Meanings of the Menorah: Ecological, Spiritual, and the Battle of Light vs. Fire

(This blog post is based on a two-part Times of Israel article about "The Menorah in COVID", which you can read here and here.)

Lighting the menorah outside

Did you know that lighting a menorah outside your front door is considered the fullest expression of what it means to “publicize the miracle”, to be pirsum hanes, as one says in Yeshivish?

It’s one of just a handful of Jewish rituals designed to be done outdoors. The main one of course is Sukkot, where we live outdoors in our makeshift booths that are required to be open to the sky and that can be easily opened to the breeze. The sukkah is a ritual space that can be used day or night. The other two rituals, though, are mainly for the nighttime. One is Kiddush Levanah, when we stand before the moon/levanah to give her a blessing, and jump and dance towards her. The other ritual is lighting the menorah, perhaps the one ritual most familiar to every type of Jew, though it is not familiar as an outdoor ritual. Lighting the menorah or Chanukiyah, as it is called in modern Hebrew, is something we get to do for eight days — for longer than any of our other rituals.

It’s true that most of us chutz la’aretz (outside of the land of Israel) light our menorahs inside the house by a street-facing window (which is fine!), but that’s second best according to the Talmud. The ideal is to light outside one’s front door, where space turns from private to public, where people will not just see the menorah but readily interact with it. That’s why in Jerusalem, it’s common to see glass boxes mounted to one side of the door to the street where one can place an oil lamp menorah that can burn without getting blown out by a breeze. (For all of us not used to lighting outside, you can try this with an unused aquarium. An ice menorah is also a special treat outside, where it won’t melt too fast.)

The flames of the candles must be separate from each other

The halakhah (Jewish law) teaches that the flames of a menorah need to be separated from each other by at least a fingerbreadth, and that it’s best to set them up more or less in a straight line. Another way to describe this in an image is that the Chanukah candles are socially distanced!

The reason for this is that the menorah light shouldn’t be like a m’durah, a campfire or bonfire, and that one should be able to count the flames to tell at a glance how many candles or wicks are lit. Since we light one more candle each day, that means anyone can tell what day of Chanukah it is by looking at your lit menorah. In a time when one day blends into another, knowing the number of the day is a comfort. If the wicks were in a circle, then the flames would overlap from multiple angles and visually blend together, like our days do when we are in a crisis. Another distinction is that a m’durah is generally used for heat, whereas a ner, a lamp or candle, is used primarily or only for its light – for discernment.

There is an alternative, almost opposite fantasy of what Chanukah means that contradicts this halakhah. One hears it in the song Ba’nu Choshekh: “We come to chase away the darkness, in our hand light and fire, each one of us a tiny light, but we all make a mighty light!” But according to Jewish practice, the lights are davka not supposed to be joined together to make one mighty light.

In fact, there is a quiet comfort and confidence in not rushing to join together, in not chasing away dark, not whipping up conflagrations, but instead dwelling in what is, in planting seeds of light, person-by-person, wick-by-wick. Chanukah is a time to honor that reality.

And so we light in these crushing times

However divided we feel, within and as a society, we can easily witness each other’s lights in our windows and doors. The light of our Chanukiyahs, which will glorifyingly multiply eight times, and which, according to our tradition, is holy, can cast a halo around what stays pure within us in the face of trauma. That also means that the light we each carry and sustain in ourselves, as we trudge through this time of grave conflict and through the dark time of solstice, can stay pure.

There is a midrash says that Israel is like an olive tree: to get the pure oil that gives light, the olives need to be crushed. For so many of us, this is a crushing time, and whether we extract the light from this time is up to us. When we witness each other’s light, we are also witnessing each other’s resilience, empowerment, resistance. To do so, the menorah reminds us, can be miracle enough.

Ecology and the menorah

Let’s now turn to focus on the biblical and ecological reasons for the traditional menorah, or Chanukiyah in modern Hebrew, with eight branches in a line (plus one shamash that is not in that line). Along the way, we’ll encounter some extraordinary legends and insights about Chanukah.

The olive tree and the Temple’s menorah

You probably know that the alignment of the candles in the Chanukiyah imitates the flat tree shape of the seven-branched menorah that stood in the Temple. That would be reason enough for its shape, since we are commemorating the rededication of the Temple. But why does the Torah insist that there be seven branches in one line, “three branches of the menorah on the one side and three branches… on the other side” (Exodus 25:32)?

One reason the Torah gives is that the lamps need to cast their light toward the altar: “and (the priest) will lift her (the menorah’s) lamps and shine light outward from her face” (Exodus 25:37). By setting the flames in one line, the Torah guaranteed that the light cast by the menorah wouldn’t create shadows in the direction it was facing (kind of like setting up lighting for zoom).

Harvesting light 

The Torah also teaches that the menorah represents a tree, with its branches sculpted with almond flowers with sepals, and of course the menorah was literally lit by a tree, since the fuel had to be very pure olive oil. The almond flower as the first blooming tree is a symbol of spring and awakening. But the olive oil is simply (and magnificently) a staple of the land of Israel, and the best thing you could use to get the best light.

I learned some new things about how olive oil gets made in Israel and Palestine that I never knew growing up. The trees may be finished growing their olives by Sukkot, but the olives are not harvested until after the first rain falls on them – typically around the end of Sukkot or a bit after. They are harvested over a month’s time, then they mellow. After that they are crushed in an olive press to make oil, and the oil must sit for a few weeks til the sediment settles out.

Since Chanukah falls exactly two full moons plus ten days after the end of Sukkot, we celebrate lighting the menorah or Chanukiyah right around when the first oil pressed from the new harvest could be used.

A festival of fire

The rabbinic story of Chanukah tells us that the miracle of the holiday was that the oil lasted eight days. But during the Maccabean revolt, the work of harvesting the olives, along with Sukkot and the other fall harvests, became difficult or impossible because of the war. Because of that, it was an even bigger a miracle to find any oil at all.

In fact, the second book of Maccabees (which is not in our Bible but was preserved by the church) tells us there’s more going on with fire than light on Chanukah. It calls Chanukah the festival of fire, explaining that when the first Temple was destroyed, the priests who were sent into exile hid fire from the altar in a cave and sealed it off. When the exiles came back from Babylonia 70 years later, Nehemiah sent the descendants of those priests to find the fire that was hidden years before. They found the cave, and inside they found a thick liquid, which they spread on the altar on the 25th of the month of Kislev.

When the sun came out, the liquid ignited. That was the miracle, says 2 Maccabees, rather than an eight-day long burn of one-day’s oil. And not only that: 2 Maccabees also says we are commemorating the fire that came down from heaven when Solomon inaugurated the altar of the first Temple, which happened over the eight days of Sukkot and Sh’mini Atseret, the eighth day when fire fell from heaven, hundreds of years before. That fire was the same passed down by the priests through the generations and then hidden. (Note: what this should mean this year and for the future, when Sh’mini Atseret is now forever associated with the October 7 attacks, is too soon to tell. If I gain some clarity on this point, I will add it to this blog post.)

2 Maccabees doubles down on the symbolism of the eight days, explaining that the Hasmonean festival of fire was also a redo of the eight days of Sukkot because Sukkot couldn’t be celebrated during the war. (Hasmonean is from the actual family name of Judah the Maccabee.) That makes two explanations from the Maccabees for why Chanukah is about fire and two for why it needed to be eight-days long. That’s in addition to the rabbinic reason for both, that the oil burned for eight days.

Festival of fire or festival of lights?

All these explanations for Chanukah involve fire – but not the same kind of fire. Remember that for the rabbis, Chanukah was a festival of lights, chag urim, in the plural, celebrating the fire of the menorah, where the flames were separated and not at all “like a m’durah.” The Hasmoneans, however, saw Chanukah as a celebration of a different fire, the fire of the altar. That fire was by definition a m’durah – a cookfire or campfire, kindled to be used either to burn up a sacrificial animal’s meat in smoke or to cook it for eating by the priests.

The flame of a ner, an oil lamp or candle (which of course is the root of the word menorah), was kindled for light, not for heat. The rabbis made a point of this difference, not only by saying the flames couldn’t look like a m’durah, but also by saying that the Chanukah lights were holy and could not be used for any utilitarian purpose. That’s why we have the shamash (the lighter candle): to provide light that has not been sanctified and can therefore be used. Both the rabbinic and Maccabean stories give us an historical reason to celebrate the new olive harvest with fire, but they embody opposite intentions. Who was right? How many quasi-historical fire miracles do we need to conjure to justify celebrating Chanukah? And did the festival really originate in any of these miracle stories?

The darkest night and the miracle

I never get tired of pointing out the fact that the darkest night of the year is not actually the winter solstice, but rather the fifth night of Chanukah, the moonless night before or nearest to the winter solstice. That’s what Chanukah is about, no matter which version of history one pays attention to.

The irrefutable miracle is also the one embedded in Nature rather than history. That’s the miracle of the olive harvest itself, and the wonder of a world where beautiful tree grows fruit from the sun’s light that can be harvested to give us oil so that we can create our own light.

And along with that miracle is a miracle specific to the ecology of the land of Israel and the Mediterranean: the oil from the new harvest is ready just in time for us to ignite it to create light in the outer Temple of the world in the darkest season, when we need it most. These natural miracles would be enough reason to celebrate Chanukah as a festival, even without the miracles of either the fire that fell from heaven, or the “oil that burned quite slowly” (as Jon Stewart phrased it in a duet with Stephen Colbert at 2:28).

Finding the holy in this fierce and scary year

So our menorah, our Chanukiyah, is not a m’durah, not an attempt to overcome the dark with a blazing fire, but a bridge of light composed of individual flames, like seeds of light. This bridge helps us cross over that darkest night of the sun’s cycle in the Northern hemisphere, without denying or disrespecting the dark.

But if you want to honor both rabbinic and Hasmonean traditions—and if you want to stay warm and do the ritual outside—Jewish law says you can build a m’durah to use for your shamash. So bring your firepits!

This year, we need all the light we can get, as we pass through this time that is dark in so many more ways than the winter solstice. We are in a time of war and cataclysm, a time when fascism threatens democracy in America and Israel and so many other places, and a time of growing out-in-the-open antisemitism. Maybe this is a year when people will feel afraid to light he menorahs in the window, but if so, then it is also a time when we should defiantly share that light. And it is and will continue to be a time when we are struggling more and more with the chaos of climate disruption, for years to come.

But never forget that there is also holy darkness to complement the light. Darkness that can hold peace, that can bring freedom, that can make our small lights shine brighter. Each olive its own little package of light, each person their own source of illumination. We don’t always need to join together and make one big bonfire flame. Sometimes it has to be enough for us to align ourselves like the candles, so that we can synchronize how we shine our own lights from within the darkness, in order to create a space ahead of us without shadows. Just enough to illuminate the journey.

Chag urim sameach!