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January 5, 2009

Lighting No-Candles


by Benjamin Dauer

A story I once heard from a Jewish teacher that may or may not have originally been told in the third person:

One time, years ago, I visited a Zen Center. I was uncomfortable with the statues of Buddha and all of the bowing toward them by the Buddhists at the center. I expressed my concerns to the roshi there and he invited me to follow him. He took me into a small room where a man was bowing repeatedly to a wooden carving of Buddha. The roshi backhanded the statue, sending it flying across the room. The other man continued to bow, now bowing to nothingness.

This past Sunday, the day before Chanukah’s first evening, I was out with my girlfriend in the first real storm that Boston’s seen this Winter. We were going to make a day of lunch, shopping and a movie but because of the weather we turned back after we ate.

Neither of us had remembered to purchase Chanukah candles. There was a Judaica store I thought we’d have passed on the way to lunch but it had closed down. The roads were awful. We still needed candles. We stopped at Trader Joe’s to pick up food under the assumption that we’d find our candles there. After going up and down the aisles my girlfriend spoke to one of the employees at the checkout.

“You’re the second person to ask for Chanukah candles today. We don’t have ‘em. Maybe Rite-Aide?”

We made an emergency stop by Whole Foods. I ran in and scanned through the store, ran out and over to the Rite-Aide. At Rite-Aide the worker at the checkout directed me to aisle eight. Sure enough there were candles in aisle eight, but no Chanukah candles.

There were two seasonal aisles filled with Christmas decoration and toys, but no Chanukah candles there either. We went home without candles.

My girlfriend was a little upset that we couldn’t find candles and I told her the story I’d heard about the guy at a Zen Center. I remembered something else I once heard from Rabbi David Cooper at a silent retreat that he’d led. Sometimes when he and his wife were fighting he would say to her:

“Let’s pretend that we’ve already forgotten what we were fighting about, that it’s over and we’re making up right now.” He liked pretending. In that talk he explained how he pretended that he was resting, cradled in the arms of G!d, when going to bed on a slab of concrete at a Buddhist retreat. So I said to my girlfriend:

“We don’t have the candles. That’s okay. We’re together. Let’s just pretend we have the candles. They’re only a point of focus. Our intention will be the same.” I’m not sure if she was convinced or not but she felt better, and that’s what we did.

We pretended to to light the shamash candle with a match, to use that candle to light the other candles. We said the brachot (blessings.) On the second night we still had no candles and as we lit our no-candles I joked that the wick hadn’t caught on the first one and we had to hold the shamash to it a little longer.

Today I’ve taken it upon myself to find Chanukah candles somewhere. There is something very special about having real candles. If I can’t find any, that will be okay too. We’ll still light candles. There won’t be anything halachically valid about our candle-lighting but for us it will still be meaningful.

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