The popular and well-known liturgy that we now use for Kabbalat Shabbat is probably one of the latest to take shape as part of our liturgical canon. Lekha Dodi, which many of us consider the center and highlight of the service, is a relatively recent composition, written in Safed by the 16th-century kabbalist, Rabbi Shlomo ha-levi Alkabetz. (It is amazing that a prayer could have been added into our ostensibly fixed liturgy at such a late date and still have achieved near-universal acceptance by Jewish communities in almost every country.) The current list of chapters of Psalms that we say to begin Kabbalat Shabbat is also not very old. Surprisingly, one of the oldest elements of our expanded Friday night liturgy is the recitation of the second chapter of Mishnah Shabbat, Ba-meh madlikin. The earliest source that mentions this custom is Seder Rav Amram Gaon in the ninth century.
In every synagogue I have ever attended, Ba-meh madlikin is mumbled very quickly. This is hardly the ideal way to study Mishnah, particularly a difficult passage dealing with technical issues regarding wicks and oils appropriate for Sabbath lights. Some rabbis attempted to make the recitation more meaningful. For example, R. Eliyyahu ben Binyamin Wolf Shapiro (born in Prague in 1660) records that one of the great rabbis of his generation used to recite Ba-meh madlikin in the chant that was normally used when studying Mishnah, “and not like the multitude who recite everything the same way.”1 But I have yet to find an Ashkenazic synagogue that does so. 2
A common misconception is that the central theme of Ba-meh madlikin is a discussion of the mitzvah of lighting Shabbat candles for ritual purposes. This is not the issue addressed 3 by the question, “With what may one light and with what may one not light?” or by the detailed answers. Just as today we have lights other than ritual candles on in our homes on Friday nights, so people before, during, and after Mishnaic times wanted to have well-lit homes for the Friday night meal. The chapter delineates which kind of lights may be used to light the home. The concern is that certain types of oils and wicks are likely to require care, and accordingly you might find yourself, perhaps in an unthinking manner, fixing or adjusting the light on the Sabbath, which is a forbidden action. Another concern might be that the light generated by the lamps on the forbidden list would be of such poor quality that people would have no choice but to abandon their dark homes on the Sabbath. 4
The logic behind the recitation of this text appears to be that people ought to be reminded on Friday what lights are appropriate in their homes on the Sabbath. But by the time of Friday night services, it is too late to tell people what they should have lit at home. Advocates of the custom of reciting Ba-meh madlikin at an earlier point in the service often disparage the more common Ashkenazic custom (which almost certainly was the original custom 5 ) of reciting it after Ma’ariv, because by then it is obviously too late to fix your candles. 6 But no matter how early in the Friday night service people recite Ba-meh madlikin, it is hard to imagine that there was enough time for it to serve any practical purpose, even in the days when people used oil lanterns.
Many early sources give a less rational reason for reciting this prayer: to protect the safety of latecomers at synagogue by making the service longer. 7 The concern was that if the Friday night service were too short, stragglers would still be reciting their prayers while the majority of congregants were already leaving. Those latecomers who finished their prayers and walked out of the synagogue alone might be subject to the dangers posed by mezikin (presumably this meant demonic forces, not muggers) who might accost people walking alone at night away from residential areas.
Aside from whatever difficulties might be connected with such a justification, it is obvious that it is borrowed: this rationale was originally given about a different Friday night prayer and then was grafted onto Ba-meh madlikin. The Babylonian Talmud uses this reason to explain why an abbreviated reader’s repetition of the Amidah is recited on Friday nights. 8
A fascinating modern scholarly theory about Ba-meh madlikin is that it developed in the ninth century as an anti-Karaite measure. Some Karaites took the restriction of “kindling fires” on the Sabbath 9 to mean that Jews must sit in the dark in their homes on Friday nights. 10 It is commonly felt that both the creation of a blessing for lighting Shabbat candles (a blessing that has no source in the Talmud) and indeed the central importance placed on ritual Sabbath candles are a result of rabbinical attempts to fight against Karaite practices. Naphtali Wieder has argued reasonably that Ba-meh madlikin is also part of that anti-Karaite campaign. 11
Aside from the problem of reciting at breakneck speed a difficult chapter of Mishnah full of details irrelevant to life in the age of electricity, one line in it sticks in the craw of many moderns:
Mishnah 6: For three sins women die in childbirth: because they fail to be careful about niddah (laws of menstruation), hallah (laws of giving dough to the priest), and hadlakat ha-ner (lighting candles).
