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A Year Later, Back to Moshe's Final Words of Blessing -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 1

On Simchat Torah morning, after we parade with the Torah scrolls, we gather around to read the very last words of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. The man who could hardly speak departs with an original song – his words, not God’s. And his last sentence in life begins: Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha. Happy are you, O Israel. Fortunate are You, O Jewish people. Who is like you. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Ashreicha Yisrael. You might recognize the word Ashrei. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people. What must it have been like for Moshe to make those his final words. Moshe, who was born at a time and place when it was against the law for him to live. Whose first recorded words were “Why are you beating your neighbor?” Who faced down Pharaoh, led his people into freedom, brought them to Mt. Sinai. All the desert crises of food and faith Moshe had gone through with them. After all that, Moshe sees his people endure, finally get their act together, and now, they are sitting still one last time. Knowing that what’s just ahead for them is a future and a fight – Moshe sings: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. Mi chamocha – there is no people quite like you.

Last Simchat Torah, October 8, knowing what we knew, we had to decide how we would sing those words. Should we just hurry through and get out of here? And what about our children? Most years our kid-friendly Simchat Torah is a quick early evening on a school day. But last year it was a Sunday morning, with no rush, so we had bigger plans. Would parents even bring their kids here on October 8, knowing what we knew?

We decided to stick to our plan. With our broken hearts, and overwhelmed, we would dance with the Torah for our kids, and for Israelis who already were begging us not to let anyone reach across the ocean and take this too away. Amazingly, parents brought their kids. And after dancing, right down there in this aisle we rolled out the Torah on a table all the way to the back. As the kids were gathered next to the Torah, I got to the chanting of Moshe’s final sentence: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. I so wanted to sing it; to promise it to our kids as Moshe promised the generation he was about to launch. I was overcome with tears, and only thanks to the kids could I sing the words at all.

As hard as it was to sing Ashreicha Yisrael, Moshe’s final sentence has more words. I don’t emphasize them generally because they are not as inspirational. Am nosha b’Adonai, magen ezrecha asher cherev ga’avatecha… ”Fortunate are you, O Israel, who is like you, a nation saved by the Divine, your helping shield, whose sword is your pride. Your enemies shall recant themselves to you, and you on their high places will tread.”

But as I croaked out those words too, I had this terrible thought: not a single part of this Torah verse was true. Not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. An enemy far from recanting, far from going back on its essence -- and who was treading on whom that day.

Was the Torah itself being kidnapped and used to mock us? How could we go just minutes later and begin the Torah again, and with rockets in the sky declare that God created the heavens, and that in the deepest darkness God said “Let there be light”?

Yet, with all the unrelenting loss and pain of the past exhausting year – and even with the escalations of the war this past week and the attack from Iran these past days – I say to you that the critical spiritual thing for us in this new year is to get back Moshe’s final words: Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people, who is like you. We need to believe that this is as true as ever, and true even as never before. Our future here depends on it.

Obviously atrocities and war are in no way fortunate. And I do not mean it is easy to be Jewish just this moment. Only that we are profoundly fortunate to be the Jews of this moment, of this era in Jewish history.

Now believe me, part of me wonders if I’m crazy to say this today. I really just want to reach out and envelop you all in a hug, and allow us to cry together among people who know the many layers of our weeping. Our congregation has many Israelis, and we are closely connected to several families who have lost people on or after October 7, and to at least five people who were taken hostage. Last fall two Beth Abraham families had their Israeli kids here in town taking refuge. We have college students too. My own daughter is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, so we know painfully what it’s like for a child to live within an institution and a community ripped apart over the past year. Some of our tears are for the loss of dreams of peace, delayed at least for now.

Yet I keep coming back to this thought: we need Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate we are to be this unique Jewish generation, the Jews of America of this era. 

We need to say those words to ourselves. We need to carry ourselves that way outwardly in the world. I thought about talking today about any of particular things on people’s minds right now: the immediate war itself, or questions about our relations with other people here in America and anti-Semitism around us, or concerns about the ethics of the military actions we are connected to, or about Israeli policy toward Palestinians. But before we can talk about or work on any of these, we have to think first about seeing ourselves once again in the light of Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. 

