Hanukkah Candle Lighting Ceremony

There is a set procedure that is followed in this home ritual.

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Traditional Jewish law mandates that the hanukkiyah (Hanukkah menorah) can be designed to burn either candles or oil. In special circumstances, such as hospitals and nursing homes, electric hanukkiyot may be used, and today, many people choose to use electric hanukkiyot for convenience. Reprinted with permission from Hanukkah: The Family Guide to Spiritual Celebration (Jewish Lights).

Open up a traditional prayerbook and look at the Hebrew index and you will find the words Seder Hanukkah, the "Order of Hanukkah." Like every other Jewish ritual, the Hanukkah candlelighting has a fixed order and choreography, what is known in Hebrew as a seder, a progression, and what in English we might awkwardly label a "Table Service."

The idea of a seder is of course best known from Passover, where a progression of 15 steps shapes a complicated process that allows us to re-live and re-experience the Exodus from Egypt. In the same way, we are used to daily and Shabbat services flowing through a fixed progression of prayers found in the siddur [prayerbook] (from the same root as seder). Even the way we conjure and welcome Shabbat into our homes every Friday night follows a fixed pattern of prayers and actions.The Hanukkah ritual is too short to call a seder, yet it has a fixed order of blessings and a fixed progression of actions. This progression takes us through a process. Think of it as one of the rides at Disney World where you get into a car that rolls or floats on a track. The ride takes you through a process: You encounter one experience, then the next, then the next. The order is always fixed, the experience cumulative. Each blessing and each prayer in the Hanukkah candle lighting service has a purpose and a function in bringing the religious experience of Hanukkah alive.

The basic Hanukkah "kindling service" consists of three berakhot [blessings] on the first night (two on the next seven nights) and then two song/prayers:

1)      First, we say the mitzvah berakhah--"lehadlik ner shel Hanukkah." [to light the Hanukkah lights]. This defines the act of lighting the Hanukkah lights as a "mitzvah," a commanded religious experience, and establishes an expectation that this act can lead--if we have the proper intention--to an encounter with the Divine.

Dr. Ron Wolfson is the Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University and the president of Synagogue 3000.