Not One of Them Resembling Another

The Hook

The only place in the Mishneh Torah where the Rambam tells the story of Chanukah is here, and it takes him two paragraphs. The Greek kingdom issued decrees, extended its hands against property and daughters, entered the Sanctuary and made the sacraments impure. The Jews suffered greatly until God had mercy. The sons of the Hasmoneans overcame them and appointed a king from among the priests. Then the oil, one cruse, enough for a day, burning for eight. That is the whole of it.

The remaining eleven paragraphs are about Hallel. How many days it is said in full, which days it is skipped through, where exactly the skips fall, whether a blessing may be recited over a custom, what happens when a man pauses in the middle, and the responsive pattern the early sages used, with the number of times the congregation answers. And the chapter ends with the Rambam setting down that pattern, calling it fitting to follow, and then saying that in every place he has been he has seen a different practice, not one of them resembling another. He legislates the praise and then reports that the praise has gotten away from him.

Two Paragraphs for a War

Read the first paragraph again and notice how it ends. Sovereignty returned to Israel for more than two hundred years, until the destruction of the Second Temple. He has given the victory a single sentence and attached its expiration to it in the same line. There is no swelling. The rescue was real, the kingdom was real, and it lasted two centuries and then it did not. A less careful writer would have let the reader enjoy the deliverance for a paragraph before mentioning what came after. The Rambam does not think deliverance needs protecting from its own history.

The second paragraph is the oil, and it is equally flat. They entered the Sanctuary on the twenty fifth of Kislev. They could find no pure oil except one cruse, containing enough to burn for a single day. They lit the arrangement of lamps from it for eight days, until they could crush olives and produce pure oil. No adjectives. The miracle is stated the way a quartermaster would state it, as a supply problem that resolved, and the eight days are explained as the length of time it takes to press new oil rather than as a mystical number.

Then the ordinance. The Sages of that generation established these eight days as days of happiness and praise, with candles lit in the evening at the entrance to the houses on each of the eight nights, to publicize and reveal the miracle. Eulogy and fasting are forbidden on them, as on Purim. And the Rambam adds a sentence that sets the level: lighting the candles on these days is a Rabbinic mitzvah, like the reading of the Megillah. Whoever is obligated in one is obligated in the other, three blessings on the first night, two on the rest, and a person who did not light and merely sees a lamp recites the latter two on the first night and one on the others. The seeing is worth a blessing. That is not a small ruling.

The Blessing You May Not Say Over a Custom

Once the Rambam reaches Hallel he stops and answers a question nobody asked out loud. The blessing over Hallel says that God sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us, and Hallel on Chanukah was commanded by the Sages, not at Sinai. How can the words be said? He answers that the same is done for the Megillah and for an eruv, and states the rule: a blessing is recited over every definite obligation established by the Sages. Where the Sages established something because of a doubt, as with tithing demai, no blessing is recited. Then he raises the obvious objection against himself, the second day of a festival, which exists only because of doubt and does carry a blessing, and answers that this was ordained lest the day be treated with disdain.

Now the taxonomy has three levels, and he adds a fourth. Hallel in full is a mitzvah on eighteen days of the year: the eight of Sukkot, the eight of Chanukah, the first day of Pesach, and Shavuot. It is not said on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, because those are days of repentance and awe and fear rather than days of extra celebration, and the Rambam says so plainly, which is worth pausing over. Praise is not the universal solvent. There are days it does not fit. Nor is it said on Purim, because the reading of the Megillah does the work that Hallel would have done.

And then Rosh Chodesh, which is the sharpest ruling in the chapter. The recitation of Hallel on Rosh Chodesh is a custom and not a mitzvah. It is done only in a congregation, passages are skipped to mark that it is a custom, and no blessing is recited over it, because a blessing is not recited over a custom. A person praying alone should not say it at all. And then the turn: if he began, he completes it, skipping the passages the congregation would skip. He should not have started. Having started, he does not stop. That single sentence contains an entire theory of how a person is supposed to treat what he has already opened his mouth to say.

One Hundred and Twenty Three Halleluyahs

The mechanics that follow are the closest thing in the Mishneh Torah to a stage direction. Hallel is appropriate all day. A man who reads it out of sequence has not fulfilled his obligation. A man who reads and pauses, reads and pauses, has fulfilled it even if his pauses together lasted long enough for him to have recited the entire Hallel from beginning to end. On the days of full Hallel he may interrupt between chapters but not within one; on the days of skipping he may interrupt even within a chapter, since the reading is already broken by design.

