December 30th, Parshat Mikeitz
Chag Urim Sameach! (Happy Festival of Light!) This week, in perhaps the most widely celebrated Jewish observance after the Passover Seder, we light candles each night.
According to the Talmud (Shabbat 22a), the Chanukah lights should really be kindled outside, next to our doorways, or even our front gates for those of us with fenced-in yards. This is because the purpose of the mitzvah is pirsumei nisa – to publicize the miracle of Chanukah – best accomplished by lighting outside in the public thoroughfare. However, there is a special dispensation during times of religious persecution to light inside, out of public view.
The Arukh Hashulchan notes that the custom in Lithuania in his day was to light candles inside and not in public, even in the absence of religious persecution. He attributes this practice to the fact that the climate in Lithuania is not conducive to doing anything outside in December, and suggests that it was not the intention of the Sages who instituted the practice of lighting for Chanukah to force us to brave such adverse conditions to fulfill the mitzvah.
These historical and meteorological factors notwithstanding, I see in the shift from outdoor candle lighting to indoor candle lighting a parallel to the historic shift that took place over the centuries in how we understand what it means to be Jewish. In ancient times, to be Jewish was not merely to be part of a religion but to be part of a nation with its own distinct beliefs and practices. The mitzvot, were not merely religious observances, but the laws and customs of a people. Jewish observance was a public affair, enforced by communal authorities, so lighting in public was the most appropriate expression of the mitzvah.
In the modern era, really beginning with Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews of France, we saw a shift in what it meant to be Jewish. A Jew was no longer a compulsory member of a self-governing religio-ethnic minority, but a citizen of the larger nation who happened to practice the Jewish religion. This approach, expressed by German Jews of the 19th century as a desire to be “a German in the street and Jew at home,” lends itself to lighting Chanukah candles in private, indoors, out of the public view.
With the birth of the state of Israel, and the return of Jewish sovereignty to the land of our ancestors, we have seen another shift in the way Jews think about our Judaism. Judaism, we are beginning to recognize once again, is more than a matter of private belief and conscience, but also a matter of participating in the life of the Jewish people. At the same time, even those of us who believe that we are bound by halakhah, see following halakhah as a choice for an individual to make for him or herself, not something to be enforced by communal authorities.
How appropriate then is the widespread practice here in America to neither light indoors, out of view, nor out on the street in public, but in a window facing the public thoroughfare. It’s as if we are saying that we want our Judaism to be about more than our own private spiritual life. We want it to be about membership in the larger Jewish community and participation in the life of our people; however, we want that participation and affiliation to be a choice that each of us makes voluntarily, free from outside coercion.
May the lights of the Chanukiot in our windows shine inward, inspiring us to deepen our private faith and commitment to serving Hashem, and outward, reminding us of our responsibilities and obligations to our Jewish community and the Jewish people throughout the world.
Rabbi Garth Silberstein