We hear it so often, yet we are deaf to it's power...
Despite the risk of this post looking like a cheap chain e-mail, I've included three quotes from three of the most prominent writers from the last 200 years:
"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
-Mark Twain
(“Concerning The Jews,” Harper’s Magazine, 1899)
"[The Jews are] the most perpetual people of the earth…”
-Goethe
“What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!
The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.
The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”We must remind ourselves that Twain, Goethe and Tolstoy were not AISH haTorah rabbis giving discovery seminars, nor were they paid spokespeople for the ADL, or the Jewish Federation, or the State of Israel. They were non-Jewish authors writing for a vastly non-Jewish public. This being said, it is incumbent on us as Jews to meditate on their words. Often, it takes people who are not Jewish for us to realize who we are. Not to become pompous and chauvinist because that would be foolish -- anyone who is arrogant for something that he received as a gift is certainly a fool. We must understand the eternality of our people because it is quite likely the most extraordinary and enduring miracle the world has ever seen, and every breath of every one of our lives is a part of it.
- Leo Tolstoy(What is the Jew?
quoted in The Final Resolution 1908)
A Turn of Events
One of the distinguishing features of the story of the megillah is the precise reversal of storylines -- storylines that were "bad news for the Jews" were flipped on their heads. The tragedy of a Jewish woman torn apart from her husband, forced to marry a non-Jewish tyrant, became the key to saving the nation. The elaborate parade of honor that Haman had planned for himself, was in the end, for Mordechai, with Haman escorting his steed through the city, hanging his head in shame. The 25 meter gallows that Haman had built on which to hang Mordechai, for everyone to see, was adorned a day later by Haman himself. And the edict that had been signed and sealed to annihilate the entire Jewish population under the control of the Persian empire was reversed.
בַּיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר שִׂבְּרוּ אֹיְבֵי הַיְּהוּדִים לִשְׁלוֹט בָּהֶם, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא, אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁלְטוּ הַיְּהוּדִים הֵמָּה בְּשֹׂנְאֵיהֶם
"...on that day that the enemies of the Jews had announced to rule over them, it was overturned, and the Jews dominated [and defended themselves], they over those who hated them" (Esther 9:1).
It is clear to the discerning ear that the dominant chord of this verse is not the fact that the Jews were able to kill those who sought to kill them, but the turn of events itself (Pachad Yitzhak Purim 25).
The Maharal explains this elusive reversal by way of metaphor to a mitzvah that is similarly mysterious in and of itself (see Ohr Chadash 6:4).
There is a halacha of Eidim Zomimim (you may have to read it twice):
Pair A of witnesses testified that person X committed some crime, and another pair of kosher witnesses Pair B came to court before the punishment was enacted on X, and testified that A could not possibly possess such knowledge of X because the two of them were elsewhere. Pair A become "Eidim Zomimim" -- the punishment that X was meant to receive is inflicted on Pair A (see Devarim 19:19, beginning of Tractate Makkot).What's the connection?!? The metaphor made it worse!
Just as a stone thrown at a wall bounces back with equal but opposite force when it becomes impossible for it to continue to move in the direction it was thrown (see Newton's 3rd law of motion), so too here.
The 2nd pair of witnesses proved that it was impossible for the 1st pair to say what they said in their testimony. And so, the punishment that those witnesses hurled against person X, ricochets off the wall of impossibility and comes back on them -- equal but opposite -- the exact same punishment.
More than Hitler in the Holocaust, Haman ostensibly had the capacity to obliterate the entire Jewish nation (see the above map). The megillah chronicles the ricocheting of Haman's plans off of the wall of impossibility to destroy us. Every negative consequence came back to Haman and his cohorts, and every drop of glory that they had planned for themselves came back to crown Mordechai and the Jews, ultimately letting the true King's Light to shine through.
This was not because we deserved it, or because we earned it, but because it is a fundamental, unbreakable reality in G!d's universe. The Jewish people will never be destroyed. Plans to eradicate the Jewish people are therefore equivalent to a false testimony. Primordial to the creation of the world, the Alm!ghty created the concept of a people who would keep his Torah through all the storms and tempests of world history (see the 2nd Rashi on the Torah). For anyone to claim that the Jewish people can or will be destroyed to bear false witness -- he cannot possibly testify to an entity that conceptually existed before the world itself, if the only One else Who was there to "witness it" was G!d.
The Kaleidoscopic Miracle
We've addressed this next concept many times, but we must emphasize it again. The miracle of our existence is not merely "a group survival challenge" on some deserted island to see if we make it out on the other side. We're so used to a Guilt-Based Judaism that hangs on Jewish Mother's Guilt if we assimilate or intermarry that we can tend to think that the goal is just to not assimilate and not intermarry...
Of course, we have to start from somewhere, but the goal we're going for as a people is the glowing expression of every Jewish soul in all its individuality as one of millions of pixels that come together to reveal Hashem's Infinite Love, just as the 12 tribes around the Mishkan with their different colored flags, and different colored paths of Torah expression.
On Purim, we all get drunk. That's right. It's a mitzvah (see your local Orthodox rabbi for specifications). We let go of the steering wheel. All the rabbis and lay-leaders will be out of commission in terms of decision-making abilities. We do so one day a year to demonstrate that we realize that Hashem is ultimately at the helm of our existence from beginning to end. Simultaneously, as the gemara says, נכנס יין יוצא סוד, "wine goes in, and essence comes out" (Eiruvin 65a). Everyone knows that wine oils the pipes of our expression (unfortunately, not always to our advantage). It brings expression to what's normally kept inside. Ideally, if throughout the year we've worked on our insides through self-awareness, Torah and mitzvot, on Purim, we should be able to see every individual around the table with his neshama-soul shining through.
While on Pesach we celebrate the hundreds of miracles in Egypt and at the sea, on Sukkot, the Clouds of Glory, and on Channukah the miraculous victory over the Greeks and the oil that lasted 8 days, on Purim we must realize that the greatest miracle in the world is you and all the Jews you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment