Fire consumes things, but with the purpose of transforming them.
By transforming them, it elevates them.
In fact, the transformation of the physical world through the love of God, through His instrument the mitzvah, is on the order of reconstitution or restitution rather than change.
To elevate things is to bring them back to their true nature and to reinstate their true identity.
To fulfill a mitzvah, to transform oil into light, is to accomplish for the world something similar to the work of a psychoanalyst.
You take a man or a thing and tell them: "You have forgotten who you are and where you come from."
Our true vocation as men is to free the world of its complex by creating change, and to upset the laws of a static world by transforming things through the fire of the mitzvah.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From The Seven Lights by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz