Hello Everyone,
This past Sunday we discussed two perspectives on one of the paradoxical halachot of Chanukah.
The central mitzvah of Chanukah is the lighting of the Chanukah candles. The purpose of the candles is to publicize the miracle of Chanukah, and this publicizing of the mitzvah is known in Hebrew as פרסום הנס.
Candles of course are subject to being blown out unexpectedly. The Gemarah says there is a dispute if one is obligated to light the candles again should they be extinguished before their having remained lit for the required half-hour. The halacha is that כבתה אין זקוק לה- if the Chanukah do not to be re-lit should they be extinguished prematurely.
This ruling is difficult to understand. If the purpose of lighting the Chanukah candles is to publicize the miracle, how has this been accomplished if the lights are blown put after two minutes? Why shouldn’t one need to re-light the candles so that they remain lit for the necessary half hour?
We saw two explanations for this halacha. One explanation came from the Chassidic work בני יששכר and the other explanation came from Rav Kook zt”l.
The בני יששכר[1] wrote that the Chanukah lights symbolize the difference between the Torah and secular wisdom. The value of secular wisdom lies in its providing the correct answer to various questions. For every question the only valuable answer is the correct and useful answer. If a person studies and experiments for many years but reaches an incorrect conclusion he has wasted his time. Secular knowledge is pragmatic and the pursuit of secular knowledge is utilitarian in nature.
The pursuit of Torah knowledge is based on an entirely different system of values. Hashem gave us a mitzvah to study the Torah. We say every day a blessing “ברוך אתה ה’… לעסוק בדברי תורה.” Hashem wants us to be involved in the study of Torah. We know that the Gemarah records all the opinions of the Sages, we study opinions which were accepted as being “Halachic” but we also study the opinions which were not incorporated into the Halacha. The opinions of Beit Shammai form the Torah along with the opinions of Beit Hillel. All of the opinions are holy.
This sort of knowledge is not pragmatic. If Hashem was interested in our acquiring “useful knowledge” the Torah would be narrowed down to the קיצור שלחן ערוך. But the study of Torah is an exercise in holiness. Even when we study and arrive at incorrect conclusions we have fulfilled the mitzvah of studying Torah.
This is why we don’t need to re-light the Chanukah candles if they are blown out before the minimum time. If the candles were lit for a purely practical reason (such as פרסום הנס) then we would be required to re-light them. But the candles represent the non-pragmatic Torah and by not lighting them anew we demonstrate that the study of Torah is totally unlike the study of secular of knowledge.
Rav Kook zt”l saw a different idea in the Chanukah candles. The discussion of the Chanukah lights appears in a discussion of the Shabbat candles. The Gemarah distinguishes between oils and wicks which burn cleanly and those that do not. The latter types may not be used on Shabbat but they may be used for Chanukah. The reason that they may be used on Chanukah is that should the Chanukah lights not remain lit for the required time they need not be re-lit. The question is, as we said already is, why not?
Rav Kook זצ”ל wrote that the miracle of Chanukah occurred at a time when Judaism was under attack by a foreign culture. The Jews had absorbed to a certain extent the values of Hellenism. Even the victorious חשמונאים were influenced to a certain extent by an alien brand of nationalism.[2] The Chanukah lights represent the Torah according to Rav Kook, as they do for the בני יששכר but Rav Kook sees in the Chanukah lights a different sort of Torah. The lights of Chanukah which do not burn cleanly and which we may ignore should they go out early represent the “hybridized” Torah which is a mixture of eternal values with the secular cultures of the day. Throughout the duration of our exile we have been and will continue to be exposed to foreign ideologies. Some Jews will be attracted to those ideas and led away from the Torah. In order to meet the needs of the Jews who are attracted to foreign concepts and beliefs there is a legitimate need for a literature which expounds the Torah’s values using the terms of alien cultures. This was done first[3] by Philo of Alexandria. It was done by the great medieval thinkers such as Rav Sadiah Gaon and the Rambam. This sort of writing was done after the Emancipation by Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch zt”l in Germany.
This literature is valuable because it meets the needs of the time in which it is written. However it lacks the eternal quality of “pure” Torah. Since this literature is written to address a particular ideology (be it Aristotelian or German thought) once that ideology has lost its currency the Torah literature written to accommodate it loses its value as well. There will always be a mitzvah to study the opinions of בית שמאי which are not accepted להלכה but there is no longer any need to study the Rambam’s discussions of Aristotle’s physics.
This explains why we may ignore the Chanukah lights if they go out too early. The Chanukah lights represent that Torah-based literature which was composed as a response to the transient secular philosophies of their time.
Happy Chanukah, Stuart Fischman
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinov_(Hasidic_dynasty)
Dinov (Yiddish: דינאָוו, Hebrew: דינוב) is the name of a Hasidic dynasty, descended from Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Spira of Dinov (c. 1783 – 1841), also called “theBnei Yisaschar” after his popular work: בני יששכר [Bene Yiśaśkhar]. Dinov is the Yiddish name of Dynów, a town in southern Poland, in the historic region ofGalicia.[1]
[2] Rav Kook mentions in connection with this the failure of the חשמונאים to hand the leadership of the nation over to the descendants of דוד המלך. See what the Ramban writes about this failure in his commentary to פרשת ויחי.
[3] As far as I know