Look what we have built so far. In less than 150 years, Jews have gone from a tiny presence in the United States, having gotten here in flight just like from every other place we have been in exile, to a flourishing community. Here we have not just carved out a corner for ourselves for a while. We have been essential to making our host country into a home, for us and for everyone. From Justice Brandeis to Justice Kagan, American law has been infused with our commitment to law and justice. From Philip Roth to Dara Horn, American literature has been infused with our creativity and our concerns. Healing, science. Comedy. The equality and freedom of people is infused with our ideas and achieved partly with our legwork. The best of America’s story and the best of the American Jewish story are completely intertwined. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute said this summer that even though we have always been a small percentage of the population, the bigness of America drew out the bigness of Judaism. 

In this year’s election, the candidates are a former president whose daughter is a committed Jew, and a sitting vice-president whose husband is a committed Jew. There has never been a diaspora Jewish community like this in all of Jewish history. 

That litany used to be my Ashreicha Yisrael. But in March, Franklin Foer wrote an article in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” His main evidence is the year at many universities, the turning against many Jews as well as against all these aspects of America that Jews have helped build, by many people who will be tomorrow’s American leaders. Foer argues that the conditions that made us happy and fortunate here seem to be going away.

Well he is right that the conditions are not the same. But that is not the determining story. In the past, in other places, it might have been. But there are new seeds of new strengths we have, and they too have been uniquely visible actually in this past year. I’m just going to talk about a couple.

Many of us experienced the year through the words and leadership of the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem, Rachel and Jon, parents of Hersh, zichrono livracha. Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova music festival after saving some lives in the attack, and his parents have urged us to advocate for their son and all the hostages every single day in every way possible. His murder a month ago along with five others was crushing.

But how Jon and Rachel have advocated is so dramatically different from what Jews like us have been used to. They hardly talk about Hamas – even in their eulogies for Hersh, they didn’t name the group. They talk about us, and what it means to value and rejoice in human life. 

In July, the Goldberg-Polins and their close circle decided that alongside their political advocacy, it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah and mitzvot.

So they organized a study of the whole Hebrew Bible around the clock and around the world, and a concluding international study event. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They organized an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona, a hip outdoor venue in Jerusalem. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages in Jerusalem, and if you weren’t nearby to post on their web page acts of chesed you would be doing all week anywhere. Right away you could see some 200 things, from challah making to opening up one’s swimming pool, to cultivating patience, to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel. It was like they were forcing the World to Come onto this world, and forcing us all to force it.

The Goldberg-Polins speak and act in this personal and international crisis as though the primary center of our destiny is in our own hands, and in the hands of any Jew with power. Of course there is a context. But for Jon and Rachel even hard-core advocacy for the hostages is about what is inside us, no matter the context. 

All year every day they have used the language of this season –  teshuvah, accountability, and forgiveness. At Hersh’s funeral they begged his forgiveness for what they did not do to save his life, though what more could they possibly have done. They have asked us directly as they have asked themselves over and over: What have you not done yet. Who are you, they have asked world leaders and Israeli leaders, and all of us Jews and all Americans.

They described Hersh at his graveside as someone who forced them to open their eyes and their hearts wider than they had known how to. 

In the past, even in the Golden Age, at difficult times we would mainly point our fingers outward. The Goldberg-Polins have showed us that we as Jews are strong enough to make ourselves the moral center of any story, even the most difficult story, even one where other people are also wrong and wronging us.

To have leaders and teachers like this in the Jewish crisis of a generation – Ashreicha Yisrael, how fortunate we are. That we have become a Jewish people strong enough at a time like this to respond to Jon and Rachel, to ground ourselves in both advocacy and mitzvah at the same time, to ask something both from the world and from ourselves – Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. This is what Zionism was supposed to do – in the era of Jewish self-determination, we take responsibility on ourselves as makers of history, even though we are small.

It’s only in this generation that we are starting to learn how to do that. For the first time, our bigger Jewish response has been much more than Never Again.

Some would say like Franklin Foer that this year the strains between Jews and our allies finally broke. But I saw something different up close here in Southern New Hampshire, specifically with my colleagues in the clergy.

