One of my favorite rituals before Friday night services is lighting our sanctuary menorah. Bruce Corris and I have a little contest about who can light it using only one match. It feels like we are participating in a ritual that goes back all the way to the time the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. It feels sacred.
We are doing exactly what Aaron does at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Behalotecha, when he “l’hehalot,” lifts up, the light of the menorah. But, in actuality, I learned this week that the custom of having a menorah in a synagogue sanctuary is less than two centuries old.
After the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the valuable ritual items, including the menorah, were carried off to Rome. Then, at a certain point, all of these sacred objects went missing. The rabbis starting in the third century forbade any three dimensional menorah from even being constructed.
And, this is the way it was until the early part of the nineteenth century when Pope Pius the eighth ordered the restoration of an ancient Roman arch that had been converted to a fortified tower in the middle ages.
The arch was none other than the Arch of Titus, an arch that contained the only visual depiction of the ancient Temple menorah on record. Still, most Eastern European Jews knew nothing about until the 1880s when an article about the Arch of Titus appeared in a Hebrew newspaper called HaTzfira.
And, that brings us to why CSS has a menorah in our sanctuary. As we began to better understand and appreciate our biblical past, Jews began building three dimensional menorahs once again. We named our synagogue communities Temples. We embraced our past.
We began once again to lift up the lights of the menorah, side by side with the lights of Shabbat. Just as we do today at Shir Shalom. In this way we have fulfilled the words of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of the state of Israel, who famously said, “the old shall be made new, and the new holy.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex