The Lamp Nobody Outside Can See

About This Talk

Chapter 4 opens on how many lamps a house owes, a single lamp per household as the plain obligation, one for each member as the beautiful practice, and one per member per night as the most desirable, which for a house of ten reaches eighty on the eighth night, and then records without embarrassment that the custom of every city in Spain is a single lamp on the first night with one added nightly, before ruling that a holder with two openings serves two people while an uncovered bowl ringed with wicks is a large fire that is not counted even as one lamp. The chapter then settles nearly everything by the eye of a passerby, placing the lamp outside the entrance on the left within a handbreadth of the doorway so the mezuzah stands opposite, voiding a lamp set above twenty cubits because it does not draw the eye, measuring the hour by the traffic in the market, permitting oils and wicks that are unfit for the Sabbath lamp precisely because benefiting from this light is forbidden, allowing the lamp indoors only in a time of danger and then requiring a second lamp for ordinary use, and voiding a lamp kindled indoors and carried out while burning or held in the hand, since kindling performs the mitzvah and not setting down. It closes on the hierarchy of poverty, requiring a man who eats from charity to pawn his garments for oil and giving the lamp precedence over the wine for kiddush when a single prutah must choose, and then ranking the ordinary lamp of the home above both, for the sake of peace in the house, since the Divine Name is erased to make peace between a husband and his wife and the whole Torah was given to bring peace into the world.