“Home” for the Holiday

Hanukka’s requirement of “ner ish u-beyto” makes the candle-lighting mitzva a house-bound one. Avraham Stav, who wrote this dispatch last Hanukka from the Gaza border, asked how myriad Israeli soldiers dwelling in the field, and those Israelis displaced from their homes, help us reevaluate and expand the meaning of “bayit” as we light our candles.

(Courtesy IDF Press Office)

The first order for our unit to relocate our temporary encampment along the Gaza border came five minutes after Shabbat. We had already prepared everything for the war’s first company-wide meal when the commander ordered: fold up the nets and tie the equipment to the vehicle’s roof, in three hours we’re on the move. We had been there in the field for barely a week. We hadn’t even set up tents yet. And yet it felt a bit like leaving home: To abandon that space between the dirt mounds on which we managed to place a board to be used as a bench; to “disengage” from that perfect little patch of ground on the northwest side of the Armored Personal Carrier (APC), where you can hide from the afternoon sun. We knew that there would be shady corners and improvised benches in the next place we camped, but that did not dull the feeling of being uprooted, which returned even in the next order to bug-out, two or three weeks later, and the one after that.

A person wants to feel at home, no matter where he may be—heimishkeit in Yiddish; baytiyut in our modern Hebrew—even when he is displaced and uprooted from his home (perhaps especially then). Already when we boarded the Armored Fighting Vehicle (AFV) at the end of Simhat Torah, each of us grabbed the spot that had been his fixed place for the past fifteen years in training. Yehoshua is lying on the pile of vests next to the company commander’s seat; Doron is folded under the radio device; I am leaning on the wooden shelf that holds the code map. Every place we arrived at we tried to turn into a home. Not all at once. Three weeks passed before I brought my quilt and pillow back from a brief visit home, but it took me seven full weeks in the field before I dared to also bring a bedsheet. And how much aggravation was caused when the rain and wind knocked over our tents and swept all the bedding into the mud.

The Hanukka mitzva calls for “a candle for a person and his house,” ner ish u-beyto, and many poskim hold that this requires an actual house. According to this opinion, one trekking through a desert or sailing on the open deck of a boat cannot fulfill the commandment. On the other hand, some said that the mitzva is unconnected to a physical house, and every person is obligated to light regardless of his or her domestic condition. But R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach presented a third approach: While a house is indeed needed to light the candle, the concept of “home” for Hanukka purposes is different than elsewhere in halakha. One doesn’t require four walls and a roof, or even the Sukka’s two walls and bit, but only some sense of privacy, personal space, of “homeliness.” As R. Eliezer Waldenberg put it: Even if someone sets up a bed for himself on a street-corner and sleeps and eats there, he is also obligated to light the Hanukka candles on that spot. It is beyond me to settle this halakhic dispute, but there is something to this approach, in the description of a makeshift street-corner bed of one who has no other place to lay his head at night—be it ever so humble, even a street-corner is a place called home. It is his place, and the idea captures my own wartime experience of domesticity in an extraordinary way.

At the moment I am sitting wrapped in a thin blanket on the metal bench in the APC, on my regular four A.M. shift. The books I brought from home are wet with yesterday’s rain, my shoes are covered in mud, and I remember how the roof of my caravan back home in the village of Gevaot was beginning to leak during Sukkot. (The calendar stubbornly, but unimaginably, insists this was a mere two months ago!) At the time, that was the closest thing I could imagine to the holiday’s requirement for a “temporary dwelling.” This is indeed the challenge of Sukkot: to imagine a bunch of poles and fabric on a balcony is itself a “house.” According to the Book of Maccabees the Hanukka festival was established as compensation for the eight days of Sukkot, which were not properly celebrated due to the Hasmonean war. It seems this idea seeks to expand our understanding of “home” and domesticity a bit more. While the Sukka demands that we establish our home in a temporary dwelling, Hanukka teaches us that every place may also become home. Domesticity is something that a person carries like armor and can project on the world around him. Wherever you go, there is home.

The Rishonim instituted an additional practice. We light Hanukka candles not only in our homes but in our synagogues as well—bayit expands to include the communal beit kenesset. Later rabbis extended the practice to include lighting at gatherings in the public square, even outside of any building at all. It seems they wanted to stretch our thinking to new forms of domesticity. This year, hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers are out in the field or lying in trenches, and almost as many Jews are displaced, wandering from hotel to hotel. When the siren sounds we run to a stairwell or a safe room. When we cannot place our trust in any conventional, physical dwelling, the community itself, the nation and its people, also becomes a home. An enveloping, embracing, illuminating, and caring home whose foundations will not be uprooted by any wind.

Rabbi Avraham Stav teaches at Yeshivat Machanayim in Efrat when he is not serving in an artillery unit. Read his recent TRADITION article on Rav Kook’s progressivism and conservativism.