Gift that Keeps Giving and Curves Straightened

The Talmud teaches us the lights of Hanukkah should burn
till there are no pedestrians who are going to the market.
It’s not to gifts that Jewish eyes on Hanukkah should turn,
but to the flames in their menorah’s holy spark kit.

The festival thus differs from the gentile holiday
on which most people focus on the presents on their firry tree.
Since it is not a major mistletoe and holly day,
on Hanukkah all Jewish minds should be from marketing quite free,

not thinking about shopping extravagant supplies
ordered electronically, unlike the lights we kindle
on Hanukkah, in numbers that increase each night, their light
memorializing miracles whose memory we don’t allow to dwindle.

When we are home and are not thinking about buying
gifts for family and friends, we celebrate the best of all
our memories, how we miraculously still survive, relying
on God, helped by the heroes who made possible this festival

that’s celebrated in some public places with an imitation
of the menorah that from seven branches grew to eight,
unlike the curved ones on the arch of Titus. Following the illustration
made by Maimonides, Chabad’s menorah’s branches are not curved — but straight.

In “Straightening Out the Menorah,” Jewish Review of Books, 12/25/34, Reviel Netz writes:

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-life/17870/straightening-out-the-menorah/

Chabad’s campaign of public menorah lightings began in San Francisco, in 1975. Two local Lubavitcher rabbis, Chaim Drizin and Yosef Langer, met with the program director of the local public television station and Bill Graham, San Francisco’s famous Rock and Roll impresario (and Holocaust survivor, born Wulf Grajonca in Berlin), and came up with the idea of erecting a twenty-five-foot-tall mahogany menorah in Union Square on Hanukkah. Although the menorah has returned to Union Square every year since then (along with the eighty-three-foot-tall Macy’s Christmas tree), its shape—giant bent L-shaped arms emerging sideways and then upwards from a center column­—is now unique in the vast landscape of Chabad menorahs. Just a few years later, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, established the now-iconic Chabad menorah: eight straight arms, pointing upward diagonally, four on each side, emerging from an unadorned central pole. This austere figure is now familiar from hundreds of public lightings around the globe. Like some other Chabad traditions, it seems to be a charming ritual idiosyncrasy until, beneath the surface, you discover a grave point of doctrine…..

Actually, the fact that the classic image of the Temple menorah, with its gracefully curved arms, comes from the famous triumphal arch in Rome (which depicts the ignominious defeat of the Jews and the sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE) was a strike against considering it either authentic or beautiful in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s opinion.

In a talk, or sicha, delivered in 1982, Schneerson drew upon the great Yemenite-Israeli scholar Rabbi Joseph Kafih’s edition of Moses Maimonides’s Commentary on the Mishna, which reproduced Maimonides’s own hand-drawn sketch, or diagram, of the menorah as described by the mishnah. As Kafih noted, this drawing was attested to in the best Yemenite manuscripts, as well as the famous autograph manuscript held in Oxford (Bodleian Ms. Poc. 295), and it contradicted the “fake” image on the Arch of Titus, which the founders of the State of Israel had ignorantly chosen as the seal of the new state.

In an extended digression to the mishnah’s remark that menorah’s limbs and lamps must all be intact for any of them to be valid (Menahot 3:7), Maimonides says that he has seen fit to draw the shape or form of the Temple menorah, the tradition for which “is in our hands,” in particular the relative placement of the cups, bulbs, and flowers that adorn the menorah.