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By the Light of the Lamp
Rabbi Joshua Kulp
My four year old daughter had long hair. My six year old son was a five year old boy–you know what I’m saying. The year I’m imagining is about 2005, our third child was still too young to understand what we were doing–although he could run around pretty well for a one year old. Up until that year, we had been doing bedikat hametz the way I grew up doing it. With a candle, feather and bowl. Either I or my wife would hide the hametz, the kids would fight over who got to hold the candle, and we would go from room to room looking for the hidden hametz. It was fun—for them. For me this was traumatic. As I said, my daughter had long hair and my son was six. Don’t worry, there were no disasters, but I was worried. So around that time, I began to rethink some of my treasured rituals.
Mishnah Pesahim begins with, “And on the night (at twilight) of the fourteenth, they examine [their homes] by the light of the lamp.” Tosefta Pesahim 1:1 justifies this practice in two distinct ways:
On the evening of the fourteenth, we check for hametz by the light of the lamp, not by sunlight, not by moonlight, but rather only by the light of the lamp, since the light of the lamp is greater. Even though there's no explicit proof for this, there is a hint for it, "And in that time I will look through Jerusalem with lamps" (Zephaniah 1:12) and it says, "The lamp of God is a human soul” (Proverbs 20:27).
We can immediately note a tension in this halakhah and its justification for using the lamp to search at night. At first, the Tosefta claims that lamp light is better than any other light. We should acknowledge that this was probably true in their reality. Homes had few windows and it might have been quite dark most of the time inside, even during the day. A lamp at night might have provided more light than sunlight during the day and certainly more than moonlight at night. It would have been especially effective for looking into the holes and crevices in the walls and floors, as the Talmud states.
However, the Tosefta finds Scriptural proof that provides a more spiritual justification for the practice. When God searches Jerusalem with a lamp, God is not searching for God’s lost keys. God is examining the deeds of human beings, as others say, “trying to find out who’s naughty or nice.” The poetic verse in Proverbs implies that lamps are a symbol of holiness, of our own souls, a holy gift from God. These verses lend to an idea that gains prominence later–hametz is the symbol of evil and of our inclinations. We search for hametz as a symbolic means to root out the more troublesome aspects of our own character.
How we understand the preference for a lamp has ramifications in cases where bedikah would be more effective if performed by a different, non-symbolic, source of light. Bavli Pesahim 8a contains one hint in this direction–Rava states that a parlor of sorts (אכסדרה) is examined by its own light, i.e. sunlight and not lamp light.
Practical concerns about the problems with a lamp already began to proliferate in medieval Europe. For instance, R. Asher (14th century Germany and Spain) insists that the bedikah be done with a wax candle. Lamps using animal fat and oil could fall on plates and clothes causing all sorts of problems. At the same time, as I wrote in an earlier article, the idea that one could completely remove all of the hametz from one’s home on erev Pesah was already out of date by the medieval period. As we do today, people were cleaning their homes earlier, leaving the bedikah on erev Pesah to be largely ceremonial.
Poskim were left with a tension. On the one hand, Talmudic law views the bedikat hametz done on the night before Pesah as a “real examination.” One is supposed to really search for hametz and not just play a game of hide and seek with the kids. There is no doubt that an electric flashlight is in every way more effective than a candle, and a lot safer. On the other hand, traditional Jews have been using lamps and candles sincde the time of the mishnah. A 2000 year tradition is not easily dismissed. So which is more authentic–adherence to the purpose of the bedikah or to its traditional accouterments?
Rabbi Melamed, the author of the modern halakhic guide Peninei Halakhah, writes the following:
In practice, each person may choose how to conduct the bedikah – with a candle, as Jews have done for generations, or with a flashlight, whose light is better for the bedikah. One may even begin with a candle, in keeping with tradition, and continue with a flashlight, which is better for searching. In places where the searcher is concerned that the candle will cause a fire, or if one does not see well by candlelight, it is preferable to search with a flashlight.
In my home, we use a flashlight. I began to do this when the kids were young, mostly for safety reasons and due to the massive drips of wax all over the floor. As the kids grew older and the danger diminished, this had already become the family’s custom. And we do try to make this a “real check”--we look in drawers, I try to see if there are any bags that were not checked, etc. But I acknowledge that there is a loss in using electricity for what used to be done without it. Would I say that God’s flashlight is the human soul? Is the light on the back of my phone really appropriate for a spiritual activity? I would not use an electric Hannukah menorah, even though there are poskim that allow this. On the other hand, I have picked up my phone at the end of a concert and turned on the light on the back and raised it in the air as a sign of my love for the band (probably the Grateful Dead)–safer and more effective than the old lighter system. Effectiveness and tradition can clash, and how we combine them in our practical and spiritual world is one of the challenges of modernity.
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