[Avodah] re; women lighting candles

[Elazar M. Teitz]

<I've often half-jokingly claimed that there is a separate women's Shulchan Aruch, written by and for women, completely independent of the men's SA. This is the SA where it is written that dirt is chometzdik, that Shabbat comes in when you say the bracha on the candles, that if you miss lighting one week you have to add a candle for the rest of your life, not to touch a sefer torah while niddah, and a lot of other things that men have never heard of.  Women learned halacha from their mothers and grandmothers, not from their fathers, so there was some divergent development.  A very feminist view, actually.>

     If men never heard that saying the b'racha of candle lighting is kabbalas Shabbos (in the absence of a stipulation to the contrary), then it might be because they haven't learned enough.  It dates back to the Rishonim, appearing in the Mordechai.  It is doubtful that women would have been allowed, on their own, to abrogate the din of oveir la'asiyasan.  

     As for the addition of an extra candle, it is mentioned in the Maharil, who is one of the prime sources for Minhag Ashk'naz.  Parenthetically, I suspect that this minhag may be the source of another one -- adding a candle for each child.  In the past, women were considered too weak to light in the week after giving birth -- see MB 263:11, who (in discussing the din that women have priority over men in the mitzva of hadlaka) says that the husband lights in that first week.  Thus,  each time she gave birth, a woman missed a week of lighting, necessitating one more candle for life.

     What might be in that women's SA is that if several women are in one home, each lights, rather than the hostess lighting for the house, thus treating lighting Shabbos candles as a chovas haguf rather than what it is, an obligation on the home.  However, it _is_ a time-honored custom (unlike, say, the custom for unmarried girls to light, which is less than fifty years old.)

EMT


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