Obi-Wan Kenobi was my first spiritual guide. From the moment I saw “Star Wars” at the drive-in with my parents as a 3-year-old, I was captivated by his connection to the Force and by his calm and wise demeanor. As the movies progressed (and as I grew older), I took one of Obi-Wan’s teachings to heart: “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” Years later, I remembered those words as I heard a story about another spiritual guide, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel, I was told, once showed up to offer an evening lecture. Standing before the audience, he announced, “My friends, a miracle occurred on my way here!” He allowed excitement to build among the gathering before announcing, “The sun just set!”

Heschel understood the power of shifting one’s perspective. “Our own point of view,” as Obi-Wan phrased it, can transform the mundane into the miraculous. We can look at a sunset and understand it as a simple, everyday event. Alternatively, we can gaze upon the setting sun as an invitation to pause and reflect on the glory of Creation and the One who crafted such beauty.

“As civilization advances,” Heschel wrote in his classic work, “God in Search of Man,” “the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind … The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

Heschel teaches that cultivating a “point of view” that perceives the miraculous in our lives is not only counter-cultural, but that it can also lead us to find “the beginning of our happiness” and spiritual resilience. Throughout Hanukkah, we are offered the opportunity to reclaim “a certain point of view” that helps us to embrace the wondrous aspects of our experiences and our world.

Hanukkah, our festival of miracles, reminds us to appreciate the wonders in our world. We see this reflected in the etymology of the word “miracle” itself; it derives from the Latin miraculum, which denotes a feeling of astonishment and marveling. Similarly, the Hebrew word nes, “miracle,” can also mean a “flag” or a “signal”—something that commands our attention.

The story of Hanukkah includes the account of how a single flask of oil lasted for eight days. From “a certain point of view,” this isn’t much of a marvel. However, from a perspective of wonder, this is an event of overwhelming significance, demanding our attention and kindling our imagination.

Regardless of whether we take this tale literally, Jewish tradition encourages us to cultivate a sense of wonder in this season. No matter where each of us might place ourselves on the spectrum of skepticism, it invites us, to paraphrase another quote from Obi-Wan, to feel that something marvelous surrounds us, permeates us and binds the universe together.

“But why do we make such a big deal about something so small?” a student once asked me. I invited him to consider which natural laws needed to be bent or broken for the miracle of oil to have occurred. At the end, we had created quite a long list, ranging from topology to thermodynamics. Although my student wasn’t fully convinced that this particular miracle couldn’t have been improved upon (“It would have been better if God had created a column of fire, like in Exodus!”), it was clear to us that the more we paid attention, the more miraculous this small episode became.

It can be all too easy to shut ourselves away from the awareness of the miracles that abound, in the words of our prayer for peace, “in every time and every moment.” Beginning in this Hanukkah season, we can choose another path, one that will lead us to refreshment and new resilience.

Let’s reclaim the will to hold to a perspective that embraces wonder and delight. Let’s dare ourselves to find uplift as we tell our children and students how great miracles happened—and happen—whenever we allow ourselves to recognize them. As we adopt this “certain point of view,” let’s rest secure in the knowledge that the Living Force, the One in whose image we are all made, will be with us … always.

Rabbi Josh Breindel is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley.

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