Study booklet for this lecture
A printable study booklet: one question per page, the Rav’s answer, its source, and a lesson to discuss as a family.
In this lecture, Rav Raphaël Benizri takes a tiny halakhic formula, ner ish u-veito, “a light for a man and his household”, and draws from it an entire vision of the human being: each person possesses a light of his own, an inalienable light that no one can take from him, and the mitzvah of Hanukkah obliges him to display it outside.
Around this light, the study addresses the place of Esav and Yishmael, the difference between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, the four stages of exchange in a human life, and what it means to carry the Divine Name rather than merely claim it.
What this lecture teaches
Hanukkah is ner ish u-veito: a light for each person and for his household. This light belongs to us; it is particular to each one of us. And yet we do not hide it. We display it before everyone, because we want to share it.
The festival opens the messianic era, and yet the world goes on living as usual. Nothing spectacular happens: there is only the recitation of Hallel, the expression of gratitude, and the affirmation of the Divine Name. This discretion is the whole difficulty of Hanukkah, and its whole strength.
What we purify at Hanukkah is the dross of thought. The Sanctuary is cleansed of the philosophies and ways of life that the surrounding civilizations impose. No generation escapes this: we always face Yishmael on one side and Esav on the other.
Esav is not simply “the wicked one”. If we are the chosen people, we are chosen from among peoples with whom we must live side by side. Our task is not to condemn them but to be the point of reference: to live with a certain independence and with dignity, without submitting to any power or any current of thought.
We share thought with everyone; what is ours alone is the way of doing. The Written Torah could be translated and adopted by others. But the Oral Law, the one we develop with its disputes and its challenges, remains the place from which we draw a way of life that belongs only to us.
A mitzvah is performed with the heart, not with the intellect. We do not fulfill it because reason dictates it, but because we want to preserve, at every turn, this exclusive way of life. This is why the kindling, an institution of our sages and not a commandment of the Torah, says something irreplaceable.
The true kings are our sages. For they chose to remain themselves in the study of Torah, to develop it as they felt it from within, and to live it that way, with a twofold feeling of Hallel and hoda’ah.
Hallel is the radiance of light; hoda’ah is gratitude. Hallel comes from a word meaning a ray of light, the brilliance of G-d’s manifestation on earth. Gratitude is the key to everything, because it is the constant struggle against “my strength and the might of my hand”.
There are four stages of exchange in a life, and the lecture describes them one by one. The baby only takes. The growing child agrees to give, but only on condition of receiving. The adolescent swings into idealism and believes he will change the world. The fourth stage, the only mature one, is to be mekabel: to receive in order to be able to pass on.
To perform a mitzvah is to learn that what I do does not depend on what I understand of it. We are often demanding, wanting the meaning of every single thing. The mitzvah teaches exactly the opposite: it frees us from the measure of our own understanding.
The Hanukkah ner means carrying the Name, and being worthy of carrying it. Claiming it is not enough. Yishmael too wears a certain garment, since they are, after all, the children of Avraham; the difference lies elsewhere, in what one has become.
The essence does not alter and does not disappear: it is always there. This is what the light of Hanukkah preserves, that light of creation which appears at the darkest moment of the year, as though the world were going out.
“Yom echad”: “one day”, not “the first day”. It is not an ordinal in a series; it is the day of oneness. From it the Rav draws the whole meaning of this movement of light that follows the end of prophecy in the world: G-d no longer speaks to us in the same way, but He has not withdrawn.
The story of Hanukkah is not written in the canon, and this is no accident. There is indeed a book, but it remains outside Scripture. What has been retained is not the chronicle but the blessing: “eternal life He has planted within us”.
Todah comes from yad, the hand: to give thanks is to hold out a hand. Lending a hand to another and acknowledging what one has received are one and the same gesture. We know that if all the offerings were ever to cease, the thanksgiving offering would remain.
Hashem holds to His Name as we hold to ours. “Act for the sake of Your Name,” says Moshe. This is why these lights are placed outside and above everything: they proclaim a Name that we carry in public.
Four matrices, four exiles: the festival falls when we read the story of the tribes. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah coincides with these Torah portions. What plays out within families decides what will play out in history.
The threshold of the door is the exact place of this covenant. The aggression of the outside world can cross that threshold, but the threshold itself carries the meaning of the light. A person should enter his home while there is light and leave it while there is light.
Each of us carries this inalienable light within, in unequal intensity, but it is there. This is the conclusion of the lecture, and no doubt its most consoling teaching: no one can take it from us, and no one can exempt us from kindling it.