My mission for sixteen years in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council has been to press beyond the simple sentiment of “there are many roads to God.” So that when push comes to shove, we’ll know whether we are really there for each other. This year was a big test. 

In October when I heard from almost none of my cherished colleagues, I began to write to them, to tell them what it was like to be a Jew now and also my worries about what would happen to Judaism if they gave us reason to close in on ourselves. Each one of them responded. I have been president of that group for almost a third of my time in Nashua and I was disoriented for a while. At first I just asked them to listen to me, and to pray for us, for the people we’re connected to, as they were praying for the Palestinian people their churches are connected to. They all said yes, of course.

I said at a meeting in the fall that I think the biggest difference between me and most of them is not Jesus but Zionism. A few days later, one of my colleagues reached out to ask me what I meant, and this opened up an amazing conversation about our seminaries and what we each know about the Holy Land. 

I bought about 25 copies of Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which includes Palestinian responses back and I have given it to many colleagues. They have read it; some have shared it in their congregations. Some have opened up to me about their reflections about the role the Christian world has played in pitting Jews and Muslims against each other. Most of our Christian friends have brought more nuance to their words and their discussions in church about Israel-Palestine.

I have done this work not from supplication but from strength, from a foundation many of you have built over decades in Nashua, and immodestly I will say I myself have built. Ashreicha Yisrael – it is fortunate right now to be a Jew in the interfaith community of Greater Nashua. 

And it is good for us to be in the middle of the difficult moral conversations that serious people are having. Because I pushed to see if my colleagues and I could talk this way, I could open my ears more too. So I also can and must say that we here are connected to at least one Palestinian family in New Hampshire who lost many people in Gaza very early in the war. 

It’s not easy, at all. But we can handle it; we are maturing as a Jewish community within America. Our friendships, alliances and our power are still robust, even though the conditions don’t make it as easy. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi chamocha – we are a unique generation.

And part of Ashreicha Yisrael is simply us here now. Doing what we do. Here sustaining one another, singing and thinking and crying together. Gathering as a moral community. Not because we have to, not because it’s as joyful as other years, but because this is who we are.

So Simchat Torah this year will be different, no question. We will have to honor what happened last year. But at some point we will dance and we will finally arrive again at Moshe’s last sentence.

And we will have a choice. All of us, whether what grips you most right now is anger or sadness or fear about the fighting, or the broader future of Jews and anti-Semitism, or the ethics of the conflicts. We are all like Moshe, looking out at a future that has both purpose and war.

We can say that things for Jews in America are going to be like they have been everywhere else for us in exile. And then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or we can say Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. We are fortunate to be the Jews of this era. Whose future is not determined; who have the possibility through our choices and efforts to define who we are. And rise to the occasion like no other generation of Jews has ever before.

When Moshe composed his final words, he reached back to the first song he taught the people along with his sister Miryam. You might know the words Mi Chamocha from the prayers, and it got there from the Torah’s Song of the Crossing of the Sea (Exodus 15:11). Back then, Miryam and Moshe asked us to look to the heavens and say: Mi chamocha ba’elim, Adonai? Who is like you among the powerful, O God? Now in his final words, Moshe looks up at us and says: Who is like you, O Jewish people. You are powerful, finally, among all the powerful. You are blessed and a blessing. 

In this time of war and heartbreak, may we find a way to hold each other up and see all of our power and all of our blessing. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha – how fortunate are you, O Jewish people, there is no one like you.

Shana Tova.

Patience and Impatience -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 2

The number of stop signs between my home and the synagogue has more than doubled in the past ten years. And I know why the new ones were put there: because of me.

I don’t mean that in an I’m-the-problem-it’s-me way. I have never caused an accident on Pine Hill Road or Courtland Street, tfft tfft.  I am sure at City Hall there is some traffic data or some record of citizen input behind the decisions, but I know that four stop signs were placed in Nashua as a spiritual opportunity, perhaps even a test, for me.

You see, as my kids would point out even before they got their licenses, I can be a major practitioner of the rolling stop. It goes with something else Laurie says to me often, which is that at home, when I ask her or the kids something, I often don’t give them even a second to respond, before I’m prodding them more or repeating the question. 

So ten years ago on Rosh Hashanah I decided to speak about impatience. And as I was writing I decided that one way I would cultivate my own patience was to come to full stops at all stop signs, since there were at the time three close to where I work. I would be able to notice my heart rate increase as I slow the car down extra, as I feel the small kick back of the car as it halts, then I could stop, take a breath, slow my heart rate and settle down. Once, twice, three times, at Manchester, Webster, and Concord Streets.

Apparently, the universe regarded this as a vow on my part, and not one that could be annulled on Erev Yom Kippur. And so, on cue, up went two more stop signs on Courtland Street, and two on Pine Hill Road as well. As a challenge to my spiritual discipline.

You’ll have to ask Laurie and my kids how I am doing with this, though for most of my drives here the only witnesses are myself and God. I know I stop more than I used to. And I am much better about waiting an extra beat or more after I ask someone at home a question. But still I struggle with patience and impatience.

The world is impatient, maybe more and more. Take something like reading, which you’d think would be made for a patient approach. Articles online often tell you at the top how long they will take to read. That’s a new invention of the past ten years, and it seems to have originated with the website Medium. Which is according to itself “a place to read, write, and deepen your understanding” – but a couple engineers at Medium had become frustrated that when they would open up something to read or deepen your understanding, they had no idea how much time they might be getting themselves into. So they came up with this idea and algorithm.

And we often default to expecting others to be impatient with us. A lot of times I call someone and they pick up to tell me they can’t talk, and ask if we could talk later. As though if I got their voicemail I would be impatient with them for not being at my beckon call. Even my own parents did this the other day and I reassured them I could handle their being occupied with something other than me.

What’s this all about? In Hebrew one of the words for patience is savlanut. It is from a root that means “suffering.” To be patient is to be able in the moment to accept some suffering. But is it really suffering to give someone a few seconds to digest what you said to them, and is it really suffering to make a full stop at a stop sign?

So I think the word savlanut points at something else, what we really might be suffering when we feel impatient in daily life. It’s being out of rhythm with the person we’re with. You’re all set to hop in the car so we can go get together with friends, but I’m still putting on my jacket or finding my jacket, or deciding if I even need a jacket. That’s frustrating. And maybe it’s not about the five minutes late to a social engagement. It’s maybe a little piece of a bigger longing we all have to know what it’s like to be in sync with someone else, that our lives become that elusive waltz in perfect time together.

Being human is always moving in and out of sync with other people, which is why we need patience, savlanut, in our day to day lives. Patience is a virtue, and in Judaism it’s one of the most important Divine virtues. It’s one of the thirteen qualities associated with Divine compassion, the shlosh esreh middot we chant on Yom Kippur over and over and have already chanted today. Adonai Adonai El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim (Exodus 34:6). Erech apayim means “slow to anger.” That’s a physical metaphor in Hebrew. Apayim are the nostrils, the place we feel our breathing change and speed up when we are impatient. Being angry in biblical Hebrew is called charon af, “hot nose.” Like a fire-breathing dragon.

Erech apayim means disrupting that circuit, keeping the breathing slow, not getting hot. As Alan Morinis puts it, keeping the match away from the fuse. Patience means putting time between something that frustrates us and reacting to it.

In Pirkei Avot (5:2), the Talmud’s compilation of ethical maxims, it’s taught that the reason the Torah takes ten generations to get from Noach to Avraham, from the flood to monotheism, is to show us how much God is erech apayim, how much God is patient.

The world takes a long time to get where it’s in sync with the Divine, yes. Then again, you’d think: how hard is it to be patient when you are God and have all the time in the world?

One the most haunting midrashim I’ve ever seen wonders if God can actually get carried away and be too patient. Dr. Aviva Zornberg in her book on Exodus teaches a midrash that imagines God watching the slavery of the Jews in Mitzrayim, and the angels are pressing God: Aren’t you going to do something? How can you leave them there like this? And God says: You remember, I told Avraham that they would be in Mitzrayim for 400 years, and it’s been almost 400 years. Don’t worry, soon they will be freed. One of the angels goes down to earth and grabs a brick that a slave is making, and in that brick is trapped a baby. The angel flies up to heaven, shows the brick to God, and says: This is the result of your patience! And then God snaps into action, and the story of the redemption begins.

This is what Rev. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” There are times when patience is not a virtue. When a kind of impatience is warranted. A higher impatience. A holy impatience.

Our prayers have so many words to express this impatience, some we’ve used this morning: b’karov b’yameinu, bim’heira, hash’ta ba’agala uviz’man kariv. Not just Hebrew, but Aramaic!

The hardest impatience is when we care about someone, and we feel that they aren't living right now as well as they could be.

We might be impatient with someone who is struggling to find a direction in life.

We might be impatient about someone who is just not well – not impatient with them, but for them. Impatient with their caregivers, for not being attentive enough or responsive enough or clever enough or miraculous enough.

We are impatient with the world right now. We want an end to war in and around Israel, we want our hostages home now. We want other wars to end, we want the paralyzing polarization of our country to be gone. 

We are, perhaps, impatient with God for all the suffering that isn't going away fast enough.

We might be impatient, most of all, with ourselves. If we’re not well, we blame ourselves unreasonably for not getting better faster. Maybe we’re not as caring as we know we should be. Maybe as we think back on what we resolved here one year ago, we can just be frustrated at our own slow pace of teshuvah. 

I wonder if somewhere also deep down impatience comes from a sense that time is precious and fleeting for each of us. It’s Naomi Shemer’s song Od Lo Ahavti Dai – “I Have Not Loved Enough.” She begins: With these two hands of mine, I’ve not yet built a town/In the middle of the desert, the water I’ve not found/I haven’t drawn a flower, nor quite discovered how/the way is going lead me, or where I’m going now. And the refrain: I have not loved enough, the wind and the sun are on my face; I have not said enough, and if not, if not now, when.

A lot of our impatience at what’s out there, with others, might really come from within our own soul.

Even our little impatience about getting out of the door might have something of this higher impatience. You want to be on time, out of respect for someone who is being generous by making time for us. We want to make the most of our time together; there are never enough moments with our friends or our potential friends, to get beyond chit-chat and really talk.

So if patience is a virtue, and if there is also a holy impatience, how do we get it right?

There is another biblical phrase that’s a twist on erech apayim, the hot nose or breathing nostril metaphor. The prophet Micah (7:18) describes God’s patience as lo hechezik la’ad apo. Who does not hold onto anger forever. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, a medieval teacher of Kabbalah, says that unlike the metaphor of erech apayim, which is about not letting frustration begin and spiral, lo hechezik la’ad apo recognizes that impatience is a real thing. Even God has impatience, metaphorically speaking, because for all of God’s infinite time, God does not really have infinite power to change us or the world. So lo hechezik la’ad apo – the suffering, the anger, you can’t stop them from appearing. The key is to hold onto impatience long enough to understand it, and to understand ourselves, but only that long, and then to decide what to do with it, and release it.

So the momentary impatiences, like getting stuck in lines or traffic, those we have to let go of quickly. But even then the impatient feeling is a reminder to open our eyes to what is actually around, because even when you’re delayed somewhere that’s not all that’s happening. Rabbi Zelig Pliskin says that when you’re stuck in the waiting room at the doctor, look around at who else is there. Perhaps there is someone who needs help with something, whether it’s filling out a form, or walking when they are called. Or perhaps there is someone in the room who needs consoling or who seems alone.

What about when our impatience is about the sufferings of someone we care about, or the sufferings and injustices in the world?

We have to be aware of that impatience. If it just exists as anger, we know that makes it harder to act, and that cycle leads to resignation, to despair, to disconnecting from the person or the cause we actually care about.

And sometimes we try to relieve this type of impatience by rushing toward unrealistic expectations or simplistic solutions. I think this is the impatience of our country right now. Too many of us think that being impatient about the right things is the whole story. So vibes and feels attract all the energy, and we go in circles if not backward, and we have neither solutions nor an end to the impatience.

Sometimes we need to turn from impatience just to presence, to be with the person or the people whose suffering matters to us.

Sometimes what we need is not so much patience as perseverance. There is a Jewish word for this too – netzach. It means both endurance and triumph, because for the things that matter one triumph is never the last. 

