The rabbis of the gemara understood that creating the holiday of Chanukah was not a simple choice. Instituting a brakha on lighting candles was going even further. How could they create a brakha that refers to God as commanding (asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav) a particular act that does not appear in the Torah (see Masechet Shabbat 23a for two different approaches to this very question)?
The specific answers offered in the gemara are less compelling to me. What does interest me is the self-awareness that establishing a new holiday, with new rituals, was pushing boundaries and needed to be justified. At some level this question forces us to consider the relationship between rabbinic creativity and the Torah’s authority. Another way to think about this issue is to explore the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. Still another way to frame this is: at what stage in history do we no longer have direct access to the divine will via prophecy? In the absence of a prophet we must struggle to use our minds and hearts to arrive at our best approximation of what God wants from us in any given situation.
Chanukah provides us with an opportunity to ask questions about the interplay between a rabbinic philosophy of halakha built on human reasoning as opposed to a world alive with the divine word through prophecy. In fact, the Rabbis (Yoma 29a) say, “Just as the dawn is the conclusion of the entire night, so too, Esther was the conclusion of all miracles.” They are fully aware that, after the events of Purim, we are living in a different world. A world that is missing certain kinds of miracles. Simply put, Purim represents the end of the Written Torah, while Chanukah happened at a time that was characterized by Oral Torah.
In a fascinating passage from Seder Olam Rabba (chapter 30), the rabbis try to pinpoint the turn away from prophecy. In around the year 333 BCE Alexander the Great made his way through Jerusalem. The Midrash describes a profound shift that took place at the moment:
Alexander Macedon who reigned for fourteen years. Until then the prophets would prophesize with the spirit of holiness; from this time forward Incline your ear, and hear the words of the sages (chachamim)…(Proverbs 22:17).
The arrival of Alexander and Greek culture happens to have been the moment in which prophecy ceased according to this passage. The rationalist philosophical approach of Greece provided a different access point to the Divine Will. No longer would you need to wait for the prophet to share what God wants. Instead it became the job of the rabbi to make a rational and reasonable claim and teach it to the world.
Rabbi Gedalya Schorr z”l (1910-1979, Torah v’Daas) has a series of short essays in the Moadim volume of the Ohr Gedalyahu in which he uses these gemarot as a way to offer a kind of periodization of Jewish history. He argues that the first Temple was the time of the Written Torah and was, therefore, linked to prophets and prophecy. On the other hand, the Second Temple was the time of the Oral Torah and was, therefore, linked to the rabbis and wisdom (chokhma). However, he then quotes a radical text from Pirkei Heichalot:
R’ Yishmael said, “R’ Akiva said in the name of R’ Eliezer the Great: From the day on which the Torah was given until the building of the final [second] House [Temple], the Torah was given [but] her beauty, value, greatness, honor, glory, fear, awe, wealth, pride, strength, and honor were not given until the final [second] House was built…
By arguing that the greatness of Torah was only revealed during the Second Temple, this mystical text implies that the Oral Torah is greater than the Written Torah, and concomitantly, that the rabbis were somehow greater than the prophets. (See also Pachad Yitzchak, Chanukah, Maamar 10. The gemara in Bava Batra 12a says explicitly that a chacham is preferable to a prophet. See also Rambam, Laws of Kings, Chapter 2:5-7 and the essay from Rav Kook chacham adif me’navi.) Rav Schorr uses a particular phrase to describe the role of the rabbinic Oral Torah. He says that its purpose was to, “l’hosif al haTorah—to add to the Torah.”
Rav Schorr sets up a distinction between the aron and the menorah from the mishkan. In his system, the aron is meant to symbolize the Written Torah and the menorah serves as a model of the Oral Torah. Part of the regular service in the Temple was cleaning and re-lighting the menorah—a kind of human involvement with the light of the Oral Torah. In this way, Rav Schorr sees Chanukah as continuing to serve as the model of the Oral Torah, as it did from the very beginning. What he makes clear with this structure is that the notion of Oral Torah was not a new historical reality that was “made up” by the rabbis. Instead, he is able to see continuity between the Oral Torah revealed to Moshe and that which was revealed in the time of the Second Temple.
The task of “l’hosif al haTorah—add[ing] to the Torah” might best be understood as both the transmission of an ancient oral mesorah and an act of to rabbinic creativity. In a deep sense, that is what every rabbi must struggle to do every day—channel our majestic heritage into a time and place that sometimes feels distant from the world of the Temple, the world of prophecy.
Chanukah is the holiday that models for us this transition. The Rabbis borrowed a Temple-based ritual object, the menorah, and moved its practice into the individual home. Each night of the holiday we are given an opportunity to recite a brakha instituted by the Rabbis and commanded by the Torah. Finding a healthy balance between transmitting an ancient tradition and “adding” to the Torah is the challenge of this joyous holiday.
Rabbi Jeffrey S. Fox, Rosh HaYeshiva and Dean of Faculty at Maharat, was the first graduate of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Upon graduation he served as the Rabbi of Kehilat Kesher: The Community Synagogue of Tenafly and Englewood for seven years. In Rabbi Fox’s tenure at Kesher, the community grew three-fold from 30 families to nearly 100. During that time Rabbi Fox also taught at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah as well as in the Florence Melton Adult Education School in Bergen County. He also served on the board of the Synagogue Leadership Initiative of the UJA of NNJ. Rabbi Fox was a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and has also been a member of the faculty of the Drisha Institute, the Florence Melton Adult Education School in Westchester County, and Hadar.