The Lamp, the Dough, and the Open Gates

Why Do Women Light the Candles?

It is Friday afternoon. The challah is cooling, the table is set, and somewhere in the house someone is watching the clock. A few minutes before sunset, a match is struck, a flame catches, and a hand circles the light three times. The house changes. Nobody announces it, but everyone feels it.

Why is this particular mitzvah, along with two others, handed to women? The Midrash Tanchuma, at the very start of Parashat Noach, asks exactly that. Its answer is blunt. Chava (Eve) “spilled” Adam’s blood, “defiled” the world’s challah, and “extinguished” Adam’s lamp. So women were given niddah (the laws of family purity), challah (separating a portion of dough), and hadlakat haner (lighting the Shabbos lamp).

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin, the great Chassidic thinker known as Rav Tzadok, takes that answer and asks the next question. If these three mitzvos are repairs, then what, precisely, was broken? In Pri Tzaddik on Noach (sections 5 and 6, or Ois 5–6), his answer reaches from the kitchen to the cosmos. The damage touched every layer of the human soul. The repair lives in three humble acts. And, a few paragraphs later, the same teaching opens onto a calendar of world history, in which a secret door of wisdom swings open.

This blog follows that thread. Along the way we will meet a lamp that burns over an unborn child’s head, a “light of Gehinnom” that is not what it sounds like, and a Flood that was, in a strange way, an offer of Torah that was turned down.

Three Layers of a Person

To follow Rav Tzadok, we need one piece of Chassidic vocabulary. The soul is not a single thing. It has layers. The lowest is the nefesh, the life-force that animates the body: breathing, appetite, instinct. Above it is the ruach, literally “spirit,” the seat of emotion and the heart. Highest of the three is the neshamah, the part that thinks, understands, and is closest to God.

Rav Tzadok’s claim is that the first sin damaged all three layers, and that each of the three women’s mitzvos is aimed at one of them. Here is the map in his words, as the Midrash lists them:

“And it said: What did women see to be commanded regarding these three mitzvot? She spilled his blood—let her shed her blood and observe her niddah. Challah—she defiled the challah of the world. Candle lighting—she extinguished the candle of man.”

— Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 5¹

Take them one at a time.

Challah and the nefesh. The Midrash compares the creation of Adam to making dough: first a mist rises from the ground and moistens the earth, then God forms the human being from the dust.² Adam, in other words, was the world’s first dough, and the life-force that animates his body is the nefesh. Chava “defiled” that dough. Every time we separate a portion of dough for God before baking, we reclaim our physical life, our eating and our bodily energy, as something that can be holy. The Shem MiShmuel adds that challah also heals division: many grains of flour become one mass, and sanctifying its first portion repairs the lack of unity among the Jewish people.³

Niddah and the ruach. Here Rav Tzadok draws on a subtle point in the Talmud. Not all blood in the body is the same. Most of it is the blood of the liver and limbs, which sustains physical life. But the Sages speak of a small, refined measure of blood, a revi’it, that rests in the heart, and the commentators explain that this pure heart-blood is where the emotional spirit lives.⁴ When the Midrash says Chava “spilled Adam’s blood,” Rav Tzadok hears the damage to the heart, to emotion and desire. The laws of niddah discipline and purify exactly that.

The candle and the neshamah. For the last one, the Torah itself supplies the image: “The soul of man is the lamp of Hashem” (Proverbs 20:27). The Gemara teaches that God tells us, “The soul I placed within you is called a lamp, and I warned you concerning the lamp.”⁵ To light a physical lamp is to tend, symbolically, the highest part of ourselves. Torah Ohr even sees the four letters of God’s Name hinted in a lamp, a picture of the Divine disclosed inside an embodied soul.⁶

One honest note. The Gemara itself never lays out this three-way map of soul levels. It is Rav Tzadok’s own reading, a way of hearing the Midrash on a deeper frequency. Still, it is a striking sign that another Chassidic work, the Shem MiShmuel, reads this very Midrash through a three-part lens of body, soul and intellect, and finds that all three were turned toward evil in the Generation of the Flood and toward good in Noach himself.⁷ This is why, he says, the Midrash is such a fitting way to open this parashah.

Why the Candle Waits for Shabbos

There is a puzzle in the map. Challah and niddah apply all week, but the candle belongs only to Shabbos. Why?

Rav Tzadok’s answer rests on a teaching of the Zohar and the Talmud: on Shabbos, every Jew receives an additional soul, the neshamah yeseirah.⁸ During the week, he says, we mostly live with the two lower levels, nefesh and ruach. The highest layer, the neshamah, comes into its own on Shabbos, “a soul in which all perfection dwells, like a taste of the World to Come.” That is why the mitzvah that repairs the neshamah is the one tied to the day when the neshamah arrives.

