I. The Hanukkah Guest [1]

 

In a brief teaching related by his grandson, the Baal Shem Tov (also known by the acronym BeShT) proclaims that the essence of the guest, אורח in Hebrew, is אור ח, the “light of eight,” or the Divine Light. [2] In the Kabbalistic imagination, the number seven represents earthly completeness (as in the seven days of Creation) while the number eight (denoted by the eighth letter in the alphabet, chet, ח) — symbolizes transcendence, that which lies beyond this world. “Thus Abraham received guests,” the Besht taught, “for chet is the World to Come (The Divine World), like a guest that is arriving.” To welcome the guest, to open one’s home to the Other, is to create an encounter with the Divine Light that the guest embodies. 

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Around this time of year, the notion of “the light of eight” evokes a different image: the eight candles of the Hanukkah lamp. Many reasons are given for why we kindle these lights: in memory of the tiny vial of oil that lit up the rededicated temple in Jerusalem for eight days; as tribute to the military victory of Judah Maccabee over Antiochus IV and the Seleucid army; as a restaging of the drama of the first Human who rejoiced for eight days after the winter solstice, relieved as the amount of daylight of each day began to grow again. [3] We are instructed to put the lamp outside the entrance of our homes, broadcasting the triumphant message of the holiday in the most public forum. [4] 

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Nowhere among these etiologies, however, is the Beshtian message regarding a positive orientation to the Guest / Other. In fact, more often than not Hanukkah is interpreted as an affirmation of the superiority of Jewish particularism, especially when commemorating the military victory of the Jews over the Greeks, the paradigmatic Other, who are depicted as emblematic of the social ills of the moment (secular assimilation, philosophy, hedonism, and so on). Other times the militarism itself is the value, manifested in the glorification of Jewish power and bloody sacrifices at the rededicated altar of national sovereignty. [5] In this framework, we look at the candles of the Hanukkah lamp and see our own light casting away darkness, and are inspired to do the same to the tempting darkness of the Other – by force if necessary. [6] 

 

The pitfalls of this prevalent reading are deeply damaging. The psychological harm of seeing enemies around every corner transforms the national Jewish narrative into an eternal conflict against oppositional world powers. Followed to its end, it finds the fullness of its principles expressed in a defensive stance towards the outside world, always ready to meet it with force. [7] It is the exclusive, even chauvinistic embrace of our own way of being in the never-ending struggle to protect the fragile jug of pure oil against any present or future contamination. When this oppositional ideology succeeds, the Other is kept far away. And in moments of outsized Jewish power, they are shackled under oppressive structures for fear of unleashing their contagion.

 

II. Modern Jewish Approaches: Rav Kook and Rav Shagar

 

To be sure, not every interpretation of Hanukkah requires such a stark rejection of the Other. Given the inevitability of the encounter with the Other ushered in by modernity, several important modern Jewish thinkers advocated for a different approach to the “wisdom of the Greeks.” Two such figures, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) and Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (1949-2007, often known as “Rav ShaGaR”), look to the biblical portrayal of Noah’s sons Japheth and Shem, the imagined ancestors of Mediterranean and Semitic peoples [8], as an alternate paradigm for the relationship between Jews and Greeks; between “pure” Jewish content and the wisdom of the broader world. They spotlight in particular Noah’s blessing to his sons in that “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem,” (Genesis 9:27) glossed in the Talmud as a prediction that the language and the beauty of Japheth will enter into the home of Shem. [9]

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For Rav Kook, this meant that Jewish wisdom need not worry about incorporating or expressing itself in the language of secular philosophy, since the foreign vessel could not contaminate the holy content. [10] On the other hand, Rav Shagar, following Rebbe Nahman of Breslov (1772-1810), insisted upon the potential of integrating foreign spiritual technologies – poetry, fables, meditation – into a Jewish theological discourse, acknowledging the inherent spiritual potency of these tools and what they may unlock for Jewish life. [11] Both approaches are emblematic of the attitudes of twentieth-century Religious-Zionist thinkers towards the outside world, ranging from toleration to acceptance regarding certain elements of foreign culture and ideology, while maintaining a strong foothold in Jewish intellectual and spiritual superiority. 

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From this perspective, the light of the Hanukkah candles carries a different message. The glow cast by the light from outside the home is no longer antagonistic towards the outside world. The direction of the illumination is instead reversed, an acknowledgement of the hidden sparks within the surrounding darkness and a charge to draw upon them to brighten the inside of the home. The triumphalist binary is overridden in favor of a less threatening relationship with the Other, recognizing the positive influence the Other may have on Jewish life. 

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This Religious-Zionist framework, however, falls short of the ideal laid out by the Baal Shem Tov in his depiction of the treatment of the Guest. The Other is treated less like a guest and more like a business partner; the encounter is regarded as highly transactional and valued only for its utility. An underlying suspicion of the Other still remains, overcome only when the benefits outweigh the consequences – the proverbial yes, but is it good for the Jews? benchmark. The BeShT, who lifts up Abraham as his exemplar of hospitality, demands a higher standard. [12] 

 

III. Levinas, the Candles, and the Other

 

