Parshah Commentary
Parshat Behaalotecha
This week’s parshah begins with God’s instructions regarding the menorah that stood in the biblical Tabernacle: “When you light the lamps,” God commands Moses to tell his brother Aaron, the High Priest, “the seven lamps shall cast their light toward the face of the menorah.” The parshah is named after the word for “when you light”—“behaalotecha”—which literally means “when you raise up.” This may seem like a surprising term to describe the kindling of the menorah, suggesting that this act is an aspirational endeavor. The menorah’s flames are not simply lit; rather, they must be raised up and nurtured, encouraged to ignite and shine.
A subsequent verse implies that while lighting the menorah is less than straightforward, making it was especially challenging: “The menorah was made of beaten gold, from its base to its flowers, it was beaten.” A midrash recasts the repeated word “mikshah” (“beaten”) as “mah kashah” (“how difficult”), thus rereading the verse as proclaiming: “How difficult was the making of the golden menorah, from its base to its flowers, how difficult!”
Was this difficulty merely technical, or might it point to a weightier and more existential problem, in which we too are implicated? Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, writes that the menorah represents “the Jewish collective.” Just as the menorah is formed through a hammer beating the gold “so that the higher becomes lower and the lower becomes higher, and all is intermixed, the higher in the lower and the lower in the higher, likewise, all Jews are intermixed, meaning interdependent on one another.” Yet this interdependence, Rabbi Shneur Zalman admits, is not uncomplicated. In the exilic and unredeemed present, he notes, it remains compromised by impurities. Only in the messianic future will the Jewish people be, as the prophet Zechariah sees in a vision, “a menorah entirely of gold.”
Indeed, the Jewish collective is not monolithic, especially when considered in all its historical diversity. To participate in this community means embracing a mutuality that might feel ambiguous and uncomfortable. This unease feels particularly acute right now: In the wake of October 7th, the political and cultural lines along which Jewish identities are currently construed have morphed from cracks into chasms. We find ourselves disagreeing with fellow Jews with a vehemence that might seem insurmountable. To face these fissures is to experience the pain of living in a yet unredeemed world, where we are always complicit in our own exile, the exile of others, and even the exile of God.
The menorah as a symbol of the Jewish collective suggests a way to think through this pain. Though hammered from a single block of gold, its seven branches extend in opposing directions and are adorned with assorted cups, knobs, and flowers. Difference and collectivity, in other words, are maintained in difficult tension. To belong to the Jewish collective is to be existentially enmeshed with Jews of all persuasions, in the past, present, and future. But it doesn’t mean being in agreement with them, even when it comes to principles that we might regard as fundamental. On the contrary, the critical value of collectivity lies in the sharp differences it forces us to confront. As individuals, we can too easily persuade ourselves that righteousness is already ours. As part of a collective—diverse, divided, and yet unfinished—we can better see how righteousness remains our unrealized aspiration.
But Jewish collectivity is not simply a check against the hubris of the individual. Rabbi Shneur Zalman adds that the menorah also represents the entirety of the Torah and its mitzvot, citing the book of Proverbs: “the lamp is the mitzvah, and the light is the Torah.” This indicates that Jewish collectivity is constructed through participation in Judaism’s transhistorical tradition of learning and practice, which has hosted innumerable debates on the most significant matters. Its framework might not provide resolution, but it encompasses and exceeds the irreducibilities of our current disagreements, situating us in the eternal project of messianic aspiration whose flames we are always enjoined to “raise up.”
Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
