come on baby light my menorah without star

#Come on baby light my menorah without star how to#
#Come on baby light my menorah without star full#
#Come on baby light my menorah without star free#

And the very darkest night is not winter solstice, the year’s longest night, but the new moon close to solstice, which is the seventh night of Hanukkah. Just so, wonder comes to us when we gaze at the menorah lights against the backdrop of the darkest nights of the year.

#Come on baby light my menorah without star full#

Feeding our eyes fills our hearts with wonder, and hearts full of wonder overflow with gratitude. Stargazing teaches us to peer into the depth of the darkness that surrounds the stars, to understand that what is invisible is so much vaster than what is visible. A clear and dark night sky is full of texture, feeding our eyes with so many magnitudes and hues of stars, bright to faint, red or yellow or blue, while feeding our minds with awareness that there are so many more stars, beyond what the eye can see. What I realized thinking about this is that gazing at the stars, even without a telescope, can also retune our eyes. Pleiades star cluster – Northern Lights Graffiti (cc) on flickr People almost instinctively ask, how can we be so blessed to live under such an endless expanse of beauty? As Abraham Joshua Heschel taught us, wonder or radical amazement leads to appreciation of the divine. It’s not hard to understand if you look at the stars in a place where the sky is dark. How does our seeing the lights without using them to see something else lead to becoming aware of miracle and wonder and giving thanks? Hanerot Halalu further explains that we only see the candles “in order to give thanks to Your name for Your miracles, Your salvation, and Your wonders.” Not just the miracle and wonder of Hanukkah, but all miracles. So we imagine we are using the light from the shamash to read by, not the light of the other flames. Reading Hanerot Halalu, or Maoz Tzur, or spinning a dreidl by the light of the menorah is using the light to see something. Keeping the candles holy is why we have the shamash. Seeing becomes an act of grace and a gift we give, instead of a step towards what we can take.

#Come on baby light my menorah without star free#

It goes, “ Hanerot halalu kodesh heim” – “These candles are holy” and continues, “and we are not free to use them, but only to see them…” Hanerot Halalu defines our relation to holiness as “seeing without using.” It is not the light from the flames, but our way of seeing them, that needs to be pure.

#Come on baby light my menorah without star how to#

There’s a prayer about how to see that is traditionally recited after lighting a chanukiyah or menorah. Like gazing at the menorah, looking through a telescope can also be a kind of fixing for the eyes, a tikkun that opens up a person to see not just images but worlds. It took me a few days before I understood how to see them. To see Jupiter’s belts, you have to look even harder, more intently. I moved my eye closer and farther away from the eyepiece to find the spot where the image was brightest and most in-focus, to make sure of what I was seeing. The first time I saw Jupiter’s moons, I wondered if I was “seeing things”-maybe those dots were just reflections of light in the lens. It turns out that you have to retune your eyes and your mind to see through a telescope. Mars’s steady and growing brightness that May inspired me to buy my first telescope in June. It’s simple: a planet is a steady, unwavering, untwinkling point of light, while a star twinkles. Several springs ago, when Mars was coming the closest it had been to Earth in a decade, I started paying attention to what was up there, and I began learning basic things, like how to tell a planet from a star. The same thing can happen when you gaze at the heavens. Gaze at the candles well, and your eyes get retuned. Gazing at the Hanukkah candles or oil lamps becomes a kind of fixing for the eyes, a training in how to see. I. There’s a custom to gaze at the menorah, to receive its light as the purest of gifts.