inst Your nation Israel to make them forget Your Torah and to remove them from the laws of Your will. You, in Your abundant mercy, stood for them in their time of oppression, You fought their fight, You judged their case, and You avenged their revenge. You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the numerous into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands of the pure, the evil into the hands of the righteous, and the wicked into the hands of the students of Your Torah. You made a great and holy name for Yourself in Your world, and You did a great salvation and redemption for Your nation, Israel, as [clear as] this very day. After this Your children came to the Holy of Holies of Your House, and they cleaned Your Temple, purified Your Holy Place, and lit candles in the courtyards of our holiness. And they established these eight days to give thanks and praise to Your great Name.
In the entire prayer, the miracle of the oil is not mentioned. If the miracle of the oil was the primary miracle of Chanukah, which the Talmud seems to indicate, then why don't we mention it in our prayers?
To answer this question we need to first deal with another question, and that is, why was the miracle of the oil necessary at all? One of the famous questions asked about Chanukah is that if the reason we celebrate Chanukah for eight days is because the miracle of the oil lasted eight days, then really we should only celebrate seven days, as the first day was not a miracle since there was already enough oil for one day. There are many answers to this question. One of the answers that some authorities, such as the Meiri, suggest is that the very fact that they were able to find one container of pure oil in the first place was a miracle. The concept of ritual purity was deeply offensive to the Hellenistic mind, especially to those Jews who had abandoned Judaism in favor of Hellenism. It had been no accident that the Greeks had “rendered all the oils impure” (as stated in the poem, Maoz Tzur) but a deliberate act. The Greeks had searched the temple very carefully to render impure all the oil, and finding even one container was itself a miracle.
This, then, raises a question; why did God need to violate the laws of nature to make the oil burn for eight days, when He could have made a "simpler" miracle that the Jews would find eight containers? We know that, in truth, there is no distinction between "nature" and the miraculous; that both are entirely the expression of God's Will. However, in general, God desires that the world follow the natural laws that He established; that, of course, is why He established them. Whenever we find a miracle that violates the laws of nature, this indicates that God wishes to send us a special message that required the violation of His natural laws. What was God's message to us through the miracle of the oil?
All of our sources about the period, historical and traditional, tell us that the Jews of this period had been deeply affected by Greek thought. (The Jews were not unique in this regard.) The influence of Hellenism was not limited only to the outright Hellenizers, who had betrayed their people and had taken a major role in the oppression of their fellow Jews, but was pervasive throughout the culture in various degrees. One of the principles of Greek philosophy, as espoused by Aristotle, is that God does not take an active part in the affairs of the world. This idea had crept into the thoughts of many otherwise loyal Jews. Thus, even after the miraculous war that had just been fought, there were Jews who were unsure if the victories were really the result of Divine intervention, or simply the result of the brilliant strategies and tactics used by the Jewish leaders. The doubts of these Jews were put to rest by the miracle of the oil. Here was an undeniable miracle; one that broke the laws of nature! Obviously, God does intervene in this world, and clearly His hand was behind the entire Jewish victory.
The miracle of the oil had no great historical impact, in of itself. It won no battles, saved no liv