Multiple meanings
Beha’alotcha

by Rabbi Richard Hirsh
executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.

The imagery of light is central to this week’s parsha, which opens with God’s command to Aaron: “When you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand.”

This is only one of many references in the Torah to that distinctive piece of Mishkan (portable tabernacle) architecture, the menora, whose details are elusive — notwithstanding the technical nature of the terminology used to describe its construction and function. So confusing are the details for constructing and deploying the menora that, based on Numbers 8:4 (“According to the pattern that Adonai showed Moses, so was the lampstand made”) and Exodus 25:40 (“Note well, and follow the patterns…that are being shown to you on the mountain”), rabbinic tradition holds that God had to show a “heavenly prototype” to Moses in order for him to be able to supervise accurately the fashioning of the menora.

Since, however, no official interpretation of the symbolic nature of the menora is offered in the Torah, it is left to later generations to determine the meaning of this symbol.

There are, in fact, two fires that burn in the Mishkan: The first is obviously in the menora; the second is the fire on the altar used for incinerating the sacrifices that make up the root and rhythm of the earliest Israelite worship. Of the altar fire, the Torah is unequivocal — “A perpetual fire [esh tamid] shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out.” (Leviticus 6:6). This altar fire, according to Leviticus 9:24, was initially ignited by a “fire that came forth from before Adonai” and was to burn “tamid,” without pause or cessation, just as the ner tamid in synagogues is expected to be illuminated without interruption.

But in regard to the menora, when the Torah says “lehalot ner tamid,” that the light of the menora was to be “tamid,” we lack both certainty and clarity. As Nahum Sarna notes in his commentary to Exodus 27:20: “[T]amid may mean ‘with unfailing regularity’ [continual] or it may mean ‘uninterruptedly’ [continuous].” The question then is how the menora burned —was it kindled at nightfall and extinguished at daybreak, with precision and regularity, day in and day out — or did it burn continuously, never extinguished?

Why does any of this matter? Since we no longer have a Mishkan or Temple, we have neither a menora nor a mizbei’ach (altar), and the light of each was extinguished with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70. We are actually discouraged from even creating a representation of a seven-branched menora, lest we imply by placing it in a mere synagogue that the synagogue is an equivalent to the Temple.

How are we to understand the symbolism of the ner tamid in a synagogue? What if the ner tamid were to be derivative not of the menora but of the esh tamid, of the perpetual altar fire tended by the priests and kept burning all the time?

If the synagogue ner tamid is derivative of the menora, according to common understanding it symbolizes God’s eternal, unbroken, and continuous presence. But if the synagogue ner tamid were to be derivative of the esh tamid, the altar fire, it would seem to symbolize not the perpetual presence of God but rather the Jewish people’s perpetual service to God.

For generations, the Jewish people has shared a set of symbols — places, objects, texts and stories, rituals and routines — that generate and embody powerful emotional attachments and reactions, often because, as Larry Hoffman suggests, of their proximity to limnal or transitional moments in our lives, moments of tremendous emotional power and presence. So often in Jewish tradition we say, “We do this because of that” or “We use this because it represents that” or “We call it this because it symbolizes that.”

But perhaps not instead of, but in addition to, asking what tradition has said things mean, we need to begin to ask each other: “What does this mean to you?” As in “When you see the ner tamid in the sanctuary, what associations do you have, what memories or images does it evoke, what do you think it symbolizes?”

Does it really matter if the ner tamid symbolizes the menora or the altar? Or is it more important that the ner tamid is one among many symbols the Jewish people share, through which they have a conversation across the generations about meaning, about concepts, about God, and about our role in service to God?

This week’s parsha teaches, “When you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand.” (Numbers 8:2) To state the obvious — the function of the menora was to enable people to see things. This is, then, perhaps the only symbolism that truly matters — that our sharing of Judaism, whatever branch we may represent, should help us to ask each other that most spiritual question: not “Tell me what this means” but “Tell me what you see.”