Then Rav Tzadok does something beautiful. He connects the Shabbos candle to a lamp most of us have never seen. The Talmud describes a baby in the womb: a lamp is lit above its head, and by that light it sees from one end of the world to the other. It is taught the entire Torah. And it has no evil inclination yet, since, as the Talmud notes, “sin crouches at the door,” meaning at birth, not before.⁹

That lamp, Rav Tzadok says, is the ohr makif, a “surrounding light” that hovers over a person rather than being inside them. The extra soul of Shabbos is the same light returning. And so, on Shabbos the evil inclination has no real dominion, because we are standing once more in the glow of the unborn.

“And likewise on Shabbat the additional neshamah … is also the lamp above the head, which is an encompassing light (Ohr Makif), such that the evil inclination has no dominion on Shabbat.”

— Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 5

Why does the baby forget it all at birth? The Noam Elimelech gives a lovely answer. We are taught the whole Torah before we are born, and then an angel strikes us lightly on the mouth and we forget, so that the Torah can remain inside us as a hidden potential. Later, when we learn it for its own sake, we reach the Torah that was already written within us.¹⁰ The Beit Yaakov of Izhbitza makes the same point from a different angle: the light we had in the womb was a gift, and we are meant to earn it back through our own free choice.¹¹

Rav Tzadok adds that this is also the “hidden light” of Creation, the light of the first day, which Adam could use to see from one end of the world to the other. When God saw how the Generation of the Flood and the Generation of the Dispersion behaved, the Talmud says, He hid it away for the righteous.¹² The Shabbos candle is a sliver of it. Some early masters would light thirty-six lamps, one for each hour this hidden light served Adam before it was stored away.¹³

The Light of Gehinnom

Now Rav Tzadok turns to a real paradox. Why would the Midrash use darkness to prove that a Shabbos candle is a delight? Because, it says, the people who descend to Gehinnom, the realm of spiritual cleansing after death often translated as “hell,” are judged only in darkness.¹⁴

“And if you say to sit in darkness, this is not delight, for those descending to Gehenna are judged only in darkness.”

— Midrash Tanchuma, Noach, as quoted in Pri Tzaddik

But the Gemara calls something by a surprising name: the “light of Gehinnom,” one of seven things created before the world itself.¹⁵ How can the same place be both pitch-dark and full of light?

Rav Tzadok’s resolution is that Gehinnom is not one experience. It depends on who walks in. The Talmud says that some sinners are so locked in refusal that even at the gate of Gehinnom they do not repent.¹⁶ For them, judgment truly is darkness, because it teaches them nothing. They hide from the truth in life, and they hide from it still.

But a Jew who has stumbled, and who stands before God and says, “Master of the Universe, You have judged well, You have acquitted well, You have condemned well,” is in a different place entirely. The moment the soul accepts the truth, the same judgment turns on a light. Rav Tzadok even tells of a pious man who said, before his death, that he did not fear Gehinnom, because there he would merit to recite such beautiful praise of God’s justice.

“For them Gehenna is termed ‘the light of Gehenna’; for once they enter it—it illuminates for them, and they acknowledge the righteousness of the judgment upon them.”

— Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 5

And the stay is short. The Talmud says that Avraham Avinu comes to lift his descendants out and receive them.¹⁷

This is a very Chassidic idea: fire is fire, but what it does depends on how we meet it. A later work puts it sharply. The fire of transgression is itself the fire of Gehinnom. But the fire a person kindles in his heart for the mitzvos is called the fire of God, and it cools and consumes the fire of Gehinnom that once burned within him.¹⁸ The Tanya says the same about repentance out of love: a soul that has been in “a parched land” thirsts more intensely than the souls of the righteous.¹⁹ And in the Bat Ayin’s words, the righteous “transform darkness into light.”²⁰

Shabbos: Eden in Time

Rav Tzadok then connects the candle to the word oneg, “delight,” from the verse “You shall call the Sabbath a delight.” The letters of oneg (עֹנֶג) are the first letters of Eden, Nahar (river), and Gan (garden), the Garden of Eden and its rivers. On Shabbos, the Midrash says, the Jewish people are like “she who dwells in the gardens” (Song of Songs 8:13), standing in Eden.²¹ Gehinnom is darkness. Shabbos is the opposite. It is light.