It is little consolation to note that the Babylonian Talmud takes pains to explain that it is not only women’s fate at liminal points in their lives that is determined by their punctiliousness in observing mitzvot; men too, whenever they find themselves doing the potentially dangerous kinds of things that men sometimes do, 12 are subject to scrutiny and punishment for careless religious behavior.
Even when this mishnah refers to a woman “lighting candles” it is not referring to the ritual lighting of candles that we know. It seems to be referring to three areas of life that were generally – for different reasons – in the control of women and that affected the religious lives of men. A man whose wife is not punctilious about the laws of menstruation will end up sinning because of her laxity. Women are assumed to be the ones who bake bread and light lamps that illuminate the home. 13 So if women fail to be careful about the laws of separating hallah when baking bread, men (and women) will end up eating forbidden food. And when women light the wrong kind of lanterns on Friday afternoon, men (and women) may end up breaking the Sabbath laws.
A brilliant teacher of Kabbalah and Hassidism in Jerusalem today, Sarah Ben-Arza Friedlander, has attempted to provide modern meaning to this line from the Mishnah. 14 But I have often heard people wondering out loud whether it might be possible simply to remove this prayer from our liturgy.
Although in general, removing prayers from our liturgy is not easily done, curiously Ba-meh madlikin is actually one prayer that was successfully eliminated by the hassidic or proto-hassidic authorities who put together the liturgical style known as Nusah Sefarad. Often Nusah Sefarad introduces into the Ashkenazic liturgy various elements of Sephardic practice. But although both Sephardic and pure Ashkenazic liturgy recite Bameh madlikin on Friday night, somehow Nusah Sefarad has eliminated the prayer.
Some recent authors have noted this phenomenon 15 and have tried to explain how it happened. Rabbi Yosef Levy 16 writes that, although he can find no written reason why Nusah Sefarad got rid of Ba-meh madlikin, he has a few theories. First, the text is less meaningful to us because, as Rabbi Abraham Gombiner wrote already in the 17th century, we do not use the same kinds of wicks and oils that were described in the Mishnah. 17 And if the purpose is to make the service longer to protect latecomers, Nusah Sefarad has added a passage from the Zohar (Kegavna) just before the Barekhu prayer. Rabbi Levy speculates (unconvincingly 18 ) that the custom of reciting Bameh madlikin originated in the days when people recited the Minhah prayer on Friday early in the day and recited Ba-meh madlikin then, leaving plenty of time to go home and set up the Sabbath lights appropriately.
The innovations of Nusah Sefarad preceded the rise of Reform Judaism, before the days when Orthodox Jews started to defend the sacrosanct nature of every part of the prayer book, even the parts dealing with lamps that none of us use. It is unclear how we could initiate a movement today to substitute another prayer for Ba-meh madlikin. But I do not think it would be considered heretical if an individual congregation decided to keep the same basic structure of the service but replaced Ba-meh madlikin with a different and more relevant selection from Mishnah Shabbat: for example, Chapter 16, which deals with rules of emergencies on Sabbath; Chapter 22, which deals with reheating food; or Chapter 23, which deals with the issue of preparing for a weekday while it is still Sabbath. Or perhaps every week a teacher could teach a mishnah or two from tractate Shabbat at that point in the service, and thus the congregation could learn all of Mishnah Shabbat in a cycle of a few years. Surely a change that would have the community recite or study halakhot in a more meaningful manner can only be for the sake of heaven.