Full transcript of the lecture
Good evening, everyone, and my wishes that your lights shine brightly this Hanukkah. For in the end, Hanukkah is ner ish u-veito, “a light for a man and his household”. Ner ish u-veito means that it is each person’s own light, displayed before everyone. We do not hide it; we want to share it with everyone. And this light belongs to us; it is particular to us. Let me explain. What matters in this path of Hanukkah, which belongs to a stretch of history that opens the messianic era, is that the world goes on living normally. Nothing special happens, except for the recitation of Hallel, the expression of gratitude, hoda’ah, and the affirmation of the Divine Name.
Yes, when we came out of Egypt, we gave thanks to the Eternal […]: what did He do on that day? On that day […], when You brought us out of Egypt, when You tore us from the grip, the dominion, of Mitzrayim or of Yishmael. And we were worthy, at that moment, of receiving the Torah. At Hanukkah, we say in the thanksgiving prayer that after purifying the Sanctuary of all, let us say today, the dross of thought, whether of philosophy or of the way of life that the civilizations impose on us… And no generation escapes this, because we are always confronted with Yishmael on one side and with Esav on the other.
In truth, we have faced four exiles, as we well know. Mitzrayim is the matrix of all these exiles, but Edom, that is, Rome, is the one that encompasses them all. Then, whether they took the form of the hostility of Babylon, of exile, or of Greece, this world of Greece which is the world of Esav… Let us not forget that of Esav it is said ki tzayid be-fiv, “for game was in his mouth” (Bereshit 25:28). We always tend to take him as simply bad, as wicked. But no. If we are the chosen people, we are chosen from among peoples with whom we must live side by side, with whom we must exist, except that we must be the point of reference. What does being the reference mean? The halakhah of this people.
We are distinguished by a certain independence of life, with dignity. We do not want to submit to any power or any current of thought; we want to remain ourselves. And we remain ourselves in the realm of halakhah, because the realm of thought we share with everyone. But halakhah, the way of doing, belongs to us alone. Now, what does the mitzvah of Hanukkah consist of? Kindling the light. It was instituted by our sages; it is not a commandment of the Torah. There is this institution of our sages, in which the image of the Hanukkah light is imprinted. This light is the indelible essence that belongs to us and that no one can truly take away from us.
They tried to appropriate Torah she-bikhtav, the Written Torah. We know very well that through translation certain religions adopted it. But the Oral Law, the one we develop, lives in the heart, not in the intellect. The intellect is the level of thought, which, as I said earlier, we share with everyone. […] It is done with the heart, not with the mind: not because reason told us so, but simply because we want, at all costs, to preserve for ourselves this exclusive way of living. For what is the Oral Torah compared with the Written Torah?
The Oral Torah is the one we have developed, the one that gives rise to controversies, discussions and challenges, and from it we must find, we must draw out, the way of life that is ours and inalienable. So this is what the festival of Hanukkah comes down to, apart from what we all know; we all know the story and I will not go back over it. Our sages instituted it, our chakhamim. Man malkhei? Rabbanan: “Who are the kings? The sages.” They are the kings, the true kings. Why? Because they chose to remain themselves in the study of Torah and to develop it as they felt it from within, to live it as they felt it from within. And with what? With a feeling, or rather two.
Hallel ve-hoda’ah. Hallel is the radiance of light. Hallel comes from the word for a ray of light; it is the brilliance of G-d’s manifestation on earth. And hoda’ah is the expression of gratitude. Yes, this expression of gratitude is truly the key to the matter, namely that not everything we hold comes from us. We have received in order to give. You know that there are four stages of exchange in life. The child, the baby, only takes; he takes and takes, and that is all he knows. And when he is not given anything, he cries. There are people whose whole life follows only this philosophy.
Then there is the second stage, when the child grows. He is capable of giving, but on condition. You give him a sweet and he will do this; you threaten him, you deprive him of this or that, and then he will agree to give you something in exchange. The exchange is conditional, governed by a calculation of self-interest. The third stage is idealism: the adolescent who believes he is going to change the world, and who, as he sees it, does nothing but give, give, give. He is ready to give you everything without receiving anything. But that cannot be sustained; it is only a passing phase. Then there is the fourth stage. The fourth stage is to be mekabel: to receive in order to be able to transmit, to be able to give. And that, in sum, is how the Jewish people understands its spiritual life: it received the Torah, but it will not keep it exclusively, jealously and selfishly for itself; it will be able to share it with everyone.