The Kedushat Levi hears something similar in the word itself. The letters of Shabbos can be read as shuvu, “return.” On Shabbos, Israel returns, recognizes that the pleasures of the weekday were tied to something lower, and is given an extra soul so that its delight is in Torah and mitzvos.²² The Sefat Emet adds that the “hidden light” is a foretaste of the World to Come, and that Shabbos carries some of it, a righteous person living within time.²³

This is why Rav Tzadok can say something that sounds almost too large: a Jew who truly guards Shabbos according to halacha is, in that moment, personally redeemed. The Talmud teaches that if Israel kept two Shabbosos properly, they would be redeemed at once.²⁴ The world as a whole is judged by its majority, Rav Tzadok notes, so that redemption has not yet arrived for everyone. “Nonetheless,” he writes, “every individual soul who observes Shabbat according to its halakhah is immediately redeemed.”

From the Candle to the Flood

Why does this teaching sit at the opening of Parashat Noach? Because, Rav Tzadok says, the story of the Flood is the story of a repair that almost happened.

In the Generation of the Flood, the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu was already present, and it was the moment to give the Torah, to repair the whole blemish of the first sin across nefesh, ruach and neshamah. Instead the generation corrupted itself. The waters that might have been life-giving became “raging waters,” the waters of the Flood, and this is what the Midrash means when it says that women die over these three transgressions. A Chassidic commentary on Genesis even says that the Flood generation sinned in the realm of the body and covenant, and so were judged by the very element they abused.²⁵

The next generation, at Babel, adds a twist. Everyone spoke one language and shared one purpose. That sounds like unity, but the Midrash says God was grieved, for this was a gathering built to rebel.²⁶ The Talmud has a rule for this: when the wicked gather, it is bad for them and bad for the world, and when the righteous gather, it is good for both.²⁷ Not every togetherness is holy, and Rav Tzadok notes that this generation also opposed the quality of tzaddik, which is called peace.

And Rav Tzadok ties it to Creation. On the sixth day God looked at everything and said it was “very good.” The Midrash asks what that extra “very” could mean, and one answer is that it includes even the evil inclination.²⁸ The sixth day, he says, corresponds to the quality of tzaddik, the “righteous one,” who guards the covenant. Its time is to rectify the damage of the first sin, and the Flood generation was the exact opposite of it.

Six Hundred: The Zohar’s Calendar of Wisdom

Now the second half of Rav Tzadok’s teaching begins, and with it the strangest passage in the parashah. The Zohar, commenting on the verse that the Flood began in the six hundredth year of Noach’s life, reveals that this is a code.²⁹

“In the six hundredth year of the sixth millennium, the gates of wisdom above shall open and the wellsprings of wisdom below, … and your sign is: ‘In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life … all the fountains of the great deep burst open.’”

— Zohar, Vayeira 117a, as quoted in Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 6

How do we read this? The Talmud says the world lasts six thousand years, with a seventh that is “entirely Shabbos.”³⁰ Rav Tzadok maps the seven millennia onto the seven days of Creation and the seven emotional qualities of the soul. And a thousand years, he says, is “a day to God,” a day made up of ten attributes each containing ten, each of those containing ten.³¹ The Yismach Moshe adds an important caution: before the Infinite, a moment and a thousand years belong to the same category, so time here is a lens, not a stopwatch.³²

The second day of Creation is the only one on which the Torah does not say “it was good.” Rav Tzadok connects that gap to the second millennium, the age of the Flood and the Dispersion. “Good,” in Torah language, means the righteous, and those generations were the opposite.³³

The sixth millennium, then, corresponds to Yesod, “Foundation,” the quality of the tzaddik who guards purity. This makes it the era meant for repairing the wound at the heart of the story. And the year six hundred of that millennium is Yesod of Yesod, the moment of deepest readiness.³⁴

Rav Tzadok sketches the whole arc in one line. First comes a stretch of human effort: six hundred years in which a person must refine his own desires, “from his own initiative,” as the six qualities of the heart require. Then God bestows wisdom from above, the “gates” and the “wellsprings.” After that, a final hundred years correspond to Malchut, “Sovereignty,” the Days of the Messiah, which are a kind of extra holiness added at the end of the week and lead into the seventh millennium, the day that is entirely Shabbos. The Shem MiShmuel puts the goal beautifully: all the repairs from the many incarnations are gathered together, and from them a complete, repaired stature is formed.³⁵ And the Bat Ayin sees in the Zohar’s words an allusion to the redemption, “speedily in our days.”³⁶

Two Springs, One Healing

What are the “gates above” and the “wellsprings below”? Rav Tzadok reads them as two kinds of Torah.

The gates above are the Written Torah, which comes from the highest wisdom, from the light that opened Creation with “Let there be light.” It is the light the Psalmist promises: “Light is sown for the righteous” (Psalm 97:11).³⁷ It is given from above to the person who overpowers his inclination.

