The Chanukah menorah and the many instructions regarding when, where, and how to light it are all aimed toward one goal: reminding us that miracles happened for our ancestors and still happen now.  I saw the power of this reminder personally not long ago.

After spending a life-changing year in Israel, my wife was reluctantly leaving on a one-way ticket to teach in America.  Taking leave of her beloved Jerusalem the day of the flight, she bid farewell to teachers, friends, and the Western Wall only to discover at the end of her stops that her organizer was gone.  Filled with tons of contact information and private memos, it was precious property with no digital backup.

She retraced her many steps.  Nothing.  She had taken taxis but hadn’t kept receipts.  She had no idea where she might have left it and her flight was leaving in hours.

A gloomy feeling entered her heart.  With no obvious effort left to make, she made her way back to the apartment she’d shared with her roommates to gather her bags.

“God,” she recalls saying, “I’m only leaving Israel because I believe it’s what You want.  Send me off with a smile.”
Soon after, she heard the front door open.  

“Tzipora,” asked her roomate, clutching her organizer, “isn’t this yours?” My wife’s jaw dropped.

“Where did you find that?!”  

“I was in town running errands.   On my way home I got into a taxi and I saw this.” 

When I heard this story my jaw dropped.   That’s crazy, I thought.   I just couldn’t process the otherworldly choreography – the precise person, getting in to the precise taxi, at the precise time my wife was still home.   My familiar foundations of what’s possible and reasonable buckled in the face of this raw intervention of the Divine.

Fast forward several years.  I was traveling home from Toronto the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, the busiest travel day of the year.  The lines in the airport snaked endlessly.
 
Hearing my flight announced, I hustled through security and onto the plane, plopping down in my seat with relief.  A setting sun reminded me only moments remained to say afternoon prayers.  I reached for my wallet to take my pocket siddur, but it was gone.
 
I froze.  The whirlwind of hurried movement and anxious calculations left me with zero recollection of when or how I’d separated from my wallet.   It was somewhere in the main terminal – along with thousands of strangers.  Watching the stewardesses hurriedly settling our already delayed flight, I calculated the loss of cash, credit cards, and IDs and admitted defeat.

And then my wife’s story flashed in my mind. 

“If G-d could deliver her organizer,” I thought, “He could work this out.  I don’t need to know how; I just need to make my best effort.”

“Excuse me,” I approached a stewardess, “I lost my wallet inside the terminal.  Is there a chance I could try to reclaim it?”  She eyed me strangely.   Was I insane?  Dimwitted?  Pulling a prank?

“Perhaps you dropped it on the floor,” she offered, dropping to her knees to search.  “What did it look like?”

I knew it was not on the plane, but I was making my effort; it was His job to work this out.
“Black leather bi-fold with a Palm Pilot PDA attached to it,” I replied.

“Palm Pilot?” piped up the passenger sitting next to the kneeling stewardess.   “There was just an announcement about one.”  We made our way off the plane to a security official who radioed in my request.

“We have a black wallet with a Palm Pilot,” came the response over the walkie talkie.  “What’s the name?”
“Henry Harris,” I answered.
“We got it,” said the voice.  “We’re bringing it over.”
 
This story changes the way I look at life every time I revisit it, and not only because it has a happy ending.   I’m aware that I don’t always merit miracles.  But with greater frequency I ask for God’s help and make efforts that factor it into the equation.  Running for a subway whose doors are about to close, finding myself in a tense conversation with a loved one, looking for parking – I ask inwardly, “God, I’m not sure I know how to finagle this, but You do and I’m not giving up.”  On Chanukah, the menorah reminds us that such help is real.
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As we walked back to the plane the stewardess paused to inquire, “You were exceptionally calm this whole time.  By any chance are you a doctor?”
“No,” I replied.  To myself I added, “But I believe in miracles.”

As a young adult I got deeply touched when introduced to the simple recipe our Talmud offers for inner wealth: “Who is the rich man?  One who takes pleasure in what he has.”
 
As someone who had felt plagued by an eye for what was missing in life, I had come to the distressing conclusion that I simply lacked some happiness muscle that others seemed to have no problem flexing.  I seemed to always veer toward “something’s wrong.”

“It’s ‘two plus two equals four,’” one of my teachers in yeshiva explained with conviction.  “If you focus on what you don’t have, you will feel impoverished.  If you focus on what you do have, you’ll feel rich.  It’s just the way life works.” 

Despite years of what seemed like innate unhappiness, something clicked:  I believed him.  Filled with conviction that this law applied to me, too, I got to work.

I set my alarm every three hours to pause whatever I was doing – eating a meal, sitting in class, running an errand – to rattle off five things that made me wealthy.  I started a  40-day course with an alarm ringing five times a day. 

I chose a partner in yeshiva to practice “gratitude drills.”  Once a day we’d find an empty room, set a 60-second stop watch, and take turns flooding our consciousness – loudly, exaggeratedly – with the virtues and pleasures of some mundane asset of the other’s choosing.

“Here, this plastic cup,” my partner would say.  “Go!”

“Do you know what I can do with this?” I’d plunge in.  “I can hold water and sate my thirst.  Do you know how many people it took to make and bring this cup to me?”  It was freestyle, stream-of-consciousness, ecstatic immersion in wealth awareness. 

