Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

Here in one place are links to the pieces I've done related to Purim and our contemporary world that I think are particularly worth a look or listen this year. For reading, listening, or watching.

Introducing Adar Conversations: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy (read and video)

Getting to Mi Yode'a ("Who Knows") -- Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World (video and podcast; courtesy of Valley Beit Midrash)

Responding to Antisemitism After October 7, With Esther As a Guide (video) -- with Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls: Wisdom From the Book of Esther (read)

Tov! Podcast About Judaism and "The Good Place": Chapter 24 -- Mask, Costume, True Self (video and podcast -- with Rabbi Ilana Schachter and Cantor Daniella Risman

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls -- Wisdom From the Book of Esther

This was Dvar Torah for Shabbat Zachor last weekend, March 8, 2025.

Last year at this time, I coined a term for a brand-new approach to wellbeing. I called it EIST, for “Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.” The big idea is that the Purim story is the best mirror in entire Tanakh, the whole Bible, for Jews like us.

Like us, the Jews of the Megillah are described as living in a vast and diverse world, all across the 127 provinces of the Persian Empire ruled by King Achasheverosh. Like us, the Jews of the Megillah were living in a world of material abundance, at least for some; and like us, the Jews of the Megillah, at least some of them, had two names, a Hebrew name and a Persian name.

Like our world, the world of the Jews in the Megillah has a random quality, where fate is a throw of lots; and the Megillah world is a morally topsy-turvy world in all kinds of ways, represented also as a tipsy world with all these drinking parties around King Achashverosh.

And like our world, inherent in the Megillah world is what we would today call antisemitism. It came to the surface easily, as ideas which could be spoken in the halls of power and converted into violence all over society.

The Megillah holds up a mirror to our world and then shows us a way out of it. That’s what Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy would be: the mirror we need to see things in and around us clearly, and the wisdom and practices to help us walk through and hopefully emerge strong and well.

The part of it I want to talk about this Shabbat is about antisemitism. This is Shabbat Zachor, and we have read in the Torah and the Haftarah about this people Amalek who are thought to be the most incorrigible enemies of the Jewish people, because they are the most ruthless people imaginable. Haman in the Megillah is their descendant. These are difficult readings, but rather than bury them it’s better for us to face them.

My question for today on Shabbat Zachor is not whether there is antisemitism around us, because there is. And it’s not whether there is more of it than a couple years ago, because there is. Or even whether it’s worse on the anti-Israel left or the white nationalist right, because both are far more active and in the open than they were ten years ago.

My question is about who we are as we perceive and experience antisemitism, directly in our lives or as we read and see film of it in our world. Will we continue to be the Jews we know we ought to be? Will we perceive hate in so many directions that we can’t look at ourselves in the mirror anymore, because we are too busy looking over our shoulders?

Every single day I get an email from the Anti-Defamation League titled “Campus Crisis Alert.” It has a little red siren icon next to the sender in my inbox, so it stands out from my other emails. It doesn’t matter what happened that day on what particular campus – I get a “Campus Crisis Alert.” It doesn’t matter if the content of the email contains mostly good news, about actions taken by Jewish students or university administrations! It’s still called “Campus Crisis Alert.”

I think the ADL is an incredibly important organization and yet I find the daily crisis alert alarming, for a different reason than they do. I have my own campus insider, my daughter at Barnard, and this week was a particularly bad one there. Talk about not knowing the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman – the material handed out at sit-ins that obstructed classes and barricaded a dean in her office is actual Hamas material. There was a crisis there this week and I’m not sure it’s resolved.

Yet even there, not every week is a crisis of antisemitism, and I know this from my insider. The hostages are a crisis. Antisemitism is a problem. There are groups invested in maintaining the crisis feeling, within the Jewish community and within our American politics. But as Jodi Rudoren, the editor-in-chief of The Forward, wrote this week -- when you’re in a crisis you can’t think straight, and when you say you’re always in a crisis you excuse yourself from ever having to think.

So what do Esther and Mordechai teach us, who were absolutely in a crisis of antisemitism? What’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we need?

The most important single moment in the Megillah is in Chapter 4, when Esther is first learning about what everyone else already knows about, the decree of genocide that Haman has persuaded King Achashverosh to issue. Esther first pleads powerlessness – I cannot go to the king, if you are not called and you go that’s sure death, and he has not called me for thirty days.

Mordechai sends a message back to her:

“If you keep silent, yes silent in this time,
spaciousness and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will disappear.
And who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.”

כִּ֣י אִם־הַחֲרֵ֣שׁ תַּחֲרִ֘ישִׁי֮ בָּעֵ֣ת הַזֹּאת֒ רֶ֣וַח וְהַצָּלָ֞ה יַעֲמ֤וֹד לַיְּהוּדִים֙ מִמָּק֣וֹם אַחֵ֔ר וְאַ֥תְּ וּבֵית־אָבִ֖יךְ תֹּאבֵ֑דוּ וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃

Obviously Mordechai is giving Esther a charge to stand up for her people, for us the Jews. But it’s a very nuanced charge.

Mordechai says to Esther: You have to speak, because right now the Jews do not know what to say about what is going on. All we are doing is wailing and crying out, or speaking without clarity. Someone needs to give better words to this moment, and someone needs to starting guiding us and giving us something constructive to do.

It needs to be you, Esther, because it needs to be someone who is powerful and not powerless. And you are actually powerful, even though you think your power is tenuous. And who knows, maybe the purpose of your power is not simply what I Mordechai originally thought when I sent you in this direction. It’s not that you have status, that you’re my insider. Your power as a Jew is important for the rest of us to see, so we will not feel as vulnerable as we currently think we are.

Mordechai says: If you do not define what this moment requires and what it means, someone else will. One way or another this Haman decree is going to be thwarted. But if you do not stand up, someone who is not you Esther with your moral voice, probably someone not even Jewish – someone else is going to come and rescue us. And then they will say we owe it all to them, to some outsider, and we will be beholden to their truth forever.

