It's Time To Electrify Hanukkah

The rabbis made a bad call. Let's revisit it.

Approximately a hundred years ago, rabbis made two decisions about electrical lighting. Each decision had a huge impact on modern American Jewish culture. One of those decisions was brilliant. The other was disastrous.

The brilliant decision? Don’t use electricity on Shabbat. How exactly rabbis came to this decision is a complicated story (that I hope to write), but the key piece is that it was decided quite early, when the question at hand was really about light bulbs and very little else. Soon, this decision was extended to all electronic appliances (with a few exceptions, mostly for accessibility). Today, Jews who don’t check their phones for 25 hours every week are following through on a decision made long before anyone could have even conceived of such a device.

The electricity ban transformed Shabbat. because so much of the consumer technological revolution involved new electrical appliances: microwaves, cars, radios, TVs, computers, etc. It also reinforced the idea that Shabbat was about putting a pause on modern work culture, because banning electricity is, at first approximation, a great way of saying no to the modern world (the Amish refused to connect their homes to the grid for the same reason). Even Jews who don’t observe Shabbat by the book are still influenced by the ideal suggested by the ban on electricity. It was a good call a century ago, and it has payed off many times over.

But the rabbis don’t always make the right decision—and with emergent technologies, bad decisions sometimes don’t reveal themselves for years. Today, it’s clear that the rabbis made the right call about electricity on Shabbat. It’s also clear that they made the wrong call about electric Hanukkah candles.

Let me explain. At the beginning of the 19th century, both Jews and some Christians observed their December holidays with physical candles—Jews in their menorahs, Christians on the branches of the Christmas tree. When electricity came to America, Christians embraced it for their trees, while Jews rejected it for their menorahs. Pretty soon the illuminated Christmas tree turned into the illuminated lawns that light up American cities each December. Jews, meanwhile, kept lighting Hanukkah candles, but these were (and are) literally outshined by nearby Christmas displays. (For those curious, I wrote about this in greater detail for The Forward)

Early advertisement for electric Christmas lights

Clearly, something has gone wrong. The whole point of Hanukkah candles is to publicize the holiday’s miraculous origin story—Jewish law states that the flames cannot be used for any other purpose—but candles and oil are never going to win against a string of LED lights. Why didn’t the rabbis allow Hanukkah candles to be electric?

The answer is a little disappointing. In a legal opinion (teshuvah), Rabbi Yitzchak Yehudah Shmelkis (d. 1905) provides two arguments:

[W]ith regard to the Hanukkah candle one does not fulfill one’s obligation with either electric light or gas light, because [lighting with] olive oil is the preferable form for fulfilling the obligation. Furthermore: since these [technologies] are used to light throughout the year it does not constitute a “publicization of the miracle,” and the Rema wrote…to be careful not to light [Hanukkah candles] in a place where candles are lit all year round… (Source: Beit Yitzchak, Y.D. 1:120)

These reasons are pretty weak. First, lots of people use wax candles; despite the fact that the miracle itself involved oil, we haven’t been sticklers about burning oil for a long time—so why not expand to electric light, too?

The second argument makes sense, but it hasn’t aged well. Shmelkis wanted people to light candles in a way that was conspicuous and unusual, so—in a world where gas/electric lighting was becoming the new normal—he insisted on sticking with actual candles. What Shmelkis could not have imagined is that electrical lighting was far more versatile than any other domestic lighting, and was uniquely suited for attracting attention on the street, where it was impervious to weather that might have extinguished flames. In the process of trying to keep the menorah’s lights unique, he rendered them invisible.

This decision had an important secondary effect. Most American Jews, who don’t know the story I just told you, see the contrast between Hanukkah and Christmas lighting and unconsciously arrive at the conclusion that the menorah is supposed to look small and inconspicuous, that Jews just don’t do public displays of religion—when public displays of religion are exactly what Hanukkah is about! In fact, illuminated lawn displays have become so deeply ingrained as a “Christian thing” that Jews don’t do them even on Sukkot, a holiday in which people eat outside, where such lighting might actually be useful. Despite the fact that America is one of the only places outside of Israel where such displays are relatively safe, they are just not done. Even interfaith families that regularly decorate their Christmas trees with Stars of David keep their exterior decorations strictly Christian.

In retrospect, it’s clear that Shmelkis—and he wasn’t the only rabbi of his era to arrive at this conclusion—made a bad call. The problem is that rabbinic decisions are very sticky: observant Jews still don’t use electric candles, their houses are still darker than the ones with Christmas lights (Chabad’s public menorahs being the big exception), and the idea that things could have been different has almost entirely been forgotten. In the same way that the ban on Shabbat electricity has paid dividends, the ban on electric Hanukkah lights has made the menorah a lot less visible. Today, both decisions are seen as inevitable. Neither one was.

So what if the rabbis had ruled differently? Ostentatious Hanukkah displays do exist, but they are so rare that they make the news. So try to imagine an American Hanukkah full of electric lights—a world where Jews, like Christians, had treated electrification as perfectly in line with the ideals of the holiday. In such a world, giant menorahs would dot lawns and windows across the countries, accompanied by other themed lights displays or blow-up ornaments, some perhaps depicting a grisly Hanukkah story, not unlike American Halloween. Maybe Jews and Christian would compete for the best displays (and maybe those competitions wouldn’t be a disaster). Can you imagine living in that world?

Our non-electric Hanukkah, like our non-electric Shabbat, is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to remember there was a decision behind it. The Shabbat decision was prescient—but the Hanukkah decision was not. It’s not too late to electrify Hanukkah. Rabbis should take this up again, and everyone else should start thinking about their Hanukkah lawn displays for next year.