Buoyed by my inner certainty that focusing on “what is” will necessarily bring joy – I was relentless.  Within days I could see I was in a different space.  Within weeks people around me began to ask, “What’s different about you?”

Self-Satisfaction

I felt so fulfilled.  I was genuinely seeing blessing.  I no longer felt like an emotional wimp, continuously kicked around by circumstances beyond my control or unwanted thoughts.  I proudly shared with my teachers the miraculous results I’d seen and offered to teach the exercises to others.  I was good at something important and I felt like a million bucks.

Then the exercises started to lose steam.  Okay, I thought, you’ve been doing this for a while and you’ve seen progress.   Move the wealth awareness muscles to lower throttle.

I progressed in my studies, got married, and got a job.   And then the voices of doubt and complaint started up again.   

Are you good at what you do?  Have you really accomplished much?  As much as so and so?  Why are you not more inspired?  More sought after? 
They didn’t let up. 

Okay, I thought, I’ve dealt with this before.  I’m an experienced inner wealth warrior.  I fired up the watch alarm and reflooded my consciousness daily with my blessing index. 

Nothing.

I reread the original sources.  I retained a gratitude partner.  I arranged to wake up to the theme song to Rocky. 

Nothing.  I was puzzled, discouraged, upset. 

The judgment began to extend to others.  I found myself filling up with complaints toward my wife, my kids, my colleagues.  Yet the chief complaint remained toward myself: why can’t you tackle this like you did before? 
  
A friend heard of my predicament and offered to share insights that had helped him.   The gist of our conversation went something like this.
“You think you were deeply helped back then by the hard core gratitude work you did; you ‘nailed’ the exercises and creative strategies,” he offered. 
“Well, yeah,” I thought.  Something about it helped.

“You’re wrong.  What really helped was a gift – the inner ‘click’ that focusing on what you have will change you.   G-d gave you that.  Your work only built on it.”

 “So how do I replicate the gift?”

“You can’t.  See that you didn’t do it, that G-d just popped that understanding into your heart.  Respect that and you’ll see how G-d is helping you with new gifts all the time.”

“Ok, but what can I do to ‘respect’ this more readily?  A program?  Exercises?”

“It’s not about what you do.   It’s about what G-d is already doing.”

“Ok, but how do I see that?” 

And around and around I went, trying to pin him down, but seemingly chasing my tail.  My work-hard-‘cause-it’s-up-to-me sensibility was flummoxed.   I believed in G-d, but G-d helps those who work hard.  What did he mean? 

Our conversations continued until something caught his eye that I hadn’t noticed: my mood had lightened.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Good,” I said with a smile.  It wasn’t a loopy, ecstatic high; I just felt relaxed.  Had it been suggested then that my tendencies toward complaints and negativity were resolved, I would surely have disagreed.

“What do you mean?” he explored.

“I don’t know,” I confessed.  “I just feel good.” 

“Tell me,” he asked with genuine curiosity, “what did you do get to that good feeling?”

I paused.  Then it happened:  a light went on inside as I confessed, “I didn’t do a darned thing!”

It was another “click.”  I saw in that moment that I had been spending hours, months, years struggling to generate greater happiness only to find that stealth-like, under my very own nose, gentle, happy thoughts had showed up.   The subjects of my complaints hadn’t dissolved, but from this lighter vista they looked softer, less ominous.  I hadn’t generated them, but the feelings of lightness and blessing were real.
 
And then something fascinating happened.  As if in an out of body experience, I watched my posture move from expansive joy to brow-furrowed concern.
 
“This is great right now,” came the thought.  “You’re in a quiet, intimate meeting with a spiritually attuned friend.  But what’s going to happen when you go home and face your wife, your kids, your life with all your familiar triggers and habits of judgment?”  Darkness descended as I sensed with certainty: you’re going to lose this feeling, it’s not yours to keep.
 
And then I watched as another thought bubbled up.
 
“You’re right,” it said, “you don’t know what’s going to be.  And that’s the way God runs His world.  He animates good moods and low moods.  You’re not really in control.  And it’s not a problem.”
 
Simple upswings (and downswings) were normal, the result of the ceaseless flow of Divine energy that animates all life, including my inner world!   I just hadn’t seen the swings as normal because my ego was too busy taking credit for the ups and taking personally the downs.  And I now understood why I couldn’t replicate my original gratitude work.  Having attributed the clarity to my own smarts and doing, I went looking in the wrong well for replenishment and turned my back on the wondrous source of the life-changing “click.”
 
Shortly after seeing this gift, I came across a striking comment on the Torah’s warning about ingratitude. 
 
“You may be tempted to say in your heart, ‘My strength and the might of my hand made me all this wealth,’” Moshe warns the Jewish people.  “Then you shall remember [God]: it was He who gave you strength to make wealth…”
 
How does the ancient commentary Onkelos translate “strength”?  Counsel, insight.  The strength that makes success in life is insight, understanding that lifts our hearts, lightens our load, and comes from beyond.  
 
I used to be proud of how good I was at generating gratitude and discouraged when I couldn’t.  I chased after certain feelings and did battle or ran from others.  These days, I am more interested in chasing the truth:  all feelings come from the gift of Divine energy showing up in my heart, in this moment.  I am seeing firsthand that “the truth will set you free”!