Thirty-six

The hidden righteous, the candles of the eighth night, and chai twice over: three thirty-sixes, and only one of them is a gematria.

Thirty-six is written with two letters. Lamed is thirty, vav is six, and the pair of them is how Hebrew has written the number for a very long time. In print a gershayim stands before the last letter, which the headword below does not carry, because every Hebrew string in these articles is set consonantally and without marks.

None of that is gematria yet. It is a writing system that never had separate numerals doing the ordinary thing it does with numbers, and it is no more mysterious than spelling thirty-six with a three and a six. The gematria begins one step later, when somebody notices that the two letters which write the number also spell a word.

לו=36

The value itself is not rare. 2,295 spans of our index carry it under the standard method, 2,259 of them single words, across 40 different spellings. That is the ordinary state of affairs for a small number in a language this compact, and it is worth holding in mind before anyone is impressed by a meeting of thirty-sixes.

The word that is thirty-six

The spelling לו stands 1,136 times in the twenty-four books, and that sentence has to be read as carefully as it is written. It counts a spelling. It does not count a word. The great majority of those occurrences are the preposition lamed carrying a third person suffix, to him or for him, which is one of the commonest things a Hebrew sentence does at all. Here it is in the second chapter of Bereshit.

The same two consonants, pointed differently, are a different word altogether: a particle of wishing. If only. Would that. It is not common, and where it does stand it tends to carry somebody’s whole heart in two letters.

Both of those are inside the 1,136, because this index is built on the consonantal written text and the consonants are the same. The door below opens on all of them at once, which is the honest way to show what a spelling count is: a pile of letters, not a pile of meanings.

Two other spellings come to thirty-six and both make the point again. אלה stands 370 times, and the lexicon behind this site’s English search does not give it a single entry: it is these, and it is an oath, and it is a man’s name, and in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra it is God. אהל, a tent, stands 124 times.

אלה=36 and אהל=36

The thirty-six righteous

The best known thirty-six in Jewish life is a tradition that the world is never without a small fixed number of righteous people, and that the number is this one. In Yiddish they became the lamedvovniks, hidden and unremarkable and holding the place up without knowing it, and around them grew a whole literature of stories.

The root of the tradition is Talmudic. This repository does not hold the tractates that carry the statement, so it is named here and nothing else: no line of it is quoted, and no daf number is given for it, because a plausible-looking address is exactly the thing a reader has no way to check. What can be shown is the verse the reading hangs on, and that verse is ours.

The marked word is where the number comes from. Happy are all they that wait for Him: the last word of the verse is לו, and לו is thirty-six. That is the whole of the arithmetic, and it is worth saying plainly what kind of thing it is. The word being counted here is not a rare or a loaded one. It is the same everyday preposition that stands 1,136 times in the twenty-four books, doing nothing in this verse except pointing at the One being waited for. A reading of that sort is a remez, a hint hung on a text that already says something without it, and the tradition never asked it to be more.

Chai twice

The second thirty-six is the one on the cheque. חי is eighteen, so double chai is thirty-six, and the same custom that gives 180 gives 360.

חי=18

There is nothing to check here and that is the point: it is two gematrias added, not a gematria of anything. The custom of giving in multiples of eighteen has no classical source, which is said at more length in the article about eighteen, and doubling a custom does not give it one.

The candles

The third thirty-six is counted rather than reckoned, and it is the one most often stated slightly wrong. A baraita in Shabbat sets out three levels of the Chanukah lamp. The obligation is a lamp for a man and his household. Those who beautify the mitzvah light one for each member of it. Those who go further than that are the subject of a dispute between the two houses: Beit Shammai light eight on the first night and reduce, Beit Hillel light one and add.

Beit Hillel’s eight nights come to thirty-six lights. So, and this is rarely noticed, do Beit Shammai’s. Eight down to one and one up to eight are the same eight numbers in opposite order, and the houses are arguing about the direction rather than about the total. The Gemara gives their reasons and neither one is arithmetical: the days coming in against the days going out, or the bullocks of the festival, whose number falls as Sukkot goes on, against the rule that in matters of holiness one raises and does not lower.

The thirty-six is therefore not the mitzvah. The mitzvah as the baraita first states it is one lamp a night, eight in all. Nor is thirty-six what the Rambam himself means by going further than those who beautify: he rules that a household lights one for each person on the first night and adds one for each of them every night after, and he works the example out himself. Ten people in the house: ten lights on the first night, twenty on the second, thirty on the third, eighty on the eighth. He stops there. Add his eight nights together and that household burns three hundred and sixty lights, which is thirty-six for every person in it.

The thirty-six most people mean is the practice the Rambam records immediately afterwards as the plain custom in all the cities of Sefarad: the whole household lights one on the first night and adds one, and ends at eight on the eighth. That is the menorah in the window, and its eight nights add to thirty-six.

One more light that is usually left out of the total. Rava rules that a second lamp is needed if a person wants light to use by, the Chanukah lamp not being lit in order to be used. He does not call it a shamash and neither does the baraita; the name, and the extra branch that holds it, belong to the practice that grew on his ruling. Either way that lamp is not one of the thirty-six, which is why the eighth night shows nine flames and not eight.

Three thirty-sixes

Not one of them is the same kind of thing as the others. The candles are counted, the way a person counts anything. Double chai is two gematrias added together, which is arithmetic performed on a custom. Only the word at the end of the verse in Yeshayahu is a gematria in the ordinary sense, and what makes that reading part of the tradition is that the tradition carries it, not that the letters add up. They were always going to add up to something.

The number is a good one to think with, and the door above will show you every place it stands in the twenty-four books. It will not tell you who the thirty-six are. The tradition takes some care not to, which may be the best kept part of it.