Hannukah Merriment
Tonight will be the first night of Hannukah so I thought it’d be a prudent time to share a pair of new ideas for having fun during the festival of lights:
1) Duck, Duck, Hasmonean
2) Pin-the-tail on the Seleucid
Any other ideas for things we Jewschoolers could do tonight to usher in another year of Hannukah?
Today Drudge linked to this jpost story about how an environmental group in Israel is trying to get people to light one less candle to reduce carbon emissions.
But wouldn’t it be better if we just cut all our candles in half? Instead of burning 8 fewer candles over the course of the holiday, we’d burn the equivalent of 22 fewer candles without having to alter our menorahs.
That would work if the candles still burned for the requisite amount of time (roughly a half an hour I think). Personally I think this lighting one candle less thing is absurd. I mean it’s a mitzvah people and what kind of an effect could it really have? There are far better ways to show how green we are without being dumb.
the micah– For those of us keeping halacha, that isn’t an option– half a regular candle won’t burn long enough. Lighting one less candle (especially if it were the shamash [“helper”] candle, would be workable.
Better yet environmentally, I suppose would be the actual bare bones halacha of one light per night. But I think getting people to go along with it would be tricky, since the increasing light is a powerful image.
I wonder if any fuels are better than others. I light with olive oil (which also gives me more ability to fine-tune how much I use, assuming my hand doesn’t slip).
Also, I agree every little bit counts. But I’m not sure that this is the largest of our environmental problems.