From the Mishkan to the home: The Torah’s commitment to light

Exodus 25:1 – 27:19

One of the most revealing ways economists have measured long-term human progress is by examining the cost of producing light.
This approach was developed most influentially by William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work reshaped how economic growth is measured over time. Among the insights for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize was the observation that, for most of human history, light was among the most expensive goods people could produce. Even modest illumination required substantial labor, and sustained illumination required enormous effort. Only very recently did the cost of light collapse.

That insight helps recover something that is otherwise very hard for a modern reader to see. In the context of Parshat Terumah, where the Torah details the construction and service of the Mishkan, the commandment of collecting or producing “shemen la’maor,” a continuous supply of high quality oil for illumination, can sound like a minor technical detail. Today, light is ambient and inexpensive. We leave it on without noticing. Against that backdrop, the requirement of a steady flow of pure oil for the Mishkan’s lighting can easily be underestimated.

But that intuition is misleading.

If one applies Nordhaus’ framework to the menorah described in Exodus 25, the scale becomes clearer. A straightforward calculation of the menorah’s annual light output, translated into the labor required to produce that amount of light in the ancient world, yields many thousands and plausibly tens of thousands of hours of work per year. Expressed in modern terms, that places the annual cost of shemen la’maor on the order of something close to a million dollars per year in today’s wages. The exact figure depends on the assumptions one makes, but the order of magnitude is unmistakable.

Once that scale is restored, the commandment looks very different. This was not symbolic lighting. It was not decorative. It was a permanent, recurring and highly visible allocation of real resources.

That observation leads to a deeper point. From an economic perspective, light is discretionary. It does not feed anyone. It does not clothe anyone. It does not extend productive labor. The Torah’s decision to mandate an extraordinarily costly form of illumination, sustained day after day, indicates that this expense was not incidental. The cost itself defines priority. Shemen la’maor is a case where the Torah legislates an obligation whose seriousness is inseparable from its expense.

Seen this way, the commandment does not stand alone. It sets a pattern that reappears deliberately in later halachah.

Both nerot Shabbat and nerot Chanukah are treated as unusually serious obligations. They are not optional enhancements, and they are not limited to those for whom they are financially convenient. On the contrary, halachic sources address these mitzvot explicitly in the language of real cost.

With regard to Shabbat candles, the Talmud rules that ner Shabbat takes precedence even over kiddush because of shalom bayit (Shabbat 23b), a ruling codified in the Shulchan Aruch. Lighting is not presented as an aesthetic choice, but as an obligation with economic priority. With regard to Chanukah, the standard is even sharper. Mishneh Torah famously rules that a person who lacks funds must beg or even sell clothing in order to obtain oil and wicks for the mitzvah.

Those rulings only make sense in a world where light is expensive.

What emerges is a clear continuity. The menorah represents a national commitment to sustaining an extraordinarily costly form of light in the Mishkan. Shabbat and Chanukah candles relocate that same logic into the home. The scale is smaller, but the principle is unchanged. These mitzvot are taken seriously precisely because they demand expenditure even when that expenditure is felt.

The Torah’s insistence on light is not about illumination itself, but about a willingness to bear real costs for what a society chooses to sanctify. In Parshat Terumah, that commitment takes the form of a national obligation to sustain the menorah’s light in the Mishkan, even at great expense, as a standing declaration of what stands at the center of communal life. Later, in the home, Shabbat and Chanukah lights ask each family to reenact that same choice in miniature, turning ordinary oil and flame into a concrete statement of what they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of God, memory and peace. PJC

Rabbi Yitzi Genack is the rabbi of Shaare Torah Congregation. This column is a service of the Vaad Harabonim of Greater Pittsburgh.