The wellsprings below are the Oral Torah, the Talmud and the living give-and-take of Jewish law. It grows from human reasoning and effort, and it works on the heart. This is the verse “The light of the righteous rejoices” (Proverbs 13:9).³⁸ Where the first light is given, this one is earned, and it makes a person glad.

“‘And the wellsprings of wisdom below’ is the Oral Torah, which is ‘much wisdom’ to rectify ‘much grief,’ and this avails to straighten the heart.”

— Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 6

Why does any of this matter for repentance? Because the Zohar contains a frightening line: for a serious blemish in the area of the covenant, “there is no repentance.” Rav Tzadok does not soften that, but he explains it. Ordinary repentance flows from the heart, the level of Binah (understanding). And the wound of the first sin touched life itself. If a person could repair it perfectly through the heart alone, he would never die, as Adam would have lived forever had he fully repaired the blemish. Instead Adam died at 930, short of the thousand years that make up “a day.” So heart-repentance, however sincere, cannot reach all the way down.

But Torah can. Torah comes from a higher root, Chochmah (wisdom). The Talmud applies the same idea to the house of Eli, whose sin could not be erased by offerings but could be erased through Torah.³⁹ And the Book of Proverbs says of Torah’s words: they are “life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh.” Rav Tzadok notes that the Torah uses the word “flesh” for this very blemish, since in holiness it is called “holy flesh,” and the opposite is called “the flesh of donkeys.”⁴⁰

“And the Torah brings healing even to this blemish.”

— Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 6

Here is the tragedy of the Flood in Rav Tzadok’s eyes. In Noach’s six hundredth year, God was ready to give the Written Torah. The generation did not want it. So God offered the lower wisdom, the wellsprings of the Oral Torah, in the hope that it might at least reach their hearts. “All the fountains of the great deep burst open” is the sound of that offer. That too was refused. And the waters of wisdom that were refused came down as the waters of destruction.

For Rav Tzadok, the lesson cuts the other way for us. Noach was called a tzaddik because he did not corrupt himself with his generation, so he could serve as a vehicle for the quality of Yesod.⁴¹ After the year six hundred of the sixth millennium, he says, whoever wants to return to God in truth will feel heavenly assistance, the sense that the gates of higher wisdom stand open. The Shem MiShmuel quotes the Sages to the same effect: if you want your ear, or any of your limbs, to be spared suffering, incline your ear to Torah and you will inherit life.⁴²

There is a hopeful footnote to the Flood story. The Mei HaShiloach teaches that after the Flood, Noach was left with a deep awe: a person should not expand without limit according to his own desire, but should hold back his spirit.⁴³ Rav Tzadok’s whole teaching is about that discipline. The first six hundred years are a time of restraint, of refining the appetites, and only then does wisdom pour down. Restraint is not the opposite of joy. It is the doorway to it.

Back to Friday Afternoon

So what began as a question about a candle ends with the architecture of history. What connects them?

One answer comes from the Tiferet Shlomo, who hears in the very verse describing Noach a hint of Shabbos itself. Noach, the Zohar teaches, corresponds to the Shabbos day, a source of rest above and rest below.⁴⁴ Another comes from the Tiferet Yosef of Radzin, who notes that before Noach the world was still in a state of the “worlds that were broken.” Look at Cain and Abel, he says: two brothers listed with no connecting word between them. But with Noach, the Torah writes “Shem, Ham and Japheth,” linked by the Hebrew letter vav. From Noach onward the world of tikkun, of repair and connection, begins.⁴⁵

And Shabbos is the weekly rehearsal of that repair. Each week we are given, for twenty-five hours, a taste of the world as it will be: no evil inclination ruling us, an extra soul, a light that was hidden since the first day. And the Zohar’s closing image is not about the end of days at all. It is about a person on Friday afternoon.

“And the world will be prepared to enter into the seventh, like a man who prepares on the sixth day from the setting of the sun to enter into Shabbat.”

— Zohar, Vayeira 117a, as concluded in Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 6⁴⁶

That is the person we started with: the one watching the clock, the match in hand. The whole of history, the Zohar says, is getting ready in the same way, setting the table, straightening the house, waiting for the sun to dip so the light can be lit.

When a woman strikes the match, she is not only following a custom. In Rav Tzadok’s eyes, she is doing the repair that began with Chava’s mistake: lighting the lamp that was put out, welcoming back the light of the unborn child, and opening one of the gates that the Flood generation shut. The candle is small. What it stands for is not.

Based on Pri Tzaddik, Noach, Ois 5–6 (Akiva Publishing interlinear edition) and its source audit.