And if that happens you and the legacy you are part of will disappear; the moral heights you had in reach will mean nothing.

Mordechai says to Esther: It’s a matter of revach v’hatzala. Hatzala means rescue, so physical safety. Revach is spelled like ruach – spirit. What’s at stake, Esther, is not only our safety but our souls, our neshamas. You can help us not only survive but keep our hearts intact.

And Esther responds in remarkable ways. Last year my colleague Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed taught me that Esther starts to realize that she has all these servant-girls who revere her as queen. To them she is absolutely the queen, a person of power and stature, and she can ask them to do things for her.

Esther tells Mordechai to direct the Jews to take three days and focus and fast. Fast for me, she says, tzumu alai. She asks them to concentrate on her, to take their minds off the enemies for a time and instead put their attention on her – what she is all about, what she will do and how she will guide them. She is reminding them that even this crisis isn’t a tomorrow crisis; the edict will take months to play out. We don’t need a solution tomorrow, though we do need one. But if we don’t figure it out right this second all is not lost.

After three days she takes what seems like a risk, but it all dissolves when the king sees her. The text says that Esther has the quality of chein, that she is a catalyst for the grace and graciousness in everyone who meets her. It was there the moment the king’s servants first met her, and it’s why the king chose her even though he’s too much of a buffoon to remember until she invites herself back.

I like to think that from there, everyone sees Esther in a high profile summit with the king and Haman -- and the Jews realize that she is okay, not just safe but in control. And they are able to exhale, and think.

When the king finally takes her side and our side, the Jews of the empire absolutely had to stand up in self-defense. But Esther worries that the Jews are learning the wrong lesson – that the only answer to Haman’s violent plan is violence; that the problem isn’t just Haman and his circle but an entire empire of people who may be ready to carry out his plan. So Esther sends a letter to the Jews of the entire empire and instructs them: We will remember Haman’s plan, and we will remember what I did and how we all stood up for each other.

And as we do it, as we retell a story with violence, we will send gifts to each other, mishloach manot, and we will take care of those in need among us, matanot la’evyonim. We will be what we want the world to be at the exact moment we are remembering when the world was not.

We will tell not only about Haman – we will tell about us, on our terms. We will tell that a Jew is someone who does not bow down to any human, that a Jew is someone who looks out for the life of the king and the welfare of the kingdom.

That’s the way out. That’s what the EIST therapist would say to us.

Esther and Mordechai lived in a world something like ours, and actually in a crisis time. The antisemitism we face in the U.S. is not a crisis like that which threatens our very existence. It’s instead a problem, a real one and a big one. And part of solving problems, and being able to strategize, is to protect who you are, the best of who you are.

That includes not letting your enemies define you, or give them control over your consciousness, your rhythm, your daily life.

So in addition to advocating for ourselves and pushing back on the falsehoods, some of what we need to do right now is to refocus ourselves on mitzvot and to see ourselves, each of us, as people of mitzvot – to love our own Jewish neshamas.

We have to be good to each other even more, Jew to Jew, at a time when not everyone is good to us.

We have to be excellent friends to other groups who are also going through things now, loyal allies. We are not the only ones with problems. Esther at the end of the story was not just a Jewish heroine, but queen of the whole empire. We have to remind ourselves of our own power and to use it for good.

We have to continue to keep faith about America and its ideals, its promise, its pluralism, even when that faith seems like a leap of faith. We have to believe in an American Jewish future that is a good one. We cannot give those things away, because then our fears will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of us have to be willing to be uncomfortable. To see ourselves as strong enough to go and talk to people or in places we worry we will be attacked. It’s what I have been doing. You might be surprised by what happens in some of those places.

There are many people doing all of these things in the Jewish community now, and so many of them are the college students, especially on the campuses where it’s hardest. They are so inspiring.

As Mordechai says to Esther, Mi yode’a – who knows if this is why we are the Jews here today at this particular time, during this generation of challenge for American Jews and for Jews everywhere.

When it comes to antisemitism especially since October 7, Revach v’hatzala yaa’amod la’Yehudim – we need security and our souls, both at the same time. Esther and Mordechai showed us how we could secure ourselves and even make our souls larger in the process. That’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we have all been looking for.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

Being Jewish Is More Than Anti-Anti-Semitism

This was my D’var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 23, 2024.

This is my closing address for our six-week conference of the Society for the Advancement of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.

Today is Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat that comes before Purim. Shabbat Zachor is the dark set-up for a zany festival.

Zachor means “remember.” We are charged in the Torah to remember the particularly brutal attack on us by Amalek in the desert, and that single attack gets a treatment that even Pharoah doesn’t get for his years-long campaign of killing and enslavement. How on-the-nose is that for this year. Zachor in our era became a watchword for the Shoah, for Never Forget.

Of course in the Torah zachor means other things too. It’s in the Ten Commandments as zachor et yom hashabbat, l’kad’sho – remember the day of Shabbat to make it holy. It’s l’ma’an tiz’k’ru at the end of the Shma -- remember the mitzvot and do them. And often it is remember the Divine who rescued you from slavery and brought you to a land flowing with milk and honey. Zachor is also a prayer we fling at God in the Torah – remember us, your covenant, our ancestors and their kindness and loyalty. Remember, God, to be who You are supposed to be in this world.

“Remember” as a concept in Torah is about bringing something to the forefront that is fundamental, but that we might have lost track of. All those zachors are hyperlinked with each other. So Shabbat Zachor is about bringing to the fore what it fundamental about us as Jews, when we are re-experiencing the confrontation with Amalek. Amalek is a symbol of physical threat and also represents our opposite: the ones who do not have awe for the Most Awesome One, and who choose the weakest to attack and kill rather than to help. The thing is: How do we pour energy into remembering Amalek without forgetting who we ourselves are.

Or to put it more simply – during a year of anti-Semitism like this, how do Jews remember to define ourselves as more than anti-anti-Semites.

There are three verses in the Megillah that I want to use to suggest an answer. One is from the beginning of Haman’s plot, one is the moment Esther decides to act, and one is after it’s all over.

Here is how Haman sells his plot to King Achashverosh, in chapter 3 of the Megillah (3:8-9): There exists one nation, dispersed and spread out among the nations, and their laws are different from every nation, and the laws of the king they do not do, and for the king there is no value in letting them be. If it seems good to the king, let it be written to make them vanish and I will weigh out ten thousands kikar of silver….

There is something perennial in this description of Jews are not fitting – not even fitting into categories of group that describe anyone else. We’re not in one place, we’re not just a religion, we’re not just a nation, and therefore we are hard to understand. And there is something so modern about Haman’s ancient description too. Noah Feldman recently described anti-Semitism as “shape-shifting”: “In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.”

So for many of those who regard capitalism as the fundamental evil of the world, Jews are identified as the secret bankers or by now the not-so-secret ones. For those who see immigrants as the big threat, Jews are the organizers of the “great replacement”, squeezing people of European origin and arranging to bring in people of color from Africa or Latin America. But for many who regard racism as the essential problem in America, the Jews through the Israel Defense Forces are the master trainers behind the most brutal practices of the police. If it’s imperial, Western exploitation that is the root of all evil, then Jews are the paradigmatic white colonialists. If it’s the corruption and weakness of Arab governments that are the problem, it’s because the Jews are occupying al-Aqsa or buying out Arab leaders, or manipulating the Americans. Etc., etc.

In each case, it’s like Haman said about the Jews – they are everywhere, they do what they want, and what would make our world better is exactly what these people don’t want. So it would be better if they were gone.

And there is always someone of stature who will listen because they are threatened by whatever that core problem is and desperate for an answer, or because there is money in going along. And once this gets out, there are plenty of people who buy into the problem statement and never thought about the real solutions, so they want to be on board and they will kiss Haman’s ring. And you never know when a Haman will speak to an Achashverosh and set all this in motion again in a dramatic way, as we are experiencing now.

Anti-Semitism isn’t about real Jews, but the reality is that we are the ones who attract Hamans all the time, and they aren’t just talk.

It’s real, and all of the anti-Semitisms I described are active and more, and not only in connection with Israel. I don’t pretend to be certain about what it means for us this year entirely. I was really sure that once Thanksgiving was over the campus protests would be over, and boy was I wrong.

Each time there is another anti-Semitic happening we are retraumatized, some of us even more than others, and each time our dreams of redemption absorb a blow.

We have to act, but the question is who are we when we do. Does zachor just mean to point these things out to other people relentlessly and keep our anger going to power us through?

And that brings me to a second verse, the next turning point, in chapter 4. Everyone knows Haman’s plot but Esther is just finding out about it from Mordechai. He sends her this message (4:14): If you stay completely silent in this time, relief and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will vanish, and who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.

Mordechai seems to say: This too shall pass, because it always does. The only variable is how, and whether you be in that story or not. You have arrived at royal power, higa’t lamalchut. The best thing for us is that you be the one to orchestrate our response, from that power.

As Jews we think we are not powerful. Or we are afraid that if we say to ourselves that we are, we will give up the moral authority that comes from being targets and having a history of oppression. And we are afraid that if we act out of our power, we will be identified with whatever is evil about the power structure in our world and vilified even more.

But Esther hears what Mordechai says and she decides that she has power, she has malchut. Yes, it is royal power in a political sense. But in the Kabbalah malchut is also the name for the closest that spiritual power gets to infusing our bodies and our world. Malchut in the Megillah is political power infused with spiritual power.

For four decades, we are more powerful than Jews have ever been. More powerful than the Jews who stood at Mt. Sinai and more than the Jews of the kingdom of David and Solomon. In Israel, to be sure, we are powerful because no conventional army or other group can threaten the existence of the state any longer. In this country, Jews since the 1980s have been prominent whether the administration is Democratic or Republican, not just the Henry Kissinger-type Jews by name only but people identified publicly by Jewish values and religion.

Which means that we are powerful even when we are in danger and when we are attacked. This week in Israel was the funeral of Daniel Peretz z”l, a soldier who was killed on or just after October 7. He had been missing ever since and only just now was there conclusive evidence that he was dead. There was a funeral and his family had only some of his blood to bury; they wait for his body to be returned along with all the hostages. The rabbi at his funeral said, “We are not weak. We are not helpless. Daniel did not fall in Auschwitz, and he did not fall in Bergen-Belsen. He fell as a hero of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

It makes a difference if we see our power, our malchut, even when we are struggling and even when God forbid Jews are killed. Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi said recently that the core thing is the difference between victimhood and vulnerability. It’s impossible after October 8, he said, for Israelis to see themselves as victims anymore. We try to hold onto victimhood as a way to get sympathy from the world, as a way around the arguments about the war. Yet the answer to Hamas and to anti-Semitism in the world can’t any more be our victimhood and it won’t be sympathy.

Because we have malchut, we have allies, some of whom respect us and some of whom love us and some of whom just find value in us instrumentally. Because we have malchut, we can take risks, we can go to places and be in conversations that are uncomfortable, and we don’t have to win over everyone today, or to win over everyone period. Because we have power, we don’t have to fear every single social media post that is ridiculous.

Because we have power, we know that we are not vanishing even when others aren’t seeing us, and we can value ourselves and other Jews no matter what other people are seeing or saying. Because we have malchut, we can even look critically at ourselves while we are fighting, whether that fighting is on the battlefield or in political debate.

It is better, the Megillah says, for us to do that, rather than wait for someone else to protect us or to be the moral voice in this moment that rescues us or forces us to act the right way.

Which brings us to the last verse I want to cite, from Mordechai’s instructions at the end of the Megillah about how Purim should be remembered forever (9:22): As the days when the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month that was turned around for them from sorry to joy and from mourning to festive joy, to make them days of feasting and joy, and sending portions each person to their neighborhood and gifts for the poor.

These verses establishing Purim don’t specifically mention Haman at all, and they don’t revel in the killing of tens of thousands of people to the degree that non-Jews were actually afraid to be seen as not-Jewish.

We are not in the “after” of the war that began on October 7, or the ripples out from that. We are reading the Megillah “during.” We are also eating our hamantaschen and exchanging our treats while people are starving in Gaza, and while a great deal of that responsibility lies with Hamas, we have part of the responsibility for that starvation. We can’t this Purim tell a story that’s over – not for the hostages, and not for any of us. And in the future we won’t be able to tell a simple us-or-them story when it is over -- yes about the day of October 7 but not about the days after.

Mordechai and Esther drop the mitzvot of mishloach manot and matanot la’evyonim into Purim. They are a tikkun, a repair, for the worry that we will read only a story of might against might, and that we will only remember and tell about our vulnerability and nightmares. These practices remind us that the Megillah is not only a story of successful anti-anti-Semitism, but also a story of malchut, of friendship, of solidarity, of prayer, of trusting Esther and each other.

In this vein, at a recent conference in Israel called Hasmol Ha-emuni, “The Faithful Left”, Rabbi Daniel Epstein gave an arresting speech. After saying that even though right now questions of security and strategy are pressing, and questions of life and death, Rabbi Epstein said the fundamental question right now must be: Who are we.

Who are we as Israelis, as Jews, as human beings?

I am who I am because I relate to the other, to the stranger, despite the enormous spiritual difficulty in doing so.

As I would a person like me, someone who deserves freedom, dignity and humanity.

Our Sages taught: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person” -- It is difficult to learn from every person, when your enemy denies you the very title of “person”, and when you do not see in him a person. But in order to learn from every person, you must first see them as a person. This is not surrender, nor is it a magic bullet, it is simply the hard work that is incumbent upon us.

And maybe you will say this is not the time -- but this is exactly the time.

If I am not for myself who will be for me;

And if I am responsible only for myself, am I still even me

So -- if not now, when.

So Mordechai and Esther make sure that in telling the story of Purim, we tell about who we were in the middle of it, when the outcome wasn’t known, about how we found each other again. And they ask us to make Purim a day to stretch ourselves as mensches.

And the Megillah says the Jews accepted this way of framing Purim and will forever remember it this way, that same word “remember” yet again: v’zichram lo yasuf mizar’am (9:28).

*****

We have to work against anti-Semitism, and we have to be more than just anti-anti-Semites. And it’s important for the world to see how do we both of those things. All the zachors of the Torah are hyperlinked. They are heavy responsibilities. But my many months of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy make me hope they might be not heavy so much as hearty. That inside each hamantasch we get tomorrow -- each pastry pocket into which we have transmogrified Haman – we might taste a different zachor, a different sweet and hearty filling. May we get to savor and digest them all.

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Purim Sameach.

Adar Conversation -- Getting to Mi Yode'a (Who Knows): Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World

Here is a session I did picking up on another of the themes I laid out in my talk a couple weeks ago. Grateful to Valley Beit Midrash for hosting it. You can watch or listen.

 

 

Follow the texts I refer to here on this source sheet at Sefaria.

Purim: The Buddy Film

This was my D'var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 16, 2024, Parashat Pekudei. which fell this year about a week before Purim.

It’s already after the Oscars, but I have a pitch for a new movie -- it could even be a franchise!

It’s about a pair of young friends who travel the world together. Every two years they pick a different spot. There has to be something grand about it -- imperial castles, or gaudy restaurants, or flamboyant festivals. They’re great friends who met in eighth grade and have always been just friends, nothing else going on there -- but each place they go, if anyone asks, they pass themselves off as cousins.

Before each of their travels, they do Wikipedia-level cultural research, giving themselves no more than two days to learn enough to choose new names to go by for the trip. Names that will help them blend in but are also a bit too on the nose. It’s kind of an inside joke between them. In Rome, for instance, they would be Sophia and Cesar, philosophy and empire.

You’re thinking: Entitled, alienated, bored millenials? Far from it. In fact the places they pick all have certain things in common.

They are prosperous places, but complacent. The ruling class is checked out, mildly corrupt, but mainly buffoons. There are latent tensions in society, whispers of racism and nativism, worries that it’s more. But the people who used to want to do something about it are stuck and have drifted away from each other. Nothing awful has happened there for a long time, but you never know. In each place there’s always someone who runs a boutique or a yoga studio or a food truck but used to be a young activist.

And here is the actual caper: The two friends choose these places in order to shake things up, to force the issue and help the people save themselves.

On the way, on the train, they talk through the whole night about all the big things. It’s like Before Sunrise or My Dinner With Andre. An hour before they arrive, they split up on the train so one will see they came together.

Once they arrive they head in different directions. She befriends the regional governor, who is (of course) recently single again. She takes language classes and always ends up starting an English-language book group for the other college students; they teach her colorful idioms and she brings them Shakespeare. He hangs out in the local taverns, figures out who the movers and shakers are, always buys the editor of the newspaper a drink.

For a few months, our gal and our guy don’t see much of each other. They pass in the streets and drop a note in each other’s pocket: Miss you, can’t wait to hang out. Did you catch that play, I think I’m learning enough of the language to get it. I heard the funniest joke, can’t wait to tell you. Dinner when we get back. Occasionally, someone notices these little connections between them and asks: Do you know each other or something? And they say: No -- well kinda. It’s my cousin; I can’t believe he’s here too.

After a few months, they know enough about the texture of the place to provoke the necessary crisis. You can probably fill this part in yourself: Local jerk who’s actually worse; owns a bunch of businesses; was the governor’s best friend back in the day. The jerk keeps selling the governor on changes to laws that one by one aren’t much, but together amount to a massive anti-immigrant crackdown. She gets her book group to raise their consciousness and take to the streets, and the owner of the boutique or yoga studio or food truck calls up her old friends and they group up too and show up together for the kids.

