When my first child was a toddler, he would fight sleep every night, thinking of every trick in the book to stall bedtime, requesting book after book and song after song, and magically waking from a seemingly deep sleep as soon as I moved my hand from his back and started toward the door. With time, we developed an extensive bedtime routine. Once he was in pajamas with his teeth brushed, we would read a few books, chant the shema, talk through what had happened that day and what to expect the next day, sing a song, end with adon olam, and say goodnight, and with time, he was able to go to sleep and I was able to leave the room. He was never one to rely on a night light, but his white noise machine ran each night from bedtime until wake-up – every night. With each child the routine has shifted, and thankfully, gotten shorter, but some elements remain the same, each and every night.
Each of us has our daily routines, things that we do each night before we sleep, each morning when we get up, at the same time each day. Some could be described as habits, others as rituals. We understand the purposes of some. Others seem to have developed by chance.
In the first verse of this week’s parsha, God tells Moses to tell the people that they are to bring him pure olive oil for lighting, so that they can uplift a ner tamid. Ner tamid is often translated as an eternal flame. It is the name we use for the light that is placed over the ark in the sanctuaries of our synagogues which we always see turned on when we enter the sanctuary for a service. It gives the impression that the eternal flame burns constantly, without end. I remember thinking of the eternal flame in this way, imagining it as a metaphor for God, always burning, always there, never sleeping. It is a comforting image, the constant presence of the divine, there for us regardless of what may be going on in our lives.
But this image is not what is described in the Torah when the instructions are given for the ner tamid. We read that Aaron, the first high priest, and his sons are to set the menorah, the lamp, in order each evening, to burn from evening until morning. The original ner tamid, eternal flame, did not burn constantly. It burned regularly, repeatedly lit every night to burn until morning. The rabbis wonder how the priests were sure it would burn exactly from evening to morning. One prominent opinion is that it would be lit with the amount of oil necessary to burn through the longest night of the year, either allowing it to burn into the day on shorter nights or changing the thickness of the wick so that it would burn faster on shorter nights.
The rabbis’ concern for the intricate details of this ritual reminds me in a way of the exacting specifications necessary for the bedtime ritual of a toddler. There must be exactly the right amount of oil in each lamp. Like the particular order of blankets on my preschooler’s bed, the lamp is to be placed not inside, but outside of the curtain that separates the ark of the covenant. The rabbis explain that this is very important because we would not want to give the impression that the light is being lit for God (whose presence is most powerfully concentrated above the ark). God, the rabbis understand does not need our light. God is a light to us, to our world.
The light of the menorah, is for us. The permanent Holy Temple, for which the portable sanctuary is a prototype, was said to have windows that worked the opposite way of regular windows at the time. While most windows were narrow at the outer surface of the stone wall and would widen toward the inside to spread the light into the building, the windows of the temple were narrow on the inside and widened toward the outer edge of the wall. This design spread the light of the menorah to the courtyards of the city, sharing the eternal light with all the people outside the temple – all night, every night. This light makes our world more comfortable. It makes us feel safer, closer to God at the time that we are most vulnerable to feeling far.
The ner tamid, the eternal flame, does not just happen. It is the responsibility of the priests in the sanctuary to set it in place, to raise up that light regularly, each day. One midrash, from the perspective of a community learning to live without the Holy Temple after its destruction, sees the lighting of the menorah as a reciprocal offering of light between us and God. We have the opportunity to offer God light, not only through the fire of the menorah, but also through studying Torah, doing mitzvot, living a life informed by God’s values. And when we raise up the light of Torah, mitzvot, and walking in God’s ways, God lights our way and lights the world. Like the eternal light of the menorah, it requires more than an initial lighting to set it in motion in perpetuity. This reciprocal ner tamid, requires us to continue to raise up the light that we can spread each and every day, as part of our daily, or nightly, routine.
This week, I asked a group of students to begin thinking about what light they have to raise up each and every day. They thought for a moment and responded that they can lift up the light of kindness, and that they can lift up their friends. May we all find a place in our daily ritual to dedicate ourselves to lifting each other up, and to lifting up kindness, so that its light may radiate out to the world around us as the light of the menorah in the temple illuminated the world outside.