This is what is called hoda’ah […], the expression of gratitude. The expression of gratitude lies in this struggle against the current of kochi ve-otzem yadi, “my strength and the might of my hand” (Devarim 8:17): it is my strength that achieves everything, the work is entirely mine. And our sages were not ashamed to call these tendencies azut panim: arrogance, an arrogant attitude, defiant behavior. Az panim le-Gehinnom, “the brazen-faced is destined for Gehinnom” (Avot 5:20). Whoever lives by this, his life is a hell, because there comes a moment when one can no longer boast of this arrogance, of this self-assurance. When our strength begins to age and to abandon us, we need the other; we realize that we depend on the other. And then? When we realize that we depend on the other, what expression comes to us? Todah!
Gratitude. Boshet panim, a sense of shame: there is restraint, there is decency, there is modesty. Let us now bring all this to the festival of Hanukkah, as it bears on our own education and our own way of seeing things. It happens in life that we are demanding, for many reasons, seeking the meaning of every single thing, unwilling to admit that some things are independent of us, things we cannot control or manage. When we perform a mitzvah, this is the lesson we learn: what I do has nothing to do with the meaning I give to this mitzvah; I do it simply because the Torah prescribed it, and because our sages developed its practice out of the way they lived the Torah. For all too often, sadly, we have studied the Torah and learned the Torah, but we have not lived it. It does not burn within us, it does not take hold of us; it is a garment.
As for this garment, […] Yishmael too, for after all they are the children of Avraham. We will not ignore them, we will not despise them, we will not reject them, but we will light their path through our practice […], through the way we live the Written Law. And the way we live the Written Law is the Oral Law, because each person has his own light within him, and his own light is inalienable. When we kindle the Hanukkah lights, we must recognize that this ner is a mitzvah, that this light itself is a mitzvah. What is a mitzvah?
A mitzvah is the name of something. You know that the word mitzvah is broken down, its first letters mem and tzadi, by means of at-bash. For there is always a permutation of the letters of the alphabet according to the mode of reading: either replacing alef with tav and bet with shin, or alef with lamed and bet with mem, pairing with the middle letters. And then we have another reading of the Torah. Now, when we replace the mem and the tzadi of mitzvah with their counterparts in the at-bash alphabet, the permutation of alef with tav and bet with shin, we find Yud-Heh. Mem-tzadi corresponds to Yud-Heh, the divine attribute, the [hidden] side, and Vav-Heh is the revealed side.
There is a hidden side, which is clothed, and another side, Vav-Heh, which is revealed. The mitzvah means carrying the four-letter Name, Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh; it means claiming this Name. But more than claiming this Name, it means being worthy of carrying it oneself. Being worthy of carrying it oneself means making of oneself an essence […]. Now, an essence does not alter and does not disappear; it is always there. It is said that the anointing oil that Moshe made was used to anoint the vessels of the Sanctuary and to anoint the kings, yet it did not diminish; it remained the same. What does this mean? That the essence never disappears and never alters. And we seek to keep this essence. This essence is in the light of the first creation, for what G-d creates on the first day is light. And that light is not the light we have; it is a light that could illuminate the world and pierce through from one end of the universe to the other.
G-d stored it away for the righteous in the time to come, la-tzaddikim le-atid lavo. For the time to come; that is to say, this light exists in each one, in each righteous person. It is there. We need only bring it to life and give it the chance to shine in a time that is neither the time of day nor of night. For the moment when the Hanukkah lights are kindled is the moment when the sun seems to have withdrawn, yet it has left in the world a halo of light that precedes the night, that precedes the darkness. And it is in this halo of light that we kindle our own light, as if we were placed there by that divine gesture which separates light from darkness: “Yom echad”, that is, the day […]. “Yom echad” is “a day one”.
It is not a cardinal day, it is not “first”. […] It does not presuppose a second; it is independent, it stands by itself. You know very well that our sages refer to this yom echad as the day of Kippur, which allows every being to stop being conditioned by time, by the year, by life, and to step out of that time and make himself a new spirit and a new heart. That is the movement of Hanukkah. It comes in the wake of the extinction of prophecy: [G-d] no longer speaks to us. There is no longer […]. At Purim there is still the Megillah. But at Hanukkah we are not even recounting the story, as we do at Pesach through the Haggadah.