Here is where the thought of a different thinker, the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), offers a different path forward. Though Levinas might not have been familiar with these positions, he would likely have protested both the limitations and the overreach of Rav Kook and Rav Shagar’s stances on the basis of his own understanding of the ethical orientation to the Other. Throughout his philosophical writings, Levinas is adamant about the importance of preserving the distinct identity of the Other. The Other is not something to absorb into a universal whole, nor something that represents a new edition of the Self, but rather must remain utterly separate. For Levinas, the obligation towards the Other is characterized by a radical hospitality, fully welcoming the Other into one’s home, at times even requiring giving the Other the bread out of one’s mouth or the clothing off one’s back. This encounter does not treat the Other as a tool to be deployed (as in Rav Kook), nor as a stimulus for the transformation of Jewish thought (as in Rav Shagar), but to coexist in a profound encounter that respects the interiority of the Other. As such, one can imagine Levinas reading Genesis 9:27 and, upon arriving at the notion that Japheth will dwell in the tents of Shem, responding with a phrase characteristic of Hasidic teachings: “ ‘Dwell’ – daika [literally].” [13] 

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A Levinasian gloss on the light of the Hanukkah lamp offers a poignant articulation of the same message. Though the practice was initially to place the lamp outside one’s door, the danger of public identification as a Jew shifted the recommended location inside the home, which is still the dominant practice today. [14] In their interpretations, Rabbis Kook and Shagar seek to reclaim the significance of the original mitzvah. A Levinasian read, by contrast, leans into the symbolism of the current practice in no less subversive a manner. From this perspective, the ethical message of lighting the Hanukkah candles inside our homes is a call to welcome the Other into our dwelling without expectation or recourse to domination or utility. What was once fear of the Other is now an embrace of the Other, in full recognition of what the Other is owed. Moreover, as the traditional practice dictates, we do not use the candles for our own usage or exploitation, but solely to gaze on them. [15] Gazing upon the light of the Hanukkah candles, it is as if we are looking directly into the face of the Other.

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This expression of Levinas’s position aligns better with the BeShTian ideal. By welcoming the Other – without infringing on their Other-ness – we acknowledge that they are “situated in a dimension of height, in the ideal, the Divine, and through [one’s] relation to the Other, [one is] in touch with God.” [16] For Levinas, we have no access to God as mediated through our own existence; it is only through the encounter with the Other that we commune with the Divine. The Guest / אורח, Levinas’s Other, is the embodiment of the Divine light, the אור ח, the light of eight that illuminates the home, just as the Baal Shem Tov taught. 

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The call of the Hanukkah candles is a reminder that we do not have all the light ourselves, that we must welcome in the Other to gain access to the fullness of the Divine Light. This year, when we light the Hanukkah candles, will we see the face of the Other reflected in them? Will we think of the Others in our midst and commit to doing all we can to welcome them into our home? Will we reckon, truly reckon, with what we owe them?

 

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Endnotes:​

[1] A nod to the author’s favorite Hanukkah book as a child, The Chanukah Guest, by Eric Kimmel. 

[2] Sefer Ba'al Shem Tov, Vayera 2:1.

[3] BT Avoda Zara 8a.

[4] BT Shabbat 22a.

[5] Shira Makin, “How the Hanukkah Myth Gave Rise to Israeli Toxic Masculinity, Haaretz, December 28, 2019, and Rabbi Jill Jacobs, “Chanukah Has Had Jews Arguing About Jewish and Israeli Military Force for Centuries,” Slate, December 10, 2023. 

[6] For a critique of the projection of good and evil onto the light/dark binary, see Rabbi Lexie Botzum’s essay “The Luminous Dark,” published in the All That’s Left Chanukah Reader, December 7, 2023. 

[7] In shifting the focus of the holiday from the military victory to the miraculous nature of the oil, the rabbis of the Talmud may have been sensitive to this critique as well. This is also apparent in their choice to choose Zechariah 4 as the Haftarah for Shabbat Chanukah, not just for its depiction of Zechariah’s vision of a golden seven-branched Menorah, but for the culminating phrase: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit—said GOD of Hosts.” (Zech 4:6). For a further analysis of anarchist rabbi Avraham Chein’s (1877-1957) essay on the rabbinic discomfort with centering the celebration of power in the observance of Hanukkah, see Aron Wander’s essay “ ‘We Do Not Immortalize a Catastrophe’: On Chanukah, Violence, and History” in the All That’s Left Chanukah Reader.

[8] See John Day, “The Table of Nations: The Geography of the World in Genesis 10.”

[9] BT Megillah 9b. The context for this sugya is the discussion of the legitimacy of the translation of the Torah into Greek, and the possibility of its translation into other languages.  

[10] Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Eder Hayakar (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1967), 52. 

[11] Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, “On Translation and Living in Multiple Worlds: A Sermon for Hanukkah,” published in ​She’arit HaEmunah (​2014) and is an amalgam of material from two chapters of Shagar’s book on Hanukkah, ​LeHa’ir et HaP’tachim (2014). 

[12] See Radak on Genesis 21:33, who cites a midrash on the phrase “He planted a tamarisk / eshel in Beer Sheba” that suggests that “eshel” is an acronym: the three letters used to write the word in Hebrew are the initials used for food, drink and shelter, a standard of hospitality which Abraham modeled for the residents of Beer Sheba. Radak concludes his comment with the statement that in order to fulfill the Abrahamic virtue of hospitality one must provide the three ingredients represented by the three letters in the word eshel.

[13] This term is the Aramaic cognate of the Hebrew term “davka,” used in Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts to indicate when a particular word has been used intentionally to communicate a specific and sometimes overly literal interpretive resonance where a different synonym would have sufficed. 

[14] BT Shabbat 21b, Shulchan Aruch OC 671.

[15] BT Shabbat 22a, Shulchan Aruch OC 673:1. This restriction has been canonized liturgically in the passage traditionally recited after lighting the candles: “During all the eight days of Chanukah these lights are sacred, and we are not permitted to use them at all, but we are only to look at them.”

[16] Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand, 17.