Right before the local jerk can make his final move, she invites him and the governor out to dinner at the gaudy restaurant down the path from the old imperial castle. She calls him out. The guy is run out of town.

Our guy and our gal, Sophia and Cesar or whatever they’re called this time around -- the people of the area finally put two and two together. They did know the other was here! The citizens honor them at a huge festival celebrating what they all achieved together. Speech, speech, the people demand, and you can write it: You people have welcomed us, you stood up for each other more than you ever realized you would because you’ve always loved each other, you just forgot for a time. Don’t forget anymore, tell this story, keep being good to each other. The two of us had to lose each other for most of a year -- don’t you all lose each other.

The people beg them to stay, but they have to move on. You know us as Sophia and Cesar, but that’s not who we really are. (In the film we learn her real name but never his.) Their year is done, and they’ve missed each other. They also need the friendship they saw all these people around them share, in the book group and the tavern and the streets. It’s time to find each other again. To tend to their own friendship for a year... and plan their next caper.

Do you recognize this movie?

If you think you don’t, think again, because the story I’ve told is the Megillah. Megillat Esther as: a buddy film.

I’ve taken a few liberties, of course; it’s my own fan fiction, my own midrash. But did I really? Couldn’t this be the story?  To give credit where credit is due, first of all I have to give a shout out to Paul Franks, who some of you know or remember from our community. One year around Purim at our Thursday Torah class, he said something like: The story of Esther and Mordechai is actual a heist; it’s Ocean’s Eleven. Something like that.

I’ve reimagined it instead as a buddy film, and I got the idea via Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who I quote here a lot, currently the leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. More on Rabbi Feigelson’s idea in a minute.

If the Megillah were a buddy film, wouldn’t it be great? In my pitch, Esther and Mordechai are old friends in every way. Their friendship is their company, the plays and the jokes they share, and how they want to change the world.

I’ve said before that within the Torah is absolutely one of the oldest buddy films of our culture. Moshe, Miryam, and Aharon -- they are for sure Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; they are Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Each one in the group has a special power; it takes all of them to defeat the Empire or Voldemort; and they goof around and poke fun at each other, and grow and gather other friends too around them for all of it. Yes, I know in each case there is some kind of family dimension that’s hidden or created -- but really all of these are about friendship first.

Rabbi Feigelson says our parasha, Pekudei, has a buddy thing going too. The construction leaders for the Mishkan (the desert sanctuary) are Betzalel and Oholiav. This is me and not Rabbi Josh but it seems like this could be a classic Odd Couple dramatic situation. Betzalel means “in the shade of the Divine” -- he’s the spiritual free spirit. Oholiav has “my tent” in it -- he’s the quieter homebody. Rabbi Josh wrote this week: “It makes sense to me that the Torah would choose to highlight two friends at the center of the creation of the Mishkan, as the word for friend, chaver, is related to a word the Torah itself uses to describe putting together the Mishkan, l'chaber.”

Am I just messing around here, or does this have something to do with Purim and Shabbat?

I would love for the Megillah to be a buddy story between two people who come to Shushan calling themselves Esther and Mordechai. But regardless, Purim is a friendship chag. There is a specific mitzvah that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere else in Torah, the mitzvah of mishloach manot ish l’rei-eihu, of friends sending portions to each other. I can’t think of any other  affirmative mitzvah that is about friendship.

In the story of the defeat of Haman and the rescue of a whole people, part of the story is friends. A pair of friends, small groups of friends, even devious friends. In the aftermath of this violent self-defense, there is a charge to do something sweet for your friends. Something about friendship itself is a tikkun at this time of year, a repairing thing.  A tikkun for the large-scale brokenness of the Purim story.

As I was reimagining the Megillah as a buddy film, I was thinking about the interplay between our purposes and our friends, and all the forms that takes. I was thinking how the small joys of friendship and the big things we contemplate in life interweave, and how some friendships come out of meeting people around a collective purpose. Or sometimes it’s with our existing friends that we just find ourselves talking about the big world things on our minds and our place in their tikkun, as we drift into and out of those conversations even in the midst of a casual dinner or a gathering for fun.

In buddy movies there are all kinds of these friendships with all kinds of rhythms. From the intensity of Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundance, to the quieter friendships, the once in a year or once in a reunion cycle reconnections. The friendships of extroverts and introverts. Maybe that’s why I imagine Esther and Mordechai as two people who pal around a lot, and also as two people who don’t see each other for a long time.

As we don’t live on bread alone, we also don’t live our dreams on ideas alone, or accomplish big things on meetings alone, or enjoy our lives on family alone.

The Purim practice of mishloach manot ish l’rei’eihu is a way to acknowlege that, to lift up the sweetness of the people we are friends with on any and all of those levels. Our tradition says a hearty treat is what we exchange, and it can be hearty food or even a hearty book!

And on Shabbat, we call the same kind of thing Shabbat dinner, or Shabbat lunch, or Kiddush at the synagogue. A day of friendship, with food made by friends and served by friends. We don’t go out on adventures, like in the buddy pics, but bring the stories of those adventures here, and as they project in the background we reconnect and talk.

There isn’t any aspect of our lives, any meaningful caper, that isn’t better as a buddy film. So on this Shabbat half an hour before Kiddush, and a week before Purim: May we send each other the blessings of Betzalel and Oholiav, of Moshe and Miryam and Aharon, of Esther and Mordechai.

Adar Conversations Continued: Esther and Responding to Anti-Semitism After October 7

Rabbi Karen G. Reiss Medwed and I recorded this conversation last night, and you can watch it on YouTube or listen as a podcast. The Megillah (the biblical Book of Esther) is a story of anti-Semitism set in the Diaspora in a multiethnic empire where Jews were living in peace. How did the Jews of the story see themselves in biblical Persia, according to the biblical text? What were the various ways they responded to being a minority and to anti-Semitism, and how did that unfold? How in particular did Esther view herself, act, adjust in real time? How should we take the end of the Megillah, the forceful and violent Jewish response described there?

