Dear Mordechai,
If oil is the bigger mitzvah, why do kids light with candles?
Chana Kuh
Dear Chana,
Because you can’t have kids pouring huge jugs of oil into tiny glasses, unless you want to turn your house into an environmental disaster. Not only that, but when we’re constantly grabbing our kids to stop them from going near the flames, the last thing we want is to make them more slippery. Candles are much more child-friendly to set up, unless you count trying to jam the candles into holes that are generally too small for them, and then just trying to screw them in.
Dear Mordechai,
My wife and I cannot settle this question: Is it menorah or chanukiyah? And now the kids are crying.
Sooki A.
Dear Sooki,
OK, so apparently there’s more than one word for the fixture that we light, and this is a pretty big sticking point. The people who call it a chanukiyah say that a menorah has seven branches, like in the Mishkan, whereas a chanukiyah has nine. Meanwhile, the people who call it a menorah say that’s too bad, but chanukiyah isn’t a word. That’s like saying that challah has to be made of three pieces formed into a braid, and if it has more, there has to be a new word for it. Why do we draw the line there? Maybe chanukiyahs are the weird-shaped ones that are decorated with cats and snails and basketball teams and choo-choo trains. They didn’t have that in the Mishkan. Maybe menorahs have to have oil, and the ones with candles are called chanukiyahs. You think they lit colored candles in the Beis HaMikdash, and the kohanim had fights every night about who would choose the colors, and the Kohen Gadol had to scrape out the wax the next morning with a series of rapidly-breaking toothpicks?
The chanukiyah people are also severely outnumbered. The yeshiva world seems to say menorah, as does the Mishna Berura (for instance, see 671:27, 17th skinny line, 5th word), and the secular world – trillions of non-Jews – say menorah too, mainly because if they can’t agree on a single spelling of Chanukah, there’s no way they’re going to figure out chanukiyah. No one says Hanookiyah. The only difference is that frum people say meh-NO-rah, and secular people say meh-NOR-ah.
My point is that if you say chanukiyah, it’s an uphill battle. At best, it’s a less-used synonym that’s mostly only used in sentences when you’re trying to show the difference between menorahs and chanukiyahs.
Dear Mordechai,
We sing, “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made you out of clay.” Has anyone ever actually made a dreidel out of clay?
Dry and Ready
Dear Dry,
Not one that spins. That guy is in for a disappointment.
Also, he’s talking to a dreidel.
It happens to be that no one makes dreidels anymore. Your kids come home with them every year, like you used up all the ones from last year. The last thing you want is more dreidels flying around the house. You will never in your life have enough people in your house for the number of dreidels you own. And if you don’t believe me, go out and buy that many folding chairs.
“So what’s up with the song?” you ask. It’s called poetic license, which means that as long as you rhyme, you don’t have to make sense. Doctor Seuss built a whole career on this.
But maybe we actually should change the song to reflect how we get dreidels in real life. Here are some options: