The Hidden and Revealed Lights of Chanukah
I
Although all Jewish holidays contain some aspect of light, the only one whose main symbol, message and observance is totally connected to light is Chanukah. It is explained in Kabbalah and Chassidut that the lights of Chanukah represent and ultimately reveal the hidden Divine light of creation. This idea is based on many different teachings.
According to tradition, God created the world through ten utterances. The first words spoken by God in a revealed manner created light: “And God said let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated between the light and the darkness” (Genesis 1:3). However, due to the fact that the sun and the moon were not created until the fourth day, the nature of this original light is unclear. The text cannot be referring to physical light, as the celestial bodies had not yet been created. So then, what type of light was it?
Most commentaries describe this light as being metaphysical or Divine light. Rashi cites the Talmudic teaching that God saw that it was not fitting for evil ones to have access to this light; therefore, after initially revealing it on the first day, He hid it and stored it away for the righteous to access in the future (Rashi on Chagigah 12a). This provides us with one of our first general principles about spiritual light that we will see reflected throughout many facets of Chanukah: this light was once revealed, but now is hidden, awaiting its recovery.
It was with this light that Adam and Eve were able to see from one end of the world to the other, although it was taken away from them after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge and were, as a result, exiled from the Garden of Eden (Bereishit Rabbah 11:2). According to Midrash Tanchuma, God revealed to Adam, even before he was endowed with an embodied soul, all the great and righteous people who would issue from him in order to inspire him to be righteous, thus ensuring him that it was they who would access and bring this hidden light down into the world.
Although Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge on day six, the day of their creation, they were not exiled from the Garden until after Shabbat the following day. Therefore, they saw by and basked within this original light for their first ‘thirty-six hours.’ After Shabbat, this light was hidden away, as mentioned, and stored for the righteous to draw down in the future.
There is here an obvious connection between the thirty-six hours that the original light shone upon humanity, and the concept of the thirty-six righteous souls that exist in every generation upon whose deeds the world exists. (For more on the thirty-six righteous ones refer back to the article “In the Merit of Abraham and Sarah,” in the Sukkot section.) This correspondence between the original light and the souls of the righteous illustrates an important point to consider: to really elevate and refine your soul you need to tap into this hidden light, as it is this light which allows one to truly see beneath the surface and into the heart of reality.
When delving into the many different mentions of light in the Torah, an intriguing pattern begins to emerge. The Sages intuited that not only within physical light, but within Divine light as well, there is a deeply paradoxical quality that is revealed repeatedly in commentaries throughout the generations: the nature of light, both physical and spiritual, is that it is always being alternatively revealed and then hidden, or the opposite, and sometimes even simultaneously.
It is especially fascinating to compare these references and teachings with the scientific revelations of the last century, which have forever changed our concept of material reality. Integral to many of these discoveries was a totally new understanding of light and its central place in the essential makeup of time, space, energy and matter. Amazingly enough, the paradoxical and mysterious nature of light that the Sages, mystics and Rabbis discuss at great length has been revealed to be the very nature of light as explained by modern physics!! Light is physical, and it’s not; it’s a particle, and it’s not; it’s a wave, and it’s not; it’s revealed and yet hidden.
The lights of Chanukah embody many of these paradoxical and complimentary aspects of light. (For a more in-depth exploration of these fascinating topics see “The Lights of Chanukah: One Hundred Meditations” and “The Mystical Nature of Light,” by the author.) We will now explore but a few of these aspects.
II
The chanukiah, the eight-branched candelabra that we light on Chanukah, is clearly connected, in shape and in function, to the seven -branched menorah in the Temple. In fact, we light the chanukiah in our homes to commemorate the miraculous lighting of the menorah in the re-dedicated Temple. Just as, according to the Sages, the menorah radiated Divine light, meaning the original light of creation, so too do the lights of the present-day chanukiah. When we light the chanukiah in our homes we are filling them and ourselves with holy light.
However, whereas the menorah had seven branches, corresponding to the seven days of creation (among other things), the chanukiah has eight lights, symbolizing the oil that lasted for eight days, as well as the Messianic energy of redemption, associated in Kabbalah with the number eight. Therefore, we can understand the menorah as representing the world of creation, and the chanukiah as representing the time of redemption. The menorah thus reveals Divine light within nature, while the chanukiah reveals the light of the Divine in history, particularly in its Messianic conclusion.
As mentioned, the Oral Tradition informs us that before the light of the first day was hidden away, it was made available to Adam and Eve for their first thirty-six hours in the Garden of Eden. After they sinned they tried to hide from God, whereupon He confronted them with a single powerful word that has reverberated throughout the ages — ayeka — where are you? This question is of course not posed in the physical sense, as if God did not know where they were. Rather, this question is a much deeper, more pointed existential challenge, imploring them to account for where they were at spiritually in relation to what they had done.
Significantly, the word ayeka (איכה) equals thirty-six, alluding to both the thirty-six hours of Divine light in the Garden, as well as the thirty-six souls of the righteous. As discussed previously, we light a total of thirty-six lights over the course of the eight days of Chanukah, a clear allusion to the infinite Divine light of creation that shone for thirty-six hours in the Garden of Eden. Lighting the Chanukah lights is thus a sign to us, and to the whole world, that this Divine light can be revealed and experienced even now.
