"Ellison-TowardTheLight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

"Res ipsa loquitur," he replied, not even opening his eyes. It was Latin, and it
meant the thing speaks for itself; it was self-evident.

"When I was fourteen years old," I said, propping myself on one elbow and
looking across at him lying there with his eyes shut, "a kid named Jack
Wheeldon, sitting behind me in an assembly at my junior high school, kicked my
seat and called me a kike. I turned around and hit him in the head with my
geography book. He was on the football team, and he broke my jaw. Don't tell me
I'm a Bad Jew. I ate through a straw for three months."

He turned his head and gave me that green-eyed lizard-on-a-rock stare. "This is
a Good Jew, eh? Chanukah is in three days. You'll be lighting the candles, am I
correct? You'll be reciting the prayers? You'll observe yontiff using nothing
but virgin olive oil in your menorah, to celebrate the miracle?"

Oh, how I wanted to pop him one. "I gotcher miracle," I said, rudely. I lay back
in the sling and closed my eyes.

I didn't believe in miracles. How Yehudah of the Maccabees had fielded a mere
ten thousand Jews against Syrian King Antiochus's mercenary army of 60,000
infantry and 5,000 cavalry; and how he had whipped them like a tub of butter.
How the victors had then marched on Jerusalem and retaken the Second Temple; and
how they found that in the three years of Hellenist and Syrian domination and
looting the Temple had grown desolate and overgrown with vegetation, the gates
burned, and the Altar desecrated. But worst of all, the sacred vessels,
including the menorah had been stolen. So the priests, the Kohanim, took seven
iron spits, covered them with wood, and crafted them into a makeshift menorah.
But where could they find uncontaminated oil required for the lighting of the
candelabrum?

It was a time of miracles. They found one flask of oil. A cruse of oil, whatever
a cruse was. And when they lit it, a miracle transpired, or so I was told in
Sunday School, which was a weird name for it because Friday sundown to Saturday
sundown is the Sabbath for Jews, except we were Reform, and that meant Saturday
afternoon was football and maybe a movie matinee, so I went on Sundays. And,
miracle of miracles, I forgot most of those football games, but I remembered
what I'd been taught about the "miracle" of the oil, if you believe that sort of
mythology they tell to kids. The oil, just barely enough for one day, burned for
eight days, giving the Kohanim sufficient time to prepare and receive fresh
uncontaminated oil that was fit for the menorah.

A time of miracles. Like, for instance, you're on the Interstate, seventy-five
miles from the nearest gas station, and your tank is empty. But you ride the
fumes seventy-five miles to a fill-up. Sure. And one day's oil bums for eight.
Not in this universe, it doesn't.

"I don't believe in old wives' tales that there's a 'miracle' in one day's oil
burning for eight," I said.