Then the Rambam records what the early sages did, and the passage reads like something remembered rather than researched. An adult begins and says Halleluyah, and all the people answer Halleluyah. He reads the next phrase and they answer Halleluyah. So it goes, phrase by phrase, and the count is given: they answer Halleluyah one hundred and twenty three times across the whole of Hallel, and the sign for remembering the number is the years of Aharon's life. At the opening of each chapter the people repeat the reader's line rather than answering; at Anna Hashem hoshia na and Anna Hashem hatzlichah na they repeat as well, though those are not chapter openings. If the reader was a minor, a slave, or a woman, the congregation repeats the entire Hallel after them, word by word.

And then the last sentence of the chapter. This was the custom of the early generations and it is fitting to hold to it. At present, however, I have seen different customs in all places with regard to the reading and the responses of the people, not one of them resembling another. He does not correct anyone. He does not rule that the scattered practices are void. He writes down what was, marks it as worth keeping, notes what is, and stops. A code of law that was built to settle every question in Israel ends this chapter by leaving one open on purpose.

The Unifying Principle

Look at the shape of the chapter as a whole. A war, compressed to nothing. A cruse of oil, described as a supply that lasted. An ordinance of eight days. A blessing, and then a doctrine of when a blessing may be said at all. A count of days. A demotion of Rosh Chodesh to custom. A choreography of responses with a number attached to it. And a closing admission that the choreography has come apart. The chapter is not about Chanukah. It is about what happens to gratitude when it has to survive for a thousand years, and the answer the Rambam gives is that it survives by becoming a form, and that the form then begins to vary the moment you look away from it.

The Alter Rebbe teaches that the lights of Chanukah belong at the doorway, at the place where the house meets the street, because the illumination of this festival is meant for the outside rather than for the room that is already lit. The Rambam gives the same instruction as law, and gives the reason in five words: to publicize and reveal the miracle. Praise here is not private consolation. It is testimony, delivered at the threshold, to whoever happens to be walking past.

The Sfat Emet reads Chanukah as the festival of pure thanksgiving, the one that asks nothing of the body, no meal, no fast, only light and words. That is exactly why eleven paragraphs go to Hallel and two to the war. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe returned constantly to the detail that the lamp faces outward, that the mitzvah is not complete while the light stays indoors. Read the count of one hundred and twenty three against that. Aharon is the one who kindled the lamps, and the number of years he lived became the tally of a congregation's answers. The praise is measured in a lifetime, and the lifetime belonged to the man whose work was lighting.

Modern Application

The most usable ruling in the chapter is the one about the blessing. A definite obligation gets a blessing. An obligation that exists because of a doubt does not. A custom does not, no matter how universally it is kept and no matter how old. The Rambam is not diminishing anything by saying this. He is refusing to let the categories blur, because a person who cannot tell what he is actually obligated in from what he does because it is what people do will eventually be exhausted by both. There is real relief in being told plainly that something you have always done is a custom.

Then the man who begins Hallel alone on Rosh Chodesh. He should not have started. Having started, he finishes. That is a rule about a specific liturgical mistake and it is also the whole of a mature relationship with your own commitments. There is a version of seriousness that stops in the middle of anything that turns out not to have been required, and it is corrosive, because it teaches you that your own opening words mean nothing. The Rambam rules the other way. The obligation was not there when you started. It is there now, because you started.

And the pauses. A man may stop in the middle of Hallel for long enough to have said the whole thing twice over and he has still fulfilled his obligation, but a man who says it out of order has not. Interruption is survivable and rearrangement is not. Nobody gets through praise without stopping, and the law does not pretend otherwise. What it will not permit is the reordering, taking the thanks before the trouble or the deliverance before the fear, because that is no longer the same account of what happened.

The Closing

Today is the thirteenth of Elul and the twenty fifth of Kislev is a hundred days off, which makes this a strange chapter to be holding. Elul is a month of accounting, and here is the Rambam counting: eighteen days, twenty one days, one hundred and twenty three answers, two hundred years of sovereignty. He counts everything, and then he reports that the practice has gone in every direction and he has not been able to count that. There is something restful in a man of his exactness saying so.

A rescue lasted two hundred years and the praise for it has lasted two thousand, and the praise survived because it was written down as a form rather than as a feeling. Then the form scattered, and the Rambam recorded the scattering without alarm, because the answering had not stopped. Say it in order. Stop as often as you need to. What you are keeping is not the choreography, and he knew that when he wrote the last line.