Dear Bet Torah Family:
A final thought on this final day of Hanukkah...
We spend a lot of time as human beings talking about how to manage the spaces we have to share.
So much room on this planet and yet we gravitate towards community despite the fact that it forces us into a constant negotiation of values, interests, freedoms, responsibilities and culpability.
The Talmud comments on the negotiation of communal living by saying we are responsible for the trajectory and tragic consequences of every errant spark that jumps from our hammer and onto another person’s property. As much as we bristle against communal control of our private actions, as the saying goes “your liberty to swing your first ends where my nose begins.” Even though the spark was not the purpose of the hammering it is owned by the hammer wielder. Part of growing up is realizing that most of the hurt we cause is because we were ignorant or not thinking or just lost in our own world and that pain unintentionally caused is still painful.
The only way not to hurt someone is to not have relationships. Being in relationship is the work of managing the spaces we share.
Even when we are dealing with seemingly innocuous materials, like the Talmudic case of a flax laden wagon traveling down a public alleyway, we are still responsible for damage it may cause. So if the wagon is overflowing and the flax is brushing the sides of the alley buildings and then pops into the doorway of a store and catches fire from contact with a candle, the wagon driver is responsible for damages. If the shopkeeper put the candle outside and the flax catches fire, the store keeper is responsible for placing a dangerous obstacle in what should have been a safe public thoroughfare.
To choose to be in community is to prefer periodic guilt from overstepping bounds rather than the frontierless, moral purity of loneliness.
As Joan Didion said after losing her husband, pushing out into the world and experiencing no resistance is a lonely feeling.
And yet we so often act like we don’t understand the shared nature of community.
Even in community we can lose perspective and jostle so furtively in our desire for unencumbered freedoms that we break the bonds of mutual care and ricochet like free radicals in shared space. In such a reality, the only thing we share then in this space is our personal desire to control it.
So the Talmud warns us against a society filled only with conflicting personal interests. When the shopkeeper places the Hanukkiah, the Hanukkah lamp, outside the doorway and into the public thoroughfare, the shopkeeper is not responsible for any damage the fire may cause.
The presence of a Hanukkiah scrambles the calculus of carefully crafted compromises and reminds us that shared space is more than the sum of its atomized and autonomous parts.
When we decorate communal spaces with only personal perspectives and navigations of interest we are deep in the darkness of Plato’s cave of shadows.
The Hanukkiah illuminates the space so we see the face and not just the hammer, the face and not just the shop doorway, the face and not simply the wagon.
These candles are holy. We have no right whatsoever to make use of them, rather we simply gaze upon them and appreciate their existence.
People too.
Wishing us a final day of Hanukkah filled with all the light we need to see each other.
Aaron
