Why Daniel Pink is Wrong About Hanukkah

Or, as I prefer to spell it Chanukah (and you'll see it spelled yet a third way further on as I quote). I know, I know this is the wrong time of year to address the topic when we've already put away the menorahs and are thinking about buying fruit platter  to celebrate Tu B'Shvat. But please bear with me as I've just recently got his book When from the library and noticed the jumped over to the discussion of the Hanukkah candles on pp. 120-124.


It starts off innocently enough by asserting that the number of candles used with the shamash should total 44, the number that come in a box, yet people are always left with some. I thought, of course, because the little candles don't burn long enough for the menorah lights on Friday. That's when you have to substitute Shabbos candles, tea lights, or those specially sized beeswax candles for the standard candles that only burn 45 minutes at most.

But that wasn't his take. What he was advancing was a conclusion based on "The End Justifies the Means, but Only in the Middle" by Maferima Toure´-Tillery and Ayelet Fishbach University of Chicagthis study. You can read the whole article online here:  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.298.5004&rep=rep1&type=pdf  starting on p. 5J if you want to check it out for yourself. Before I checked the original source for myself, I figured that there is no way these are Orthodox Jews -- even though Pink related that they sought out those who said they were religiously committed enough to keep kosher -- and now that I found it, I see I was correct.

Here's what it says about the subjects:

Method Participants. Two hundred and two students (42 men, 160 women) at Ben Gurion University, Israel, participated in the experiment in return for candy prizes. All participants were Jewish, and all indicated that they observe Hanukah. Our sample did not include orthodox Jews, whom we assumed would observe the ritual on every single night.

Now this is particularly fascinating because the overwhelming majority of their subjects are women. Even though women are included in the obligation, in many circles they don't light their own menorahs. In fact, in Sephardic tradition, only the male head of the household lights for anyone in the house, including other men. The breakdown of percentage of lighters fails to identify if more females than males don't light. Also while they identify as religious enough to eat kosher, I'm not sure that in the context that signifies as much as it would for Jews outside Israel. It is much easier to keep kosher in Israel than it is anywhere else. In Israel, you can enjoy kosher McDonald's, Pizza Hut, etc., and not feel like you have to compromise on kashruth to go out to eat with your college buddies. Perhaps a better signal for religious observance in this case would have been students who abstain from work on the Sabbath.

So the sampling itself is flawed. But let's look at the figures they extract from it, nonetheless. What it does identify is a progressively diminishing participation that doesn't really pick up at the end to the extent Pink suggests to make this study fit his theory about strong beginnings and endings.
Here's the actual table in the study:

First night 76% light.
Second night 55%
Third night 50%
Fourth night 48%
Fift night  49%
Sixth night 43%
Seventh night 45%
Eighth night 57%

Yes, more people lit on the eight night than on night 3-7, but only slightly more than night two and not nearly as many as night one. That indicates that the uptick at the end Pink is so fond of with his U graphs doesn't quite come up to the starting point. So while the study may show waning interest that gets some revival at the end, it's rather a weak rally.

Now the follow up to this study of 202 involved just 40, again predominantly women (14 men, 26 women) at the same university. This is not exactly a random enough sampling on which to draw the conclusion that they do. In their own words:

We conclude that people judge skipping religious traditions at the beginning and end of a goal sequence more harshly than they judge skipping traditions in the middle of that goal sequence. Because self-evaluation mirrors interpersonal evaluation, such a pattern of interpersonal judgment could imply that people weigh their own beginning and end actions more heavily than their middle actions. 

Anyway, back to what I had guessed and confirmed about the level of religiosity of the Jews in question as a background to my own theory about what may be going on here. The stress on the first and last day of the holiday could well be steeped in their consciousness of the other extended holidays we have. We have Pesach with Yom Tov and the first and last days with Chol Hamoed in between. And we have Sukkoth  that beings with Yom Tov to proceed into Chol Hamoed, followed by Shmini Atzeres. So without getting overly detailed about the halachos involved,  there is that pattern set in which the first and last days are the more serious and stringent and more intense in their way than the rest of the days.

But the greatness of Chanukah is that it is not that way at all. It's not a great start that tapers down only to be remembered again at the end. On the contrary, it's a holiday of added momentum in which we build up to the final blaze of all eight candles to carry the light on into the rest of the year -- even without the act of lighting.  Ultimately, Chanukah is the very antithesis of this weakening in the middle that Pink is describing through second-hand observation of a study that is given a lot more merit than it deserves in light of (no pun intended) the deficiency in the sampling. It's not just the beginning and the end that matter but what we do throughout our lives.

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