This same word, pronounced differently, is the first word and the name in Hebrew of the book of Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av by the light of candles as we sit on the floor in semi-mourning for the destruction of the Temple. Prophetically, in anticipation of the coming destruction of the Temple, the menorah was hidden away where it awaits discovery in the future. Here is another instance of Divine light being first revealed, as it was in the menorah, only to be subsequently hidden. In this case, however, it was not the Divine light itself that was being hidden, as it was in the Garden, now it was the vessel that channeled the Divine light that had become obscured and inaccessible. If at first we lost our direct access to the Divine light in the Garden, with the hiding of the menorah we then lost our connection even to the medium through which we could access that light; meaning that we were, as a result, now two steps removed from the Divine light.
This was the case until the events of Chanukah, which revealed the hidden remnants of the Divine light still present within the midst of our ruined Temple. It was in fact our initiative, faith and actions that reignited the sacred flames of God, Torah and Israel in the world. We learn from this that the Divine light was actually never completely gone, just hidden. All we had to do was look, hope, pray, struggle and act on our instincts purified by the light of Torah and aligned with righteousness; the rest is mystery! Lighting the Chanukah lights each year symbolizes the acknowledgment and acceptance of our role in revealing Divine light in this often very dark world. In this way, we become mediums that channel and reveal the hidden light of creation into the here and now, thereby bringing the light of redemption into the present moment.
Chanukah begins on the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev. Amazingly, the twenty-fifth word of the Torah is the first appearance of the word light (“let there be light”), further connecting the light of creation with the lights of Chanukah. Furthermore, the word Kislev, כסלו, can be divided to read כס-לו, which means “36 (לו) are hidden (כס).” The thirty-six hours that the Divine light shone for Adam and Eve are hidden within the thirty-six candles of Chanukah, which gently urge us to reflect on where we are at in life (ayeka), initiating a process of personal introspection which has the power to transform us in potential into one of the (36) righteous. All this and more ensues on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, as we tap into and reveal that first light expressed in the 25th word of Torah.
Going deeper, we find other ways in which the alternatingly hidden and revealed nature of Divine light is expressed through the history and mystery of Chanukah. For instance, the miraculous flask of oil that was used to light the menorah following the defeat of the Greeks had been ingeniously hidden away before hand and was thus the only oil that had not been made ritually impure by the Greeks. Connecting these points of light that we have mapped out, we see that: first the Divine light is revealed in creation and then hidden; then it is revealed in the Garden and then hidden; then it is revealed in the menorah, and then hidden, only to be revealed again on Chanukah. Based on this, one might say that the nature of the light of the menorah (light of creation) is first revealed and then hidden, while the light of Chanukah, the light of redemption, is first hidden and then revealed. In this sense, the lights of Chanukah are a revelation of the hidden light of the menorah, which now symbolically resides not just in the Temple, but in every Jewish home.
Further considering Chanukah as a unique time to reveal and revel in the hidden light, we even see this idea reflected in how we are instructed to display the light. According to Jewish law, the lights of Chanukah are meant to be lit publicly in order to advertise the miracle. It is in fact the only Jewish ritual we are taught to do in such an open, revealed manner. The root of the word Chanukah is chinuch, which means “education.” Perhaps more than any other mitzvah, the lighting of lights on Chanukah represents the quintessential mission of the Jewish people — to be a “light unto the nations.” The light of Chanukah is not merely a physical light, rather it is a spiritual light that is meant to be shared with and revealed to the entire world. In fact, this spiritual light is the hidden light that is both concealed and revealed by the physical flames of the Chanukah lights.
In conclusion, as discussed above, the clash of philosophies at the time of Chanukah was ultimately between a Greek worldview based on cold logic and the superficialities of physical beauty and pleasure, and the Jewish world view that embraced not only logic, but a higher spiritual reality that is at times paradoxical and beyond human reason. In fact, the word for logic in Hebrew is הגיון, whose last three letters spell יון, Greece. In contrast, it is very interesting to note that although we think of science as being the epitome of rationality and Greek logic, physics today is perplexingly counter-intuitive and illuminates one mysterious paradox of material reality after another, especially in relation to light. This is a beautiful example of the fulfillment of Noah’s blessing to his son Yafet, the archetypal ancestor of Greece: “God shall enlarge Yafet and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27). For now, the findings of science and logic have returned to the mystical teachings of religion and prophecy (For more on Noah’s blessing to Yafet, see the article in this section “The Tenth of Tevet”). This is, in essence, one of the main themes we learn from both Chanukah and the paradoxical nature of light: physicality is actually spiritual; nature is ultimately miraculous; history is guided by forces both hidden and revealed.
One final idea revealing the intrinsically paradoxical nature of the lights of Chanukah is the well-known disagreement between the House of Hillel and the House of Shamai regarding the order of lighting the lights. Hillel taught that we begin with one light and add another light each night until reaching eight on the last night; while Shamai taught just the opposite, to begin with eight lights the first night and to end with one. Although we follow the opinion of Hillel, we are taught regarding this and similar types of arguments throughout the Talmud that, “These and these are the words of the Living God” (Gittin 6b; Eruvin 13b). This type of paradoxical logic, where two diametrically opposed opinions that appear on the surface to be mutually exclusive are both seen to be correct, is a particularly Jewish way of looking at the world. This is the very type of logic that the Greek mind-set could not fathom but which Torah embraces.
As we have seen, light in general, and Chanukah specifically, illuminates the beautiful synergy that exists between a host of seeming opposites: hidden and revealed, physical and spiritual, finite and infinite, logic and paradox. The inter-inclusion of all these concepts into one holistic worldview is what makes Chanukah the special holiday that it is and always will be.
