Lamplighters, To Your Stations

By Rabbi Shimon Posner, Shliach in Rancho Mirage, California

What is a Chasid, you ask? The question was asked more than a century ago; the illustrious master answered, “he is a lamternsh’chik, a lamplighter.” But you live in the here and now, and so you ask, what is a lamplighter? He was a common figure in the world before light pollution camouflaged the night. The gas lamps were prepared, fuel and wick, and come eventide the lamplighter-fellow with his long stick, carrying fire at the far end, would light each lamp as he worked his way down the street.

The Rebbe pointed out that the lamplighter finds the wick and fuel of each lamp ready and able; all the lamternsh’chik needs to do is bring his light in close enough proximity to the lamp and the lamp will begin to glow. So too, every Jew has his wick and fuel, a legacy of the matriarchs and patriarchs. He needs no Hasid to provide him with anything, to convert him, to change him into something she was not. The chasid only brings close his own flame: the lamp’s flame ignites on its own.

And so now it is Erev Chanukah and the lamplighters must be at their station, wherever on the globe, whatever the venue: an old-age home in Casablanca, a youth hostel in Nepal, Champs Elysee or the Kotel, no matter. They must make sure their own light is pure and unadulterated, honest and full, warm and glowing, inviting and illuminating. Because a thousand lights are not nearly enough, as his Rebbe’s appetite for Jewish life was insatiable. Every Jew. Everywhere.

On this day, Erev Chanukah, my grandfather died, a few months after his Rebbe passed. And he was a lamplighter, my zaide. He started the career late in life, at age 38 or so he moved to Pittsburgh “To open a yeshiva” my grandmother told her new neighbors when she got there. “A yeshiva in Pittsburgh?” a man snarled, holding up his open palm, “there will grow hair on the palm of my hand before you get a yeshiva in Pittsburgh.” Sholom Posner this was, and his wife Chaya.

They were Maccabees my grandparents. Not brooding about Greek armies nor American melting-pot values. He made sandwiches my granddaddy, for each of the six students in his school. He would have danced on the table or done handstands on a fighter jet if it would keep them in yeshiva. He even went shnorring door to door, not because he didn’t hate it or because he was adept at it but because it had to be done.

He was not the first lamplighter in his family. His uncle, born in Austria and schooled in cheder there, arrived in America and began work as a lamternsh’chik. While still in high school, he went from streetlamp to streetlamp kindling them each evening. Philip Sporn eventually received an engineering degree from Columbia and became president and CEO of American Electric & Gas Company, the largest utility company in American at that time and the first Jew to break a glass ceiling of that magnitude. He designed Israel’s electric grid – if I understood what his widow told me. Ben Gurion would telegram ‘I need you Wednesday’ and he would respond ‘Coming’.

When Eshkol took over he asked the same. Uncle Phil responded ‘But I promised France I’d be in Paris that day.’ Eshkol took the Israeli equivalent of Air Force One to Paris to meet with Uncle Phil for a few hours and then flew back. A magazine in my parent’s attic had the cover story of ‘The Ten Most influential Jews in America’ and Uncle Phil’s picture was on the cover. (This does sound improbable, Google it.)

Uncle Phil adored my grandfather (the affinity of lamplighters?) and saw him as philosophy professor potential. I’ll pay for you to learn English, he offered the starving immigrant with a wife and two kids. I’ll pay your way through college and make sure you get a position, he continued, it will not be shameful charity, you will repay me on your own terms. You won’t need to compromise on your religiosity, he assured him, (he respected it even if he couldn’t fathom why so intelligent a man held onto that stuff) but , he suggested, consider trimming your beard just a bit , and wear shorter coats. The starving Chosid didn’t dismiss the offer outright, but together with his wife concluded, that if before Uncle Phil had extended funds there are already suggestions, what will be once they accept dependence on him? Their poverty remained intact: a cousin from my grandmother’s side, the Tzeitlins, told me how once her father gave my grandmother a case of eggs for Yom Tov. She sold half of them to buy wine and matzahs and with the other eggs made Yom Tov. Philip Sporn was a lamternsh’chik who embodied the American dream; Sholom Posner was a lamternsh’chik who defined what Americans should dream.

He had such faith in his students, the youth, more than they had in themselves. “The Amalikeh Amalikeh zeinen de greste Amalikeh,” he said in a Yiddish play on words that teigt auf kapores if you translate it into English.

And if he read what I write about him I know exactly what his reaction would be; when his wife would tell a story in which he was the main character he just stared off into space like husbands do when their wives talk about a shopping spree. So no one makes a big deal about him, but he was one of the first and the few lamplighters in America when it was a vocation disdained.

I light the yartzeit candle for him and arrange a minyan for my father to say kaddish for him. And now Chanukah is nearly upon us. To your stations, lamplighters!!! But for one moment, before you touch flame to wick, in a fleeting second of which no one will know but you, pay homage to the few, the brave who lamplighted before it was a concept.