All of this hits us differently after October 7. Karen and I walk through each part of the biblical story and reflect on how different parts resonate today and might answer some of the dilemmas we are facing. We recorded a week before Purim 5784/2024, and much of it reflects the year and also the particular moment during this war.

 

 

To read the biblical book of Esther (the Megillah): https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.1?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Scriptures,_published_by_JPS&lang=bi

To continue this conversation with us, e-mail [email protected] and/or [email protected], and feel free to post a comment here as well.

Conversations Toward Purim: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy for 5784 (And Beyond?)

To listen to this as a podcast recording, click here.

You can watch, or read the same thing just below the video thumbnail.

This is an introduction to a few conversations about the festival of Purim and the months of Adar in the Jewish calendar. I am releasing this on March 7, 2024, the 27th day of Adar Alef in 5784, which I mention because it’s the first Purim since October 7, 2023. I started thinking about this particular Purim even before last Chanukkah was over, in December of 2023. I have always loved Purim, and the chag, the festival, has deepened for me at every stage of my adult life, starting in college. But this winter I found myself both grasping for Purim more than ever, and wondering how we could possibly celebrate this year.

October 7 was itself a festival; it was Simchat Torah in Israel. As I am recording today the subsequent war is still going on, with thousands dead and wounded, Israelis and Palestinians, more than 130 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, and so much human suffering and ongoing trauma. On the one hand, Purim seems so on the nose right now – an attack on Jews seemingly out of nowhere, the mobilization of Jews everywhere in armed response and in advocacy to the world’s superpower, and in some cases Jews have gone back to masking themselves especially at some universities. Usually at this time of year I’d be making or sharing funny videos, like this: [insert]. But the thought of celebrating through all of this seems almost profane.

On the other hand, I have long thought that Esther is the text, and Purim is the chag, that are most true to modern Jewish experience especially in the diaspora. So maybe the Megillah and Purim are here to catch us this year. Maybe there is an Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy that will at least hold up a clear mirror for us, and perhaps even guide us or at least map our situation a bit better. I know how much I need that.

So here is a first sketch of that map, and the ways the story of Esther, the Megillah, and the festival of Purim might be what we need right now. These elements I hope to follow up in conversations with other Jewish teachers between now and Purim.

I want to start with a sort-of cryptic description of the biblical Jews of imperial Persia at the time of Esther’s story, from a midrash found in the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Shabbat page 88a. You can see it here. But you don’t have to look at it or remember it; I’ll keep going back to it and picking up its components.

The midrash starts with a quote from the story of the Israelites standing at Mt. Sinai about eight hundred years before Purim, give or take. The quote is part of a verse from Exodus 19 about the giving of the Ten Commandments, and it says:

"And they stood beneath the mountain" (Exodus 19:17).

Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa said: This verse teaches that the Blessed Holy One inverted the mountain above them like a vat, and said to them:

If you accept the Torah, that's good, and if not, there will be your grave.

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there’s a substantial piece of knowledge that is an objection to the Torah!

Rava said: Even so, they went back and accepted it in the days of Ahashverosh, as it is written toward the end of the book of Esther (9:27): "The Jews fulfilled and accepted" (Esther 9:27) -- meaning they fulfilled what they had previously accepted.

End of Talmudic quote. It’s in kind of a code, the analogies aren’t at all obvious to today. But I want to poke and pull at this text because it’s going to be helpful. The starting point is a comparison between the Jews of Mt. Sinai and the Jews of Shushan, the Persian imperial capital at the time of Queen Esther. And in this comparison in the Talmud, it’s the Jews of Shushan who come out way higher.

That seems crazy, or at least very unexpected. There should be no comparison at all between the Jews in our most holy book and the Jews of the silliest of our holidays. Yeah, both groups are in the larger Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh – but the Jews of the Megillah are just barely in the Bible according to many of the rabbis of the Talmud, who thought of leaving the Book of Esther out entirely.

In the Torah, there are the Jews of the Mt. Sinai generation who received a direct Divine communication, who were eating every day manna, food that came to them in a direct delivery from the Divine down from the sky. The Jews at Sinai were experiencing Torah on a regular basis as a fresh and brand-new teaching full of mitzvot, full of very specific responsibilities. 

In the Megillah there are Jews, but they are so different. The only Jewish thing about them was that they called themselves Jews! Except when they didn’t because they didn’t want people to know they were Jews, and then they named themselves after Persian divinities like Ishtar and Marduk. At the start of the Megillah there aren’t even any Jews mentioned at all –  if it wasn’t in Hebrew you wouldn’t even know it’s a Jewish book. When we do first meet Mordechai, a Jew willing to identify himself publicly, the only substantive Jewish thing about him is that he wouldn’t bow down to another person. The Megillah generation of Jews don’t seem like Torah people or God-connected people at all.

So how could Rava, in this midrash in the Talmud, say that without those Jews, we couldn’t have a valid Torah?

Well for one thing, the Jews of the Megillah live in the Persian empire, a huge area of 127 provinces, each of them culturally and ethnically distinct. Jews live everywhere among all of these peoples, at a time when some Jews also live in Eretz Yisrael, in the land of Israel. The Jews at Mt. Sinai are living in a one-of-a-kind world in the wilderness, all by themselves, not in their land yet and not really anywhere. 

So score one for the Jews of the Megillah as more relevant for us Jews today than the Jews of the Torah. Rava in the Talmud might be saying that it’s easy to accept Torah when God talks to you directly and everyone around you has had that same experience. But it’s Jews like the ones in the Megillah whose commitments are more like our commitments, and until Jews like the ones in the Megillah decide what they are committed to, the Torah isn’t fully here in the world.

