Hanukkah is about happiness. The holiday’s customs promote joy in the form of sweet chocolate and oily latkes, while the Hanukkah story points to a spiritual element of human satisfaction—freedom.
Through subtle wordplay, the Torah portion commonly read during the holiday focuses our attention along similar lines. Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams by explaining that the seven fat cows and seven healthy sheaves represented years of plenty, or satiation, while the seven lean cows and seven ill-looking sheaves represented years of famine. The roots of the Hebrew words for “seven” (?×??×?) and “satiation” (?×?×??×???) are nearly identical, and they are written identically in the Torah’s un-vocalized text. The two words appear next to each other several times, suggesting a relationship between the notion of satisfaction and the number seven.
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