Even though we still have over a week until Purim, we should try to get a head start on thinking about it, otherwise, all of its depth will be lost upon us, drowned in its apparent superficiality. Between the costumes, the heavy drinking and gift-giving, Purim can look to the untrained eye like a tacky, platonic fraternity party.
It may be that Purim, as the most ostensibly simplistic of the holidays, requires the most profound inner preparation in order to penetrate its depths.
~~~~~
The Sfas Emes (Rav Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, late 1800's) asks a very basic but important question: why do we have to hear the megillah twice, once at night and once during the day?
If it's a question of remembering the story, maybe they can just pass out a little book report in shul the first time they read it and save us the trouble the next day...
...it's really not such a difficult plot to catch on to:
...it's really not such a difficult plot to catch on to:
Achashveirosh throws a party, kills his wife, throws another party to find a new wife, marries Esther, Mordechai refuses to bow to Haman, Haman passes a decree to kill all the Jews, etc. etc... Mordechai and Esther save the day and Haman ends up getting hanged.
Any school child could tell it over to you!Right?
Really, it's almost unprecedented in other mitzvot. Especially, when we look at the other holidays: Matzah, Maror, the 4 cups, and telling over the story of leaving Egypt -- we only have these mitzvot on the first night of Pesach.
On Sukkot, the mitzvah from the Torah is to take lulav and etrog once on the first day.
On Channukah, we light one candle a night, but only at night.
Why do we have to neurotically hear the whole megillah again within 24 hours!?!
Back to our concepts of Time
We spoke a couple of weeks ago about the Torah concept of time, that we have to see how the flow of time isn't just flowing endlessly in circles, but has a direction and an endpoint, and that we can tap into that "goal"-reality on Shabbat. Purim, in a certain sense, functions as a counterpoint to this concept -- opening our eyes not to the goal per se, but to the symphonic confluence of moments in the process towards that goal.
It is human nature to have a short memory span. Both a blessing and a curse. When we are suffering from a headache, our whole world becomes the headache. Our lives before the headache fade into the distant past, and the prospects for living without this pain becomes an almost impossible future. We forget that hours before, we had been comfortably enjoying a healthy life for weeks at a time.
Similarly, we often work so hard in order to achieve some goal: get into a certain school, land a job we really want, plan and earn for a family vacation -- and when we get there, all of the trials and tribulations -- all of the day-to-day grind -- all the sweat and tears to arrive at that point, melt away, leaving just the now of pleasure.
A few moments of reflection will reveal that it is inherent to the physical body that it only understands the pleasure and pain of the now. The body does not naturally remember last year's toothache or even yesterday's ice cream sundae.
The same is true for the emotions. The heart, on its own, feels and magnifies an emotional emotional experience in the here, now and "me." On its own, the heart is very bad at considering the future, the past, other places, and other people. By way of metaphor, an adult body is comparable to an infant, and an adult heart is like a 13 year-old -- both are relatively self-centered and focused on what's in front of them.
When we left Egypt as a nation of slaves, we needed special effects and fireworks to be able to confidently follow Hashem into the barren desert. The shackles and whips of slavery turned off our minds from free-thinking, and bound us to "my pain," the "futility of my labor," "why me?" We were a nation in its infancy, and the Alm!ghty educated us according to where we stood.
A thousand years later, we were considerably more mature as a people (Shabbat 88a). Hashem educated us in such a way that we would be able to see Him not only when He revealed Himself to our senses and emotions in hail stones filled with fire, or a splitting sea, or a billowing mountain, but in the subtleties of our mind's eye. If your body is you as a newborn, and your heart you as a hormonal teenager, your mind is you as an elderly, experienced wo/man capable of seeing past the here and now, remembering the past, and projecting the future, and sensitive to the nuances in between.
It is a well-known fact that Megilat Esther is the only book of Tanakh in which Hashem's Name is entirely absent. We should now be more equipped to understand His hidden-ness.
Hashem's Ineffable Name, which is spelled י-ה-ו-ה, is understood by our Sages as an allusion to the fact that in the past היה, so much as the present הווה, and the future יהיה, Hashem is there conducting the timeless orchestra.
A slightly deeper understanding of this (and perhaps more precise in terms of the spelling of His Name) is that to "see" Hashem in the world one has to be able to comprehend how the הווה present is unfolding into the future (a "yud" in front of a verb conjugates it in the future tense) [Leshem].
Our mental CPU has to be running on full blast to be able to envision at once, the BIG PICTURE of where the Alm!ghty wants to lead us, and simultaneously see this unique moment, this Torah idea you're struggling to understand, this seemingly insignificant act of kindness to another -- how every freeze-frame of life is leading you to become the individual, and us to become the nation we are meant to become. This is, of course, a much more delicate task than the more coarse "Hollywood" revelation that a nation of slaves needed to jolt them out of their slavery, but we can understand how it is this challenge which raises us into spiritual adulthood.
The chessmaster can move the amateur into any position on the chess board that he desires. So too, the chessmaster playing another chessmaster can project at every move the possible directions that the other player is aiming towards. For us to be able to appreciate the greatness of the way Hashem moves His pieces on His board, we have to become, to the best of our abilities, "chessmasters" ourselves. This is not just in order to become a "chess expert" or "afficionado" for the sake of it. The Alm!ghty is not trying to put us in check mate; He wants us to be check chai. He does not want to keep a "secret agenda" from us; He wants to share His plans with us, and for us to join Him. He wants us to become the people we are destined to become -- if we choose to accept our destiny.
Hashem's Name is missing from the megillah because it is our job to see it written in. In this way, the megillah of Purim is the most accurate simulation of modern life -- a life in which Hashem's Presence is not always so obvious -- and sometimes, it seems, terrifyingly absent.
The reason, the Sfas Emes explains, that we must read the megillah twice is because the first time, we our flown over the panorama, from beginning to end -- as if with horse-blinders on -- following along scene by scene -- each detached from the next. Only once we've seen the big picture, how we were saved from a certain destruction, one more thorough than the Holocaust, can we appreciate that Hashem was there from the beginning.
In a era in which the word "random" is trendy -- in a time in which science itself is predicated on "essential uncertainty" -- when art is post-modern and meaning is everything but objective, the megillah remains extraordinarily contemporary for a 2,500 year old document. We must look deeper in this computer age to understand that just as all the semiconducters and transistors must be in place for the microchip to process, and just as chaos theory teaches us the delicate dependency of even a butterflies flapping wings, this world is not random at all, but rather, every detail is dependent on every other one. All too often, so pulled by the increasingly rapid flow of time, we fail to connect the dots in the world at large, and perhaps more importantly, in our own lives. This is the arena of our free choice: are we aware that the delicate balance of the entire world can very well depend on us (Rambam Hilchot Tshuva 3:4)?
The same is true for the emotions. The heart, on its own, feels and magnifies an emotional emotional experience in the here, now and "me." On its own, the heart is very bad at considering the future, the past, other places, and other people. By way of metaphor, an adult body is comparable to an infant, and an adult heart is like a 13 year-old -- both are relatively self-centered and focused on what's in front of them.
When we left Egypt as a nation of slaves, we needed special effects and fireworks to be able to confidently follow Hashem into the barren desert. The shackles and whips of slavery turned off our minds from free-thinking, and bound us to "my pain," the "futility of my labor," "why me?" We were a nation in its infancy, and the Alm!ghty educated us according to where we stood.
A thousand years later, we were considerably more mature as a people (