The Pach: From Garbage Can to Holy Vessel
When the Greeks contaminated the Temple, the Maccabees searched for oil that was still fit to use. What they found was one small flask.
וּמָצְאוּ פַּךְ אֶחָד שֶׁל שֶׁמֶן שֶׁהָיָה מוּנָּח בְּחוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל
They found one flask of oil lying sealed with the seal of the Kohen Gadol. Shabbat 21b
The quantity is the famous part. The seal and the location are the interesting parts. That flask was sitting inside the contamination zone, overlooked, surrounded by everything that had been ruined, carrying the one thing in the building that could not be ruined. By every reasonable standard it was refuse. They lit it, and it burned eight nights.
The word is still in use, and it means bin
In modern Hebrew פַּח is a tin, and פַּח אַשְׁפָּה is a garbage can. The Torah’s flask is פַּךְ, one letter different at the end, and the two sound identical in the mouth.
An eggshell goes in the pach. You fish it out, rinse it, fill it with oil and light it for Shabbat. That sequence is what Chanukah already did: the pure container retrieved from the discard pile and lit.
The flask is inside the verb for overturning
פַּךְ sits inside הָפַךְ, to overturn, to invert, to flip. It is the verb Yonah carries into the city: נִינְוֵה נֶהְפָּכֶת, Ninveh is overturned (Yonah 3:4), a word that means destroyed and means turned around, and the whole book turns on which one it is.
The homophone carries the same motion. פַּח is also a snare, and the Psalmist breaks one.
הַפַּח נִשְׁבָּר וַאֲנַחְנוּ נִמְלָטְנוּ
The snare is broken and we have escaped. Tehillim 124:7
The container breaks open and what was trapped inside is released. The garbage becomes the vessel. The trap becomes the escape. An eggshell in a kitchen bin is the pach shemen of that house: the one uncontaminated container in the contaminated zone, waiting for somebody who knows what it is.
Even the enemy is a vessel that has not been turned
The king of Amalek was אֲגָג, Agag, which said out loud in another tongue is egg. The Gemara records that descendants of Haman, out of Agag’s own line, learned Torah in Bnei Brak (Gittin 57b; Sanhedrin 96b).
The bad egg hatched Torah scholars. The enemy is not the opposite of the vessel. The enemy is a vessel that has not yet been turned.
If you want the joke on your table, use pear oil. The pear is אַגָּס, one letter from אֲגָג, and in English it says eggs. Commanded nowhere and needed for nothing: a drop of agas in the eggshell is eggs inside the egg, the enemy’s name sweetened and burned for light. It is a Purim move, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא (Esther 9:1), the great overturning, the same hafach the flask is named for.
Laughing your way into a piece of wisdom is permitted.
What the practice actually is
A retrieval. Finding the pach in the pach, the sacred inside the discarded, and lighting it. Nothing in it requires anything rare.
The argument runs through Kol Tehom, free to read in English and in Hebrew. Oils are here.
Keep reading
- Baka one verb splits the sea and cracks the egg
- Solomon’s Question, Answered by an Eggshell how a finite vessel holds what the heavens cannot
- Lighting Chanukah with Oil why the Shulchan Aruch calls olive oil the choicest
The map shows how all of it connects.
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