Netzach, perseverance, is figuring out what you can actually do. When it comes to the big things in the world, it’s deciding when to be the doer and when to be the donor. It’s noticing when people are actually working on something, with the care and skill its complexity deserves, even when it’s taking time. It’s offering yourself to the people who are leading, knowing how to encourage them and get them what they need. This is one of the best antidotes to the impatience we experience when the wider world seems out of sync.

When we are impatient with ourselves, it helps to find someone to talk it out with – to help us balance expectations of ourselves with grace.

Impatience on its own is not a virtue. But it is not just patience we should learn from the Divine example. It’s lo hechezik la’ad apo – it’s reading our impatience. Impatience teaches us who are, reminds us what we value and who we love. 

So in this new year, we should definitely come to a full stop at stop signs, no matter how many there are. We should let the phone ring when we can’t talk, and trust the other person to trust that we’ll call them later when we can really talk.

And then we’ll have room for holy impatience. Instead of fiery vapors, over and over, our breath will be long shofar blasts, ever more in sync, turning from brokenness into wholeness and redemption.

Shana Tova.

Herds, Hearts, and Hashgacha: A D'var Torah on Mattot-Masei

This is the current draft of my D'var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Masei, the end of the book of B'midbar (Numbers), specifically chapter 32.

The best two word opening to a story probably in the whole Bible is cattle -- lotsa! "Umikneh, rav." I would hold that up with “in the beginning” and “God tested.” The first word is cattle, probably we should say herds so you’re not only thinking cows, and the Masoretes who standardized the chanting and punctuation put a pause after "herds", umikneh and slowed down the word "lotsa", rav. These words come before we even hear who the people are in this particular story, perhaps to emphasize something about those people, who are the tribes of Gad and Reuven, joined by some or all of Menashe, which is that their self-definition has a lot to do with their herds. The Hebrew word for herds mikneh comes from the root kanah which means to acquire or own, and we might want to hypothesize that these are the extreme materialists among the Israelites.

They come before Moshe and Elazar, Moshe’s nephew the current Kohen Gadol, the high priest, and they say: This place we are right now, across the Jordan River from the land we are going into, is great for our herds, and we would like to have our tribes live here and not over there on the Israel side.

At this, Moshe seems to go kind of ballistic. He says that he cannot believe what they are asking. How could you not take part in what we’ve been waiting for, and fight with your fellow citizens. It’s the end of 40 years of wandering, and the whole reason they have been wandering for 40 years is because the people followed the words of the ten scouts who advised them that they should not be going into the land -- and now we’re almost there and you want to replay this again? How could you once again set an example that the rest of the people will want to follow? You don’t think maybe God won’t add more years of wandering?

It is tempting to say that this is a fundamental conflict of values between spiritual values and material values. Eretz Yisrael is a special place, Moshe knows, not because it’s the easiest place to herd or cultivate. And as he’ll say later, not on bread alone do people live. And here are the tribes of mikneh, of possessions and material. Of course Moshe is going to be upset.

But the Netziv of Volozhin spots a different kind of tension here. He notices that Moshe in his response to the B’nai Gad and the B’nai Reuven shifts the language from the herds to the heart, from mikneh to lev. The Netziv suggests that the people of Gad and Reuven and Menashe are expressing fearf, and it’s not a fear of war. They are afraid of “Hashgachat Hashem”, of Divine “hashgacha” in the Land of Israel.

Now you may know this word “hashgacha” from the world of kashrut -- hashgacha means supervision. You hear about a restaurant and want to know, what’s their hashgacha? A person who supervises is called mashgi’ach or mash’gicha.

But “hashgacha” has a broader meaning, which is being noticed by the Divine, individually and in all of our actions.

The materialism of the people of Gad and Reuven is a cover for a spiritual fear. They are afraid of living life as though every moment were worth noticing. As though every action, every intention, has a cosmic significance.

They are afraid that their lives don’t have that significance, that they aren’t worthy of being watched by the Divine and seen in that way. So they try to define themselves in terms of the external markers of a good life -- prosperity, which is good, and safe homes for their children. They use the language of mikneh to say we’ll be satisfied if we’re doing well in the aggregate, if we’re productive. We’ll give our tithes, just let us count what we do and calculate at the harvest, we’ll mark the year with everyone but if it’s okay just watch us from a bit of a distance, the rest of the tribes and God also.

