asefi did with more than one hundred paintings. Bit by bit, he painted over a person, or a horse, or a bird. He made a riverbank of grazing cattle into just an empty riverbank, matching the background color in oil perfectly in watercolor. He replaced people with flowers. He would take a painting and tell an unsuspecting Taliban official that he was working on repairs to it, and then he’d move things around, and put the altered piece back somewhere else, to throw them off.
And indeed, when the Taliban were deposed after 9/11, Dr. Asefi went back to all the paintings — and with sponges soaked in water he took away the watercolor, and one after another, there were the original paintings once again.
This story I have told you is a story about hope, and it is exactly the story of Chanukkah. What Dr. Asefi did was exactly what the legend says about the kohanim, the priests in the Beit Hamikdash in the early days of Antiochus. Anticipating that Antiochus would soon come and defile the Temple and the olive oil necessary for its lamps, someone made sure a cruse of oil was hidden away somewhere in the Beit Hamikdash itself, where they could retrieve it one day, and if not them then the kohanim of a future generation. Retrieve it and restore the lights of the menorah again.
The key to Dr. Asefi carrying out his plan, at risk to his life, was hope. Another artist-activist, the Czech writer and then president Vaclav Havel, said that hope is different from optimism. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well”, ever or in the foreseeable future. “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
Hope is the conviction that there is a picture that deserves to be seen, that deserves to be real even when it’s not real right now – and hope is living in the light of that picture anyway. That is the hope that Chanukkah comes to teach us. The key moment is stashing the oil in the first place.
I have many times linked this to the dreidel and taught that there is a deeper truth in this children’s game. The spinning top is the uncertainty of our lives, and the four plays that can happen represent four kinds of hope experiences. Taking all the M&Ms, or some; standing pat, or putting M&Ms into the pot – these describe four hope situations. Hope can go with abundance, of course, with gimel or hay. But hope can go with stuckness, numbness, with nun. Hope isn’t a feeling itself, a prediction. Which is why hope can even go with shin, when you have to give away, when you are bereft, when the reality moves farther away.
It’s the shin I am talking about this morning. When the s’vivon lands on the letter shin, you take away from what you have and put it into the middle for now. In the phrase nes gadol haya sham, “a great miracle happened there,” shin is the last part; sham in Hebrew means “there.” The not-here-ness of what we hope for — and yet there can be hope.
Shin hope is putting up an altered painting in the Afghan National Gallery, when its true beauty is only under what you can see. Shin is facing destruction by preparing a cruse of pure olive oil, and then hiding it near where it might give light one day.
Shin in the dreidel seems like the opposite of hope – losing plain and simple. But in some ways it is actually the foundation of hope. In dreidel, every shin eventually becomes gimel winnings at some point. Someone has to put in the M&Ms in the middle, or else there is nothing to take when you win.
That is the story of Chanukkah too. The kohanim who hid away the oil – it’s because they had already the story of the slavery of their ancestors, and the liberation afterwards. The story of Joseph’s bones, buried deep in Egypt, which he had made every generation promise to find whenever they would be freed. Yes, something was being taken in the time of Antiochus – but the kohanim of our legend made that a shin, another deposit of hope.
The Afghanis have their own such story – Dr. Asefi and others like him could only have kept their culture alive underground because they had stories of cultural destruction and reemergence going back all the way to Alexander the Great. They have for instance a story of sixteen people who survived the sack of Herat in the 1200s by Genghis Khan, and from those sixteen everything was rebuilt. (Sixteen, twice our Chanukkah number of eight!)
When the world is shin, when the miracles seem to be receding, we can be frightened and sad and oh-so-uncertain, and at the same time live with hope.
It’s true in the wide world and for our own lives also. When we are dealing with illness or sadness, with depression or loss, hope means believing that light isn’t gone, but hidden; the beauty isn’t lost, but covered up. Beneath the surface of today is the pure oil of friendships we’ve cultivated, of community; the light of our Torah’s wisdom and our people’s experience; the images and movements of characters in the stories we have told before and been inspired by.
We may not know how the dreidel will fall today, this turn or the next or the next. Some of the M&Ms we get back down the road will be the exact ones we put in, paintings restored.
Sometimes not, and today’s shin may become a very different gimel down the road. You have been thinking: why am I talking about Dr. Asefi when the Taliban are back. Which is of course why Dr. Asefi is in Arizona right now – he is in exile. But he is there because of hope. His own, because to him his work of creating and teaching is not done. And the hope of others who believe his story is not negated; it is just a shin, it will inspire someone else to be an artist for freedom. His shin will be transformed once again, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
And so too for each of us. We can hope when what is ahead is clear or seems positive, and we can be hopeful, we can live hope, through uncertainty, even in worry and fear. Because hope isn’t a prediction or a feeling. Hope is the oil itself, even when we don’t know yet what lamp it will light or when. Hope is the conviction that there is a hidden picture that deserves to be seen – and hope is living somehow in the light of that picture, nonetheless.
Shabbat Shalom, and an early Chag Urim Sameach! (A Joyous Festival of Lights)
NB — While I have heard and told about Dr. Asefi before, I drew on a few published pieces this time. There was an NPR piece I heard once which I am not sure I can pinpoint now, with apologies to the creator. Here is one from the New York Times, one from the Washington Post, and one from the author Andrew Solomon. I learned about Dr. Asefi’s presence and work at Arizona State University here.