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Candle lighting is at 4:30 pm on Friday, November 21. This week's Torah portion is Parashat Chayei Sara. Havdalah starts 60 minutes after sundown, at 5:47 pm on Saturday, November 22. Courtesy of hebcal.com |
Shedding light on HannukahBy Rabbi Alan Yuter According to the letter of Jewish law, the Hannukah candle must be kindled after dark, in or by one's residence, after tset ha kochavim for half an hour. The length of half an hour is ad shetichleh regel min ha- shuq, in Talmudic times this half an hour was measured by the time it takes after dark for the streets to be empty of walkers. Today, several changes, or reforms have taken place. We treat the period of tichleh regel min ha-shuq as a rule of law, or the time that the commandment to light the candle light may be preformed, as the law when the law only gives us one half an hour. While one may light a candle at midnight, the blessing should probably be avoided, the lenient rulings notwithstanding. After all, when blessing obligations are in doubt, the right recourse is to leave them out. According to Jewish law, there is not commandment to light the candle in synagogue, in spite of the license provided by R. Karo in Shulhan Aruch. If we follow the ruling of the R. Caro, and light a candle in the synagogue with a blessing, unauthorized by the Talmud, we are following the tradition of culture and not the Tradition of the Oral Torah. We who believe in religious integrity act like the Maccabees. We obey God, but while we respect culture, we do not defer to culture. Earlier generations can make mistakes. R. Abraham ben David believed that tradition is what we inherited from our parents; Bet Yosef [Hoshen Mishpat 25] believed the tradition is based on the best reading of the canon. It is this second to which we are committed. After all, Torah is given to all of us. The Tradition of the Union for Traditional Judaism is the Tradition of Torah as recorded in its canonical sacred library, scientifically parsed. Just as R. Caro, the author of the Shulhan Aruch, applied lower text criticism to determine the right text of the canon in order to establish the correct way to obey God, we disagree with R. Caro respectfully by applying his method. In his encyclopedic Bet Yosef, R. Yosef explains how and why he reached his decision, allowing us to travel the maze of his amazing mind. By studying our past with integrity, our observance sanctifies us because we are obeying the Divine command and are free of social conventions that are adopted by convention and adapted without thought or review. |