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The Olive Tree
It is my honor to be the Jewish Nature Center Sponsor of the Month. Many years ago, before Gabe became famous, he would come and sit in my branches and think about life. Did you know that we olive trees can live to be 1,000 years old? Yep, I have a great-uncle olive tree that was just a young sapling in Israel when your country won the Revolutionary War. Fortunately, the people of Israel value us so much that they won't let anything happen to us. It's really fortunate for great-uncle Oscar because they were going to build a road right through his sitting place. Instead, they had to build the road around him and, now, all day long, people pass by and say, "Look at that amazing tree." Of course, most of them say it in Hebrew.
You probably know the story of Chanukah.
Some really nasty soldiers conquered ancient Israel something like 2,500 years ago. They took over the Holy Temple and really schmutzed the place up – writing graffiti on the walls, letting pigs poop by the Altar, leaving their dirty clothes all over the place. As you know, when the Jewish army (led by the Maccabee family) kicked the enemy out of Israel and took back the Holy Temple, they discovered that all of the jars of olive oil used to fuel the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Light, had been destroyed or stolen by the enemy soldiers. There was only one jar of oil and this was only enough to keep the Ner Tamid burning for one night. But, this one jar of oil burned for eight nights – an event that has become known as the Miracle of Chanukah.
Now you are about to hear "The Rest of the Story:" A Modern Middrash
What the ancient Israelites did not know is that this jar of oil came from an olive tree that was known throughout the orchard as Grandfather Olive.
This was a tree that had seen more than one invasion. It was a tree that had survived lightening strikes, storm winds and unusually cold winters. Once, when it was only a sapling, ice covered its branches, threatening to break them off of the trunk. The tree survived all of this because it believed in never giving up. When other trees came to Grandfather Olive with a problem, he would tell them, "Believe in yourself. You were made by the Creator of the universe and put on this fine land for a reason. Never give up."
The jar of oil the Maccabeees found; the jar of oil that burned for eight days instead of one; it wasn't just any jar of, it came from the fruit of
Grandfather Olive. For eight nights, it did not give up, not until enough oil had been made to replace it.
It took eight days because only the first drop, the purest drop of each olive, could be used as the special oil for the Ner Tamid. And those jars new jars of oil came from an old olive tree in a nearby orchard. You guessed it. It was Grandfather Olive. And now you know the rest of the story.
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