This fear of hashgacha, that our hearts and our lives won’t stand up to being seen by the Divine -- I wonder if Moshe doesn’t see through that right away.

I wonder if Moshe didn’t make a show of accusing them of something, and getting hot and in their face. Because look what happens: Immediately they tribes come back and say: No, no! We’re not going to abandon the people. We will fight with them for the land, in fact we’re going to lead them into the land, and we will be the first to gear up, and only when we have secured this national mission will we go back and join our herds and our kids. Yes, they talk about the herds before the kids.

And I’m sure if you followed you noticed how Moshe goes over this twice, once in the positive -- are you saying you’re going to go and lead the people and.... and they repeat it. They say it in the positive and the negative -- if we go as fighters into the land, and with the rest of the people.... and if we don’t then we understand what it says about us, and the consequences of that. And Moshe brings them to Elazar the kohen, and repeats what they said, and has them say it again.

In Jewish law this has become known as the stipulation of the tribes of Gad and Re’uven, the t’nai bnai Gad uvnei Reuven -- which is when you make a pledge or an agreement in both the positive and the negative, which is a legal thing to make words airtight.

But I think what Moshe is doing is smoking them out, and causing the people of Gad and Reuven to declare that they are more than they realized. They are people of herds, yes, but also people of solidarity, and commitment, and passion, and energy, and people who can see a picture beyond their own neighborhood. Moshe gets them to say it and then he says it back to them. More than once. And in front of someone else.

Moshe is saying -- this is what hashgacha looks like. This is what it’s like to have someone look into your heart, into more of your actions than you might have chosen, into more of your intentions. It’s at first a bit of a shock to the system but I bet it feels good, to hear me say out loud what I am seeing of you that’s deeper, and to hear yourselves say it also.

This was a demonstration of what it is like, to live under Divine hashgacha, and hopefully you will embrace that.

I think Moshe was saying to them that their materialism was not superficial. These people may lead with mikneh rav, lotsa cattle, but the Divine is described in our Amidah in the same language, as koneh hakol -- everything is Divine possession, Divine material.

To the extent they are people of mikneh, it is a good thing -- through herds they will perpetuate the people and the land they graze, they will feed, they will tithe. It’s through material things that you experience not only surface joys but deeper ones, and as Michael Walzer has written there is a spirituality of milk and honey, of the seven species of grains, there is a material life that is infused with spirituality and in fact all spiritual life in Torah is through our bodies and our things. So be people of mikneh and hashgacha, don’t say it has to be that you’re either a superficial materialist or you have a spiritual life. Don’t see these as two opposed value systems when they are not.

As we finish up the book of B’midbar (Numbers), getting ready to be ever closer to the end of the Torah, so too we are getting ready to be closer to the new year. We all deserve to believe our lives are worthy of Hashgachat Hashem. That we lead lives and have hearts worth being seen in all their moments, and that it brings God joy to see all those moments. We all deserve someone like Moshe to shock us when we act more superficial than we really are. Someone to make it less scary to say what is deeper in us, our truths and our pains, and to say them back to us.

Yom Hashoah Remarks 5784 (2024)

This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:

We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.

We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.

How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring.  We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by. 

As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.

This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.

I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.

We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.

I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to  remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.

We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.

We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.

Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who, we, still, are.

We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.

And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.

 

Tentative Torah For the Week's Parasha and Week of Protests

Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.

 

The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.

 

Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.

 

“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”

 

And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.

 

1. Nadav and Avihu

 

In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.

 

If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.

 

Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.

 

2. Aharon and his two sons

 

I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.

 

None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.

 

But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.

 

From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?

 

Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.

 

3. The Divine and Aharon

 

How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?

 

But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.

 

I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.

 

4. The Divine and Moshe

 

So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.

 

Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.

 

Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?

 

Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?

 

Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.

 

Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.

 

On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.

 

And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.

 

5. Aharon and the people

 

It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.

 

They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.

 

Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.

 

Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.

And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.

 

Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.

 

Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.

 

Interlude – Two Goats

 

The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.

 

Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)

 

6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now

 

In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.

 

I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.

 

This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?

 

From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.

 

They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.

 

I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.

 

Not just back then, but for us too.

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.