[Thanks to our wonderful Israeli line producer, Nir Weiss, I’m back online. As much as my shoot schedule permits, I’ll be posting here near-daily, and on Cyan’s site two or three times a week. To all those who emailed in the interim since my last post with their advice: yes, I promise I’ll try really hard not to get blown up.]

“Nes gadol haya sham.”

I recited those Hebrew words while growing up, year after year, prompted each hanukkah by the first letters – ‘nun’, ‘gimmel’, ‘hey’ and ‘shin’ – that in turn adorn the four sides of the dreidels my family would pull out of a box in our garage. Nes gadol haya sham – a great miracle happened there.

In short, that’s what hanukkah – like most other Jewish holidays – is about; memorializing a great miracle that kept the Jewish people alive, century in and century out, despite the best efforts of countless civilizations. Still, in the case of hanukkah, which celebrates the successful revolt of the Maccabees, the miracle we celebrate isn’t the suprising, David-and-Goliath-esque military victory, but rather a much smaller one.

When the Maccabee rebels returned to their Great Temple after tossing the greeks, they found the place ransacked, the Neir Tamid – the Eternal Light – extinguished, with barely enough oil left in the one unbroken flask to last a few hours. Yet, through the eight days it took them to pick and press olives, to replenish their oil supply, the single flask burned on.
From that, then, Hanukkah – eight days, a festival of lights. Yet, in the bigger picture of their against-the-odds win, that little miracle seems, well, not all that miraculous. But, perhaps, that’s the entire point – a miracle of any size is a miracle none the less.

While growing up, I remember each year being told that, In Israel, dreidels differ slightly – the letter ‘pey’ replaces ‘shin’, the stood-for word ‘po’ replaces ‘sham’. Nes gadol haya po – a great miracle happened here. In this very place.

I thought of that today as I drove back from Ben Gurion Airport towards Tel Aviv. I had just sent out Chris, our director, and the Israeli crew that will be following him, off to Newcastle, to shoot Sakhnin’s UEFA game later this week. As we had been running behind on our way to the airport – we wanted to get there in time to film the team’s bus pulling up – I had given in to the urgings of my car-ull of Israelis, and driven straight through, despite the nearly-empty state of my car’s gas tank.

The fuel light had come on well before we arrived at the airport, and, on my way back, the needle was dipping further and further below the empty line. I drove along the highway to Tel Aviv, looking desperately ahead for signs of roadside gas stations on the horizon. But, not only were there not any gas stations, there weren’t even any exits – aside from junctions for equally large highways shooting off towards the desert on either side – for tens of miles.

By the time I pulled off the highway onto the first exit I could find, the car was already beginning to slow slightly – my top speed had dropped to maybe sixty kilomters per hour. And, as I drove, increasingly slowly, down block after block of the small road I had exited onto, the odds of finding a gas station seemed increasingly slim. The small commercial strip gave way to sparse apartment complexes, and handfuls of industrial buildings.

Still, knowing I certainly didn’t have enough fuel to return to highway speed, I kept pushing forward. I was doing thirty kilometers an hour at best, but the car kept going, one painful mile at a time. Finally, some ten minutes after I had turned onto the road, I caught sight of a gas station far up on the left. Ever slower, I rolled forward, my eye on the glowing sign ahead.

By the time I pulled in, the engine was knocking, and I was barely doing five kilometers an hour. But I managed to roll the car up alongside the pump. As I stepped out of the car, breathing in the beautiful smell of petrol, I thought about those Israeli dreidels. Nes gadol haya po. A great miracle happened here. Apparently they still do.