If the oil was enough for one day, why eight days and not seven?
Verse 5 says the people of understanding set the eight days for song and joyful singing. The Gemara's story has a snag. The Greeks made all the oil in the Temple impure. The Jews found one jar still sealed by the High Priest, "enough to light for one day only," and they lit from it for eight days. If the jar held one day of oil, then the oil did something unusual on only seven days.
The Beit Yosef (Rabbi Yosef Karo, who lived in Tzfat in the 1500s and wrote the Shulchan Aruch) asks this question himself. He says it is a difficulty: the jar had enough for one night, so the miracle happened on only seven nights.
He gives three answers. One: they divided the oil into eight portions and put one portion in the menorah each night, and each portion burned until morning, so every night had a miracle. Two: after they poured the right amount into the lamps, the jar was full again, so the miracle showed even on the first night. Three: on the first night they poured all the oil into the lamps, and in the morning the lamps were still full, and the same happened every night.
He also explains why they needed light for eight days at all. All of Israel was impure from contact with the dead, and making pure oil takes seven days of purifying plus a day to press the olives. The Ran (a Spanish scholar of the 1300s) says there was pure oil four days away, so a round trip took eight days.
He does not choose among the answers. Each one keeps the miracle going on all eight nights.
Shabbat 21b,Beit Yosef, Orach Chaim 670Why does a song of thanks ask God for revenge?
Verse 6 says, "Take vengeance for the blood of Your servants from the wicked nation." If that bothers you, it is a fair reaction. The words are nearly the same as Tehillim 79:10, "the avenging of the spilled blood of Your servants." That psalm mourns the destruction of Jerusalem. Another verse of it (79:6), "Pour out Your wrath on the nations," is said at the Seder in the Haggadah.
Notice who is asked to act. In the Torah, God says, "Vengeance and payment are Mine" (Devarim 32:35), and Moshe's song ends, "He will avenge the blood of His servants" (32:43). The song does not say "we will." It hands the matter to God.
The tradition also pushes the other way. The Gemara tells of Rabbi Meir (a sage of the Mishnah), who prayed that some violent neighbors would die. His wife Beruria, a learned woman quoted in the Gemara, asked, "Do you think it is because the verse says, 'Let sins end from the earth'? Does it say sinners? It says sins." She pointed to the end of the verse, "and the wicked will be no more." When the sins end, the wicked are no more. So pray that they repent. He prayed for them, and they repented.
Both are in the same tradition. One asks God for justice for people who were killed. The other asks that wrongdoers turn around. This line does not say which nation it means or what the vengeance would look like. A rav can help with how the two fit together.
Tehillim 79:6 and 79:10,Devarim 32:35 and 32:43,Berakhot 10a,Tehillim 104:35Why do we say Hallel on Chanukah but not on Purim?
Verses 4 and 5 put two rescues side by side, Purim and Chanukah. In shul they are treated differently. On Chanukah we say Hallel (psalms of praise). On Purim we do not.
The Gemara asks this itself. It notes that Chanukah has neither of the features the discussion was about: it has no special offering of its own, and work is not forbidden on it. Yet Chanukah has Hallel, "because of the miracle." Purim has a miracle too, so why not Purim?
The first answer, from Rabbi Yitzchak, is that we do not sing praise for a miracle outside the Land of Israel, and Purim happened in Persia. Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak objects that the Exodus from Egypt also happened outside the Land, and we say Hallel for it. The Gemara answers with an older teaching: before the Jews entered the Land, every land was fit for songs of praise. Once they entered, other lands were not.
Two more answers follow. Rav Nachman says that reading the Megillah is the Hallel. Rava (a Gemara sage of the 300s) says that at the Exodus, "Praise, servants of Hashem" means servants of Hashem and no longer of Pharaoh. After Purim, he says, "we are still servants of Achashverosh."
The Gemara does not stop to say why Chanukah is different. The Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, a Chassidic teacher in Poland who died in 1905) takes up the question, starting from what his grandfather said about Rava's answer. The problem is that the Chanukah miracle did not end Greek rule completely either. He says it was light found in the dark, and it made people feel they were Hashem's servants even in exile. That, he says, was the miracle.
So the song puts the two rescues side by side, even though shul treats them differently. Purim, on Rav Nachman's answer, has its Hallel in the reading of the Megillah.
Arakhin 10b,Megillah 14a,Shabbat 21b,Sefat Emet, Chanukah 5632, first night