Menorah

Badge of holy honor, symbol of political persecution, or Erotic emblem? Vilified and valorized, the best known contemporary Jewish symbol is not as old as you’d think, but ancient enough to carry multiple meanings. How did this mystical medieval shield of magical powers become the emblem of national pride? Join us to learn more about the Star of David through the lens of the surprising theories of Gershon Scholem, the greatest scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th Century.

With a match in her hands she lights one candle after another. All the seven candles begin to quiver. The flames blaze into mother’s face. As though an enchantment were falling on her, she lowers her eyes. Slowly, three times in succession, she encircles the candles with both her arms: she seems to be taking them into her heart. As with the lit candles her weekday worries melt away. She blesses the candles. She whispers quiet benedictions through her fingers and they add heat to the flames. Mother’s hands over the candles shine like the tablets of the Decalogue over the Holy Ark.

Bella Chagall , Burning Lights

Marc Chagall, Lights

“Especially at this season, when lights were miraculously lit for Israel even though they did not have enough oil, there remains light even now to help us, with the aid of these Hanukkah candles, to find that hidden light within.”

Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger 1847-1905)

“The Hanukkah candles are here reinterpreted as a spiritual symbol. They are the light of the mitzvot by which we search out our inner selves. We are looking for the hidden divine light within ourselves; the mitzvot are light-seeking candles, instruments given to us to aid us in that search.”

Rabbi Arthur Green, commenting on the Sefat Emet

Hanerot Hallalu: Why am I so taken with this phrase?

I think because, in a world where everything and everyone seems so relentlessly at risk of being turned into a transaction, Hanerot Hallalu reminds us with a few simple words: Be careful. Not everything has to be useful.

So here is my personal meditation on Hanerot Hallalu for this Hanukkah:

Be careful. Not everything has to be useful.

More than that.

You are not permitted to look at these candles with hungry eyes.

Don’t ask what they can do.

Don’t ask what you can do.

Don’t ask.

These candles are useless.

Their light is not for

Reading

Working

Making

Doing

Selling.

These candles that we light are holy.

Kindling them is the easy part.

But if we linger

Relent

Just look

With eyes resting

Searching for nothing

Only words of gratitude and praise on our lips

We too will be kindled, useless and holy.

Amen.

These Candles That We Light: A Meditation on Sacred Uselessness By Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld

In between antiquity and our time are generations that preserved, destroyed, loved, hated, ignored, restored and lived with the texts and artifacts that I study…In studying the Menorah, the list of sources is very, very long – this being the longest continuously used religious symbol in western culture. This object, and the resultant “symbol”, stretch back to the ancient Near East, more than a millennium before the Christian era (that is, more than 3000 years ago), and forward to our own time. The Arch of Titus itself has been a part of the conversation for nearly 2000 years.

I spend considerable time with images that are called today “symbols”, or visual codes - “icons” in ancient Greek and in contemporary computer parlance - through which cultures try to express their complexities in simple forms that can be seen. The Christian cross is one religious simple, the Islamic Crescent another, and the Menorah - the most ancient of the three - a third.

Especially since the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and even before - the study of symbols has been a preoccupation of scholars – particularly in the world transformed by photography, then video, and now computer imaging. Symbols have been seen as forms that pre-exist culture and religion, as primordial windows into all that is human. If only we could develop the right tools to unlock their meaning, the language of symbols, scholars thought, it would be possible to discover truths about a shared humanity that transcend the barriers set before us by modern notions of religion, race and nationalism.

Steven Fine, The Menorah From the Bible to Modern Israel

The menorah is a symbol that was absorbed from the outside culture but became a primary channel of Jewish teaching and values. This development itself illuminates the Jewish way through history...In the course of this journey, Judaism has sometimes absorbed symbols and religious icons from outside cultures, and has also been open to the reshaping of its own symbols. The menorah is a particularly illuminating example of this process.

The menorah was widely present in civilizations contemporary with the Bible...

But the menorah was absorbed into Jewish culture because it represented a central and most important image of the Jewish religion: the Tree of Life, the base being the trunk, and the branches, the arboreal coverage. Therefore, the menorah took on the symbolic meanings of two distinct manifestations of this central Jewish image.

First, life is planted in God. Life is not an atomistic physical power. Rather, everywhere life is found, it grows in—and is nurtured by—the unseen Divine Ground. Second, the menorah evokes the actual Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden which, “if one eats from it, one will live forever” (Genesis 3:22). This is a harbinger of the ultimate and most visionary idea of Judaism, that we can overcome death.

...Sometimes, a symbol is so rich that it grows in usage through the ages. Out of perennial usage, the symbol becomes more deeply embedded. Out of multiple applications, it speaks in new and different ways in different cultures over time. So it has been with the menorah.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg A Tale of Three Menorahs

Dr. Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni, pioneers in the scientific study of nature in biblical sources, found a native plant which resembles the description of the menorah. Their son, Nogah Hareuveni, founder of Neot Kedumim, Israel’s Biblical Gardens, writes that Moriah (Salvia Palestina), when pressed on one plane mirrors the menorah with three stems emerging from each side of a central stem. The Salvia also has knobs (gallnuts) which grow right from the stem, precisely like the knobs (kaftorim) of the menorah. Thus, the instructions to build the golden menorah were not created from imagination, but based on a real plant that grows in the Land of Israel.

Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz, The Botanical Menorah

Though the religious symbolism of the menorah is consistent with Jewish mythology and ideology, the archeological record suggests that the significance of this symbol was influenced by surrounding religions of the region, which would have preceded the conception of the menorah...Tree worship is common in religions throughout the world, and may have held particular significance in the Middle East due to their limited distribution... In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the Tree of Life, which Jews are familiar with from the story of the Garden of Eden, is based on a Mesopotamian religious myth.

Mesopotamian depictions of the Tree of Life resemble the menorah, leading many scholars to speculate that the design of the menorah was influenced by Mesopotamian iconography…

Ancient Semitic peoples, who lived in what is now modern-day Israel, Syria and Iraq, had a pantheon that included a goddess called Asherah, or sometimes called Athirat or Elat. Asherah was a fertility goddess, and believed to be the mother of the gods. Asherah is described in cuneiform documents from the first Babylonian dynasty as the bride of the king of heaven, and a mistress of sexual vigor and rejoicing. An Ugaritic text describes Asherah as the bride of El, creator of the world. Asherah was often depicted as a tree. At an archeological site in the Sinai called Kuntillet Ajrud, a drawing was found of a lion with a menorah-like tree with ibexes on either side, bearing the inscription “Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah.”

Some scholars speculate that an asherah was a living, pruned sacred tree used during Canaanite cultic practices...Scholars also speculate that there may have been a pruned almond tree used in cultic practices dedicated to the goddess, and the menorah is a symbol of that specific tree.

At some point in history, the ancient Jews took the deeply religious symbolism that was already present in the region and amalgamated it into the abstracted form of the menorah. Do these pre-Judaic influences somehow invalidate our culture? To the contrary, the archeological record only confirms that the symbolism and mythology of our culture are truly ancient. More importantly, the ancient Israelites did not live in a vacuum. They lived in a complex and cosmopolitan world, much like today. We were not alone, we coexisted with other diverse peoples and ideologies...When we light the candles of our chanukiyot this holiday, we continue a legacy that is thousands of years old. And that is cause to celebrate.

Ben Leyland Precursors to Menorah are Many

Hebrew reserves the word "hanukkiah" for Hanukkah candelabras – a word added to the dictionary by none other than Hemda Ben-Yehuda, wife of the resurrector of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. In 1897, writing in the Hebrew newspaper Ha’Zvi, she mentions that she had picked up the name from Sephardi neighbors who used "hanukkiah" as opposed to "menorah," as was the custom among most European Jews.

Israel HaYom, "A Sense of Continuity"

Maxim and Gavriel Shamir, Proposal for the Emblem of the State of Israel, 1948

After we decided to use the menorah, we looked for another element and concluded that olive branches are the most beautiful expression of the Jewish people's love of peace. The leaves are also a very decorative element. Now we faced the question of which menorah to use... We decided on a stylized version rather than an ancient form. Our intention was to create a modern emblem, without Jewish traditional symbols. We told ourselves that the menorah itself is an ancient symbol and its very presence on the seal constitutes a traditional element. But its shape should be modern.

(A. P., "How the Emblem of the State of Israel was Born," interview with the Shamir brothers, Ma'ariv, February 16, 1949).