Believe it or not Jews invented advertising. How so you may ask? It comes down to Hanukkah. The menorah or Chanukiah is not only a symbol of the holiday, but is also the first advertising icon. The rabbis in the Jerusalem Talmud command us to L’Pirsom HaNes, to advertise the miracle, by placing menorahs in our windows to show the world how God rescued us from the Syrian-Greek Empire and allowed oil meant to last one day last for eight instead. In fact, in the Old City in Jerusalem, side by side with their mailboxes, many homes in the Jewish quarter have special metal boxes to hold a menorah. Without available windows this is their method of fulfilling the commandment.
Two other images about menorahs stand out from my recent trip to the Holy Land. The first is from Yad VaShem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, where a stark picture from a recreated Jewish doctor’s home in Berlin in the mid 1930s features a menorah in the window with a Nazi flag flying outside in the background. One gets chills seeing these images side by side. The other image is much more hopeful. It is a small menorah in the office of the Yad B’Yad School in Jerusalem, a school where Jews and Arabs study side by side. The menorah was handmade by the students there, and in each branch a word written in either Hebrew or Arabic, representing a quality taught at the school. If the original menorah was lit by the Maccabees to represent the end of the war, this too seemed a hopeful sign in today’s Israeli society.
This week as we light our menorahs, let us think not only about the experience itself, but also of what we, through our actions, are hoping to advertise to the world.
Happy Hanukkah and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex
Last Updated on 12/15/2017 by wpadm