Displaying the Miracle

Pi r s u m e i N i s a

By Barry Landy As my friends know very well, I have been a very keen skier for many years, and have very often taken a skiing holiday over the school winter holiday. Inevitably, since Chanukah and Xmas usually occur around the same time, many of these skiing holidays have included Chanukah. As a result, we have lit our Chanukah candles in some very strange circumstances.

Quite early in our family skiing career (1975?) we hired a flat in a chalet in Verbier. The chalet contained three self catering flats, and the tour company took us all in a bus from Geneva. Much to my surprise a little way into the journey up pipes a voice "Aren't you Barry Landy?" I could hardly deny it! It turned out that the voice came from a student who had left Cambridge just a few years earlier, and he and a large group of Jewish friends were staying in the flat below ours. For the first and only time on such a holiday we had a minyan for -Shabbat and- for Chanukah too. On another occasion we left home in the middle of Chanukah, when it was still daylight, and knew that we would not arrive in the ski resort until after dawn the next day. It was the third day of Chanukah - how were we going to light our candles? I solved that one in a rather eccentric, and possibly dangerous, fashion. We lit the candles in the car, while waiting in the port car-park for the cross channel ferry. I knew in advance how long the wait was likely to be, and how long the candles burned, and made sure that they would complete their duty before we had to drive onto the boat. I hope the people next to us in the queue enjoyed the (somewhat muted) strains of MaOz Tsur which emanated from our car.

This brings me to the title of this article, Pirsumei Nisa. or proclaiming the miracle. The Chanukah candles are lit in a very precise manner; one the first day, two the second, and so on, up to eight the final day;

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moreover, they have to be lit where they can be seen by the public. The purpose of all this is to proclaim the miracle, a public demonstration intended to get people to ask what it is all about so that we can tell of God's greatness. That time in the Channel port car park was indeed Pirsumei Nisa even though no-one asked us any questions (how British!). The strangest time of all occurred in 1987, the year that our eldest son Aron got married. After the wedding, Ros, our youngest son Joshua, and myself went skiing in Meribel. It was Chanukah, and we lit candles before we left - the timing being different from the earlier occasion - and then lit them again the next evening in Meribel. Of course, we placed them in the window where there was a possibility that they might be seen - Pirsumei Nisa! A little while later there was a tentative knock at the door. We opened the door “Are you the flat where there are Chanukah candles?” What a surprise! Then (of course) "Don't I know you?" - it turned out that Joshua and one of the two at the door were acquainted having met at a Bnei Akivah camp. Inevitably, it was the turn of the wedding photos. “But that's Jo Ebner!” What a small world, and all because we displayed our Chanukah candles to fulfil the mitzvah of Pirsumei Nisa.

In December 2005 Ros and I left Ushuaia at the Southern tip of South America (near Cape Horn) on a two week cruise to Antarctica. Sometime after booking the cruise (in November 2004), I realised that the whole of Chanukah would happen on the cruise. This presented two prospective problems: firstly, ships do not allow people to light naked flames because of the fire risk; secondly, the problem of sunset. So far as the problem with lighting candles was concerned I purchased an electric menorah over the Internet and arranged to connect it to the power supply via a timeclock so that the lights would go out automatically and I would not have to disconnect them. I reckoned that was the best I could do in the circumstances, and it certainly felt sufficiently yomtov-dik when we lit the lights and sang Maoz Tzur in our cabin. For the first few nights of Chanukah we were able to light after dark, though admittedly that was late in the evening, around

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