[…] to recall this commentary: Mi khamokha ba-elim Hashem, “Who is like You among the mighty, Hashem?” (Shemot 15:11). But how can one draw a comparison […]? The sages say that this is not how it should be read. One must read Mi khamokha ba-ilmim: “Who is like You among the silent”, when He turns a deaf ear, when He does not manifest Himself openly, when He leaves to us the care of managing His world. And indeed, the story of Hanukkah lo nitan le-hikatev, “was not given to be written”. It is not written. There is a book of the Hasmoneans, but it lies outside the biblical canon. No: it was not given to be written. What remains are those who are malkhei rabbanan, the sages who are kings, those who bear these dignities of G-d, kol ha-nikra bi-shmi ve-li-khvodi berativ, “everyone who is called by My Name, whom I created for My glory” (Yeshayahu 43:7). They are the dignitaries of the Divine Name, who bear the kavod, the glory, of the Eternal, and this is the important element. That kavod is no small thing: it is the dignity of the one who bears it. Malkhei rabbanan: in principle, this belongs to royalty. You say hod malkhut, majesty. Hod malkhut is not an inheritance, it is not something you pass down from father to son like a dynasty. No, it is yours; you are the one who acquires it. You are a king from the moment the Torah you carry is no longer the prey of all those who seek to destroy you, to annihilate you, to challenge you.
It is the Torah you carry in your heart. Indeed, in the second blessing [over the Torah] we say ve-chayei olam nata be-tokhenu, “and eternal life He has planted within us”. So what is this eternal life? It is Torah she-be’al peh, the Oral Torah. And the festival is the celebration of this taking hold of the Written Law and of its transformation into Oral Law, so that they become […]. That is the meaning of these lights: the bayit, the home, that we have built draws its existence from this alone.
And when we cannot, when we are not in a position to display it outside, then we still kindle it inside the house, for ourselves, because that is what matters. And here we come to le-shimkha ha-gadol selah, “to Your great Name, forever”: we will give thanks forever, for all eternity. We know that if all the offerings were to disappear, the korban todah, the thanksgiving offering, would remain: gratitude, the act of giving thanks. If all prayers were to disappear, we would still keep, of all the prayers, the prayer of thanksgiving. You know that in the Shemoneh Esreh, the prayer we say in intimacy with the Holy One, blessed be He, there is hoda’ah at the end; at the very end, we arrive at hoda’ah.
Ha-tov shimkha, “Your Name is good”: we arrive at hoda’ah. Modim anachnu lakh, “we thank You”, we give thanks to You. And we are also in the realm of birkat ha-mazon, Grace after Meals, the only blessing prescribed by the Torah. Todah comes from yad, the hand: it means lending a hand to the other. Lending a hand means saying: I need you more than you need me. And consequently there is an affirmed solidarity with everyone, even those who are in the darkness of night, grounded in this inalienable essence that we have preserved. For the Holy One, blessed be He, also holds to His Name, when we [plead] le-ma’an shemekha, “for the sake of Your Name”, as Moshe did […]: Your Name must not be [profaned].
It must not be contested. Since all that You have created, li-khvodi berativ, “for My glory I created it”, the dignity that You created, and this is not easy, well then, continue. So it is no coincidence that we celebrate the festival of Hanukkah just as we are studying the appearance of Yishmael in Avraham’s house, the appearance of Esav in Yitzchak’s house, the appearance of Yaakov’s children with Yosef. Yes, because there, truly, the hostility of Yishmael […] reappears in another form in Esav. But what is most dangerous is that it appears within Yaakov’s family, and that there the children do not sense […] that these children come from four matrices. And so we have the four matrices of exile, and so on.
These four matrices are not Jewish matrices; they are foreign matrices. […] There, the unity of the family, the unity of the Jewish people, [comes about] only through […] this descent into Egypt. And peace, shalom, depends on this, whether we like it or not. It is from within our families that radiance can spread outward, because Yishmael, Esav, and Amalek too, dwell within us in one way or another. Today this is easy to perceive. And when we do manage to remain ourselves, with this light of Hanukkah, this ner at the door of our homes, in our families, with a will to engage with an outside world that assails us from every side…
This aggression can cross the threshold of the door. But the threshold of the door carries this essence of the light. And [our sages taught]: Le-olam yikanes adam be-khi tov ve-yetze be-khi tov, “A person should always enter by daylight and leave by daylight” (Talmud): a person must enter his home while there is light and must leave his home while there is light. These are […] of this inalienable light that each person has within himself. It does not have the same intensity in everyone, but it is there. And on that note, […]. — “Thank you very much, Rav Benizri. I have a small question. It is a little outside, well, it is within the theme of Hanukkah, but a little outside what you have said.”
The Books of Maccabees, I and II.
Find all of Rav Raphaël Benizri’s lectures on Hanukkah: Hanukkah — Pensées Juives.
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