Then we’ve got this idea of Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa about God turning the mountain upside-down over the Jews’ head and threatening to drop it on top of them. That’s so weird. But the midrash works in metaphors, and part one of this metaphor is the Hebrew word for inverting, which is kafa, the letters כ פ ה kaf, phay, and hay. It means both to turn something upside-down and also to coerce.

And wouldn’t you know that in the Megillah, one of the key words is a word for turning something upside down. It’s got the same three letters but in reverse order – instead of kafa it’s hafach, ה פ כ hay, phay, chaf – and the way the Megillah describes things in that world is v’nahafoch hu, things got turned upside-down.

In the Megillah, one of the big themes is that everything gets turned upside down, over and over. The story starts with peace for Jews, then comes a threat from Haman (boo) and he gets the king’s support, then Esther gets the king on board on our side. At the start the king gets sick of one queen, Vashti, because she’s headstrong and might provoke a feminist movement, then he chooses a seemingly opposite queen, Esther, who seems hidden and meek, but then she turns into a very powerful feminist mastermind. The Jews are nondescript members of this huge empire, then astonished at what’s happening, and then defend themselves with force. The Jewish world turns upside down again and again.

So why does Rav Avdimi say that Mt. Sinai is the thing that’s upside-down? I think what Rav Avdimi is saying is that there is something upside-down about the way the Torah presents the world, upside-down in a way that can also be oppressive. The Torah makes the world seem very orderly and coherent. Obey these mitzvot and things will go well, or break the covenant and things will fall apart. There’s a mitzvah for every situation and every experience. Even the way the Jews live in the wild, scraggly wilderness for forty years is in a camp organized in a geometric pattern, an order imposed on nothingness.

But Rav Avdimi is saying that’s actually upside-down thinking. The world isn’t like that, and it’s oppressive to think that it is. If all you can think of is that moral behavior gets rewarded and immoral behavior gets punished, you’re going to feel completely topsy-turvy when that’s so obviously not what is happening.  Or, you’re going to feel like a huge mountain is about to collapse on top of you.

In contrast, the Jews of the Megillah know that life is not that consistent or coherent. Jewish experience is unpredictable, and it flips from terror to celebration, and back and forth many times. Morality is not always rewarded. The Divine is not clearly evident in the Esther story; if we seek the Divine, we have to be ready to perceive divinity in ways that are not revelations everyone sees.. It’s more right-side-up to understand all that and accept it, and then to decide anyway to live right because it’s the right thing to do, not because the world always makes sense. So score two for the Jews of the Megillah, who can find a way to be grounded in Torah wisdom even when they don’t know which way is up.

That’s where we are especially this year, when the shock of October 7 and the aftermath, and the shock of how people around us have reacted to it, have been dizzying for months on end.

The metaphor of the upside-down mountain has a part two, and it’s the way that Mt. Sinai is compared to a vat that is held over the Jews’ head. It’s an unusual word in the Talmud, gigit in Hebrew, and it might well refer to a vat of wine.

Why does Rav Avdimi compare Mt. Sinai to a huge open vat of wine about to be dumped out on top of us? You might have said the Torah is the most sober thing in Judaism. Serious business about laws and responsibilities and our history. The Megillah, though, starts off with a six-month drinking party in honor of King Achashverosh, and every time something significant happens in the story there’s drinking.

And in another place in the Talmud, it says that on Purim you’re supposed to get drunk or into an intoxication-like or dream-like state of mind called ad d’lo yada, “until you don’t know.” Specifically: until you don’t know the difference between Cursed is Haman (boo!) and Blessed is Mordechai, Arur Haman (boo!) and Baruch Mordechai. You’re supposed to get yourself that disoriented. 

In the midrash in the Talmud, it’s Mt. Sinai that’s being compared to a whole lot of wine, and Rav Acha bar Yaakov says: Hey, this is a big thing to know about the Torah. Knowing this is connected to not-knowing the difference between Mordechai and Haman (boo!) – it’s the same Hebrew root-word, moda’ah and lo yada. I think Rav Acha is saying that the Torah on its own without the Megillah is overpromising what you can know for sure. The Jews standing at Mt. Sinai didn’t know as much as we think they did. But the Jews in the Megillah were in a constant state of not knowing enough about their situation and even about themselves.

At a key moment in the Megillah (Esther 4:14), when Mordechai gets word to Queen Esther about the plot against the Jews, he tells her: Who knows if for a time like this you’ve become royal. Mi yode’a. He doesn’t say he knows for sure that’s why she’s queen, like it was obviously divinely ordained. Instead he just says who knows, maybe, so act like it’s true because it’s the only way to act that makes sense.

The Megillah says even when you’re not sure, act on the basis of what you can know, which is how to be there for people and for what’s right. Purim is not about getting drunk or escaping, but coming back from those states and getting clear about some things. Recognize what complete moral unclarity feels like, so we can look into our regular messy world with moral clarity. So score a third point for the Jews of the Megillah over the Jews of Mt. Sinai. We have to figure out too this year what it means to act out of solidarity, with Jews and with suffering Palestinians, when we really aren’t sure what our situation is and what our power is.

I’ll say here a quick thing about the Purim theme of masks. The Jews of the Torah were really by themselves in the desert, just them and God, so they didn’t have this issue of deciding how or whether to reveal themselves to other groups of people. The Jews of the Megillah were interwoven with the 127 other peoples of the empire, and were very much in the dance of showing themselves vs. blending in vs. wondering how dangerous it was to be in the open. That’s a fourth way that Jews of Shushan are relevant to us in a way the Jews of Mt. Sinai aren’t as much.

A fifth thing is the figure of Esther herself as a leader and rescuer, along with Mordechai, in comparison to Moshe and the other leaders of his time. I can’t even sum this theme up for this introduction, but I very much want to talk about that and expand on it in one of my upcoming conversations.

But I do want to say something here about the response to anti-Semitism, which is this year the major reason Purim is so relevant. 

For the Jews at Mt. Sinai, it was clear what to do about Pharaoh and about the nation of Amalek, who had attacked the Jews shortly before they got the Torah. Be separate, get away, fight back, trust God. I’m oversimplifying of course, and even if it was clear it wasn’t easy to do these things.

But for the Jews of the Megillah, when the threat came on the scene through Haman (boo!), himself a descendent of Amalek, it wasn’t clear at all what to do or what to think.

Especially in Shushan, the capital, the Jews at first are simply astonished and confused, and we can relate to that this year. They weren’t deciding to separate from their surroundings or to go to Eretz Yisrael, which they could have done with no one stopping them and without an army, unlike the Jews of Mt. Sinai. The Jews of the Megillah don’t say that King Achashverosh is like Pharaoh. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – under Esther’s leadership they eventually make the king their key ally.

Eventually they do defend themselves, and they go on the offensive. This year for the first time I think I understand emotionally what it means in the Megillah that the king could not just rescind his edict. It’s not that simple. In the story no one knows just how supportive all the people of the empire are to the anti-Semitic edict deep down, once it’s said out loud. The Jews certainly responded with overwhelming violent force. All of it is so familiar.

But Esther ordains that when they look back on all this afterward, they can’t just write down all the horrible things that happened, and how they gathered with other Jews and fought back. They would also give meals to their neighbors, mishlo’ach manot, and gifts to poor people, matanot la’evyonim. Somehow they would need to integrate a fierce fighting spirit with a generous one. They would use this story of anti-Semitism and topsy-turvy not to say that self-protection is the whole answer for Jews, not to say that turning inward is the only option, but to build community on the basis of love and to radiate generosity despite it all. And I think the Megillah means not just to other Jews.

Esther’s new festival of Purim would be about the threat to Jews and about Jewish power and about Jewish values. It would be actually a microcosm of the most important things about Jewish community and the ethics of Judaism – a huge threat and the best things about us rolled into one festival.

That’s Rava’s point in the Talmud about why we should see the Jews of Shushan as the ones who really got the Torah, even more than the Jews of Mt. Sinai. It’s why our tradition compares Purim to Yom Kippur, the single most morally intense day of the Jewish year. So score a sixth point for the Jews of the Megillah as relevant uniquely for us today, even more than the Jews of the Torah.

I am saying this last part, about anti-Semitism and the Megillah’s idea of how we respond, with far more certainty than I actually have. It’s what I want to believe, what I want to know. But this is the conversation I most want to open up, hopefully in another recording in this series, and with anyone who wants to talk about it more one-on-one or in a group. Drop me a note by e-mail, whether it’s Adar 5784 or anytime you find this.

***

So, that’s the map I’d like to explore between now and Purim of 5784, the Purim after October 7. These are the building blocks of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy, which is the support I know I need right now. Read the text of the Megillah yourself, the Book of Esther, with all this in mind. Maybe we can help each other figure out what kind of joyful communal celebration might be appropriate for this Purim. If such a celebration is possible, and not profane in a time like now, what kind of chag would be not just fun for the kids, but right for us – in a way that is true toward the upside-down in our lives right now and in the lives of those who are suffering most, among our Jewish people and among the Palestinians with whom we Jews are so interwoven.

I hope this introduction helps. To be continued, together.

The Power of Purim (Reflecting Just in the Moment)

The power of Purim:

 

On Tuesday and yesterday, I spent several hours in total shopping for and making my do-it-yourself costume. There was the regular work I do, which I did; and the world to attend to with its craziness, which I check in on regularly. And I learned of a sudden death in the family of my cousins. If anything, the world and my world were even a bit more upside-down Wednesday than they were on Tuesday. I sometimes fast the Fast of Esther, in solidarity with the people in the thick of a particular year’s horrors, but yesterday I didn’t because I didn’t think I’d make it with enough energy to what I would do in the evening. I felt guilty about that, and tried to say a blessing when I did eat and drink and dedicate that energy to the people who need it. “Several hours making a costume?” I asked myself.

 

Then I dressed up last night and so did others, and we sang Purim songs and read from a real parchment scroll the ancient story of a “world turned upside down” and then right side up again. The pulpit looks completely unpulpit-like in the process, the rabbi unrabbi-like; I committed fully as I always do, to the costume and the act and the joy.

 

And what I experienced, as I have for many years, is a spiritual lifeline. I believe that the week leading into Purim and the things we read and study for that week offer to take us deep into the hardest parts of the world, socially and existentially. Knowing that the costumes and the laughter and the singing and the scroll are at the other end helps me allow myself to feel more confused, discombulated, and powerless than I do most weeks. I think I’m supposed to allow those feelings (they are more than feelings, I search for the right word) to have me or me to have them, and to fling myself down a zipline that lands where the Megillah scroll is.

 

I don’t mean to overstate this; I don’t experience myself any real physical danger right now, Baruch Hashem, thank God. But for at least a quarter century that’s how I experience Purim. I am grateful to my ancestors – to Esther and Mordechai for their story and for putting themselves in it, as a bridge from the time of prophecy toward our kind of time. I do believe this process of making the costume and wearing it and thinking about what it means to take that time, put it on, and take it off is supposed to charge me to act better in the world.

Tov! Special Purim Episode Is Out!

I haven't posted a Tov! update for a while, but a few new episodes are out the past month and one of them is keyed to Purim which begins tonight. Listen right here or on YouTube (it's just audio), or check out the episode page with the audio and full show notes. Or just subscribe on any of your favorite podcast apps. Simchat Purim, wishing everyone a joyous and meaningful Purim celebration!

 

Purim Playlist!

I've had fun making these, and hopefully you'll enjoy learning a bit about Purim and the month of Adar, one short bit at a time. A couple more are coming in the next few days. "Hamentashen for thought"!

You can click on the video and watch it here, expand it, or click on the three horizontal lines toward the top that appear, which will reveal the whole playlist.