When the light of menorah gazing did not flow into my vessel of being, I wondered how to repair the capacity to receive. Last night, awaking at midnight with a sense of falling, it seemed timely to do the Tikkun Hatzot,* heart-opening prayers of lament for the situation in Israel, our world, and issues in my life--if I could find a Hanukkah connection. So...
Padded through the darkness to go sit by the menorah, as it customary on Hanukkah to study Torah beside it, lit or not, I suppose. Doing a hard drive search on Tikkun Hatzot, texts sent some time ago by Maggid Yitzchak Buxbum became helpful:
“Rebbe Tzvi Hersh the "Servant" of Rimanov would wake up at midnight for Tikkun Hatzot…,wash his hands, and with a powerful loud voice cry out from the depths of his pure heart, 'Mama Rachel!' [The hasidic book that records this anecdote explains parenthetically: our mother Rachel is an epithet for the holy Shechinah]… Immediately, the Rebbe would then jump out of bed and … begin to mourn the suffering of the Shechinah and the exile of the Jewish people." (Kohen Gadol Mesharait, p.154)."
Maggid Buxbaum also included stories of rebbes being overheard praying “Mama, Mama” aloud. One also did so during the day--in whispers. “Mah” in Hebrew means “What?!” Our Biblical matriarch Rivka, too, called out a prayer when her twins were struggling in her womb: “ma zeh anochi—What is this going on in me?!”
Continuing the keyword search on Google, in the Jewish mystical literature, the Zohar’s Raya Mehemna, this teaching appeared,
“Certainly the vessel of the Holy One Blessed Be… is the Shechinah…the vessel that serves…she is…the Menorah.”
The same source emphasizes the importance of repairing our vessels:
“The time has come to fix the vessels of the King, to set them in order and rectify them. [In the physical world] they are the [ten] vessels of the Tabernacle. They are the Menorah, the Table [of the Showbread], the Altar, the Washbasin and Jug, the Ark and the Curtain [in front of it] and the [two] cherubs and all in its Weight.
Each of these ten vessels corresponds to one of the qualities/sephirot on the Kabbalists’ Tree of Life. The Menorah of [our and All] Being is interpreted as the sephirah of Chessed—the flow of lovingkindness within and between self and All that is.
So praying last night to Mama, Mother, Shechinah, the flow of Chessed returned and bathed me in a rainbow of light--God's love shining through God's tears, a river of compassion / lovingkindness.
May your gazing at the Menorah and the lights tonight, connect you, too, with Chessed--the Shechinah. May the light come as the letdown of the milk of the Mother, as it is in written in Torah: “Be still/letdown (your stress, hands, tightness) and know that I am G*d.”