The light of betwixt and between

Last year Chanukah time, we lit candles and shared dinner with friends as we strummed guitars into the night, mask free, carefree, and oblivious that these kinds of gatherings with people outside our family unit would become a rare and even dangerous undertaking.

This year, we will be lighting Chanukah candles with our immediate family. If we do connect with friends or family, it will be with caution. The one common thread that connects our lighting pre-COVID-19 to now, is that our chanukiah will still be placed at a window, at the outermost edge of our home. Yet, robbed of a social ease that we all took for granted, we might want to consider that even before COVID-19, many of us lived in bubbles – racial bubbles, political echo-chambers, and socio-economic comfort zones.

Chanukah as a holiday is about a dance between public, communal space and the space of the home. While some mitzvoth in Judaism require the community, other mitzvoth thrive in the private domicile of home and hearth. Chanukah is one of those few mitzvoth which we might say is a practice at the border between the community and the home. We light candles in our home, but we light them at that fine edge so that the outsider can peep in and see the candles of Chanukah. For this reason, we are supposed to place the chanukiah on the window ledge that overlooks the street, sharing our story with the world, lighting inside for those outside.

In 2020, the border between inside and outside acquired renewed significance. As infection rates peaked in South Africa, a doorway became a potent type of crossing over from the safe space of the home to the potentially contagious outside world. On returning home, we left our shoes, our outside clothes, and our shopping bags at the door, and rushed inside to wash hands and decontaminate.

In ancient mythologies and even in Jewish practice, the space on the border between the inside and the outside is regarded as liminal, an in-between space. We place mezuzot on our doors to cultivate awareness of G-d as we transition through space. During a time of pandemic, this space between the inside and outside resounds more deeply. The people on the “inside” of our “pod” might feel safer, and the further we move into the world, the more at risk we become of exposure. We become scrupulous about mask-wearing out in the world and conversely, relax a little more at home.

While many of us bemoan the new normal and the loss of what was, we might want to challenge ourselves to think about the ways in which prior to COVID-19, we already lived in confined spaces and limited our interactions with others – those who felt different from us, those with whom we nursed a ferrible (grudge).

The rabbis in Tractate Shabbat seemed to have an acute awareness of how the world of outside and inside are inextricably linked to each other. In a discussion of how long Chanukah candles should remain alight, an ancient source teaches that the Chanukah candles need to be lit from the time the sun goes down until “all foot traffic had returned home from the market”. In a further explication of this, Rabbah bar bar Channah says it wasn’t just until the market place had closed, but until the last of the last, the tarmudai had gone home from the market. Rashi, the 11th century exegete, explains that the tarmudai were a (non-Jewish) people who sold wood at the market. They were the very last to leave, says Rashi, because people would return from their day and on wanting to light a fire in their homes, would find they were out of wood! Just as we might send our partner to the garage shop to buy some matches late at night, people would leave their homes a second time to buy wood from the tarmudai, who deliberately tarried at the market knowing they would be able to catch these later-night shoppers.

The very time during which candles should be lit is described in spatial terms: your candles should be lit while the public space is still peopled. The African adage of ubuntureminds us that I’m a person because of others. In the world of tractate Chanukah, my Chanukah lighting inside is determined by the whereabouts of people outside.

This focus on lighting inside for people outside changed during the time of the Ba’al Ha’tosfot. In their 13th century commentary on the Talmud, they wrote, “Nowadays, there is no concern about when to light, since we don’t have an awareness except for the people inside the home (livnei habayit), since we are lighting inside.” It’s possible that the Tosfot, living in France and Germany in the Middle Ages, didn’t orient their lighting towards the outside world because of Christian antisemitism. For these rabbis, the outside world was dangerous and their consciousness was attuned within.

Yet, in spite of the Tosfot’s experience, Chanukah as a chag evolved along the lines of the Talmud, holding a subtle balance between the domains of inside and outside. But perhaps in times of pandemic, we are more like the 13th century Tosafists. Our consciousness has become attuned toward the safety of “inside”. Yet, an ethical and healthy society needs more permeable borders between inside and out.

Chanukah lies on this axis between the tarmudai, the foreign folk who live among us who are the later stragglers on the street, and our most intimates, the b’nei habayit, those living in our homes. As our chanukiah sits on the threshold, it reminds us that who we are at home is influenced by the most other among us, and that our inside and outside lives are linked. We shouldn’t retreat into ourselves without a consciousness of the other, and at the same time, we need to retain a sense of an inner core, the bifnim, so that our interaction with the outside world doesn’t diffuse or dissolve who we are.

Instead of romanticising life pre-COVID-19, perhaps the Chanukah candles on the window ledge can invite us to think about better, braver ways of interacting between the inside and the outside, new possibilities for engagement in a post-COVID-19 world. At the end of the day, we light where we light, not just for ourselves but for those exterior to our pod because ultimately we are who we are because of others. Chanukah light is constellated on the premise of humanity’s profoundest interconnections.

• Adina Roth is a clinical psychologist and a Jewish educator in Johannesburg. She is currently a student online at Yeshivate Maharat in New York.