Evening comes early in winter, filling the streets with darkness and cold. Amid the electrical glare, a warmer, purer glow asserts itself from doorways and windows: Chanukah lights illuminate the night.

“For a mitzvah is a lamp, and Torah, light” (Proverbs 6:23). The essence of our mission in life is to shed light: every time we fulfill a mitzvah we are lighting a lamp, illuminating a world darkened by ignorance and strife with the wisdom and harmony of the Creator.

Every mitzvah is a lamp, but two mitzvot whose fulfillment involves the generation of physical light actually mirror their quintessential function. These two mitzvoth are: the lamps of the menorah, which were lit each afternoon in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem; and the Chanukah lights, kindled at nightfall each night of Chanukah.

Indeed, the Chanukah lamps are the offspring of the Temple’s menorah. They were instituted by our sages to commemorate the miraculous rebirth of light in the Temple after its suppression by the Hellenist rulers of the Holy Land.

The Temple's menorah was a five-foot high, seven branched-candelabra made of solid gold and topped with seven oil-burning lamps. Its seven flames, fueled by premium olive oil prepared under stringent conditions of spiritual purity, were the physical expression of the spiritual light which emanated from the Holy Temple, the epicenter of G-d's manifest presence, from where light emanated to the entire world. Attempting to supplant the spirituality of Israel with the paganism of Hellene, the Greeks invaded the Temple, defiled it with their decadent images and rites, and contaminated the oil designated for the menorah.

But one family refused to yield to the darkness. Matisyahu the Hasmonean and his sons the Maccabees rallied and drove the Greeks from the land. After liberating the Holy Temple, they searched for ritually pure oil with which to light the menorah. They found a single cruse of oil that had survived defilement. Miraculously, the one-day supply burned for eight days, until new pure oil could be prepared.

Every winter for over more than 2,100 years, we reenact the triumph of light over darkness with the eight flames of the Chanukah menorah.

A Different Menorah
There are, however, several differences between the Chanukah menorah and the Temple’s menorah:
a) The Temple menorah was lit during the day (before sunset) while the Chanukah lights are kindled at night (immediately after sunset, or after three stars come out, depending on custom.)

b) The original menorah stood in the inner Heichal sanctum of the Temple. The Chanukah menorah is placed at the perimeter of the home, on the outer doorway or, if one lives on the second floor, in a window overlooking the street.

c) Seven flames burned in the Temple menorah. The Chanukah menorah holds eight lamps, all of which are kindled on the culminating night of the festival.

Why these dissimilarities? Generally, there is a rule-of-thumb that all rabbinical institutions are modeled after their biblical prototypes. So why, in instituting the kindling of Chanukah lights, did our sages so differentiate between them and the lights they are meant to commemorate?

Standard Operating Procedure
G-d saw the light that it is good, and He separated between the light and the darkness. And G-d called the light day and the darkness He called night; and it was evening and it was morning, one day. Genesis 1:4-5

In the beginning, darkness and light were one--a single, seamless expression of the goodness and perfection of their Creator. But G-d wanted contrast and challenge in His world. So He separated between light and darkness, between revealed good and concealed good, challenging us to cultivate the day and control the night.

Our task is to harness the light of day so that it illuminates the night. We strive to preserve and develop all that is good and G-dly in our world, and to direct these positive forces to overcome and transform the evil and negativity of the dark side of creation. This process was exemplified by the menorah in the Temple: kindled in the light of day, its rays reached deep into the night; kindled in an inner sanctum brimming with divine light, radiating to the mundane world outside.

But there are times when this standard procedure is no longer operative. Times when darkness invades the divine lighthouse, extinguishing the menorah and defiling its oil. Times when we can no longer draw from the day to illuminate the night.

On such occasions, we must turn to the night itself as a source of light. We must search for the hidden single cruse of pure oil, for the undefilable essence of creation. We must delve below the surface realities of day and night to unearth the primordial singularity of light and darkness.

Therein lies the significance of Chanukah, when the menorah moves from within the Temple out into the street, and from daytime to evening. Chanukah transforms the menorah from a tool that disseminates the light of day into a tool that extracts the luminous essence of darkness itself.

The Temple menorah stood in the holiest place on earth, the seat of G-d's manifest presence in the physical world. The Chanukah lights, however, test the limits of our light-generating capacities. Placed in the doorway or in a window, they straddle the private and public areas of our lives, the boundary between the home and the street.

Light journeys through time and space to ever duskier vistas, to increasingly alien environments; a journey from midday in Jerusalem to the darkest reaches of a world awaiting redemption.

Cycle and Circumference
This explains the difference between the number of lamps in the Temple and Chanukah menorahs.
Seven is the number of creation. G-d created the world in seven days, employing the seven divine sefirot attributes which He emanated from Himself to serve as the seven spiritual building blocks of creation. Seven is the dominant number in all natural cycles and processes. Hence, the standard operating procedure to bring light to the darker corners of creation is associated with the seven-branched menorah of the Holy Temple.

If seven is the cycle of nature, the number eight represents the circumference that defines and contains it, the pre-creation reality that both transcends and pervades the created reality. If the seven lamps of the Temple menorah embody the normative process of overriding darkness with light, the eight lamps of the Chanukah menorah represent the endeavor to access a higher reality--a reality in which darkness is but another ray of divine truth.