CPR Lesson from Snuffed Candle
One Chanukah, when I was a teenager, a friend showed me a cool trick. If you snuff out a candle, the smoke rises from the wick for a few seconds. If you place another flame directly in that smoke , the flame will actually follow the smoke down and relight the candle. I made a video showing it here . It's a cool trick, but I never really understood the real meaning of it, until last week when I realized that this is exactly what happened to my son when I blew his soul back into him! "A candle of G-d is the soul of man" (Proverbs 20, 27). Chassidus elaborates on the parallels. Flames don't want to exist. They want to expire & fly back up to where they came from in heaven. It's the wick and fuel that tie the flame down and keep it from expiring. So too, a soul wants to fly back up to heaven, where it came from, and the body is what keeps the soul down here alive. As a flame is extinguished, and it's en route back up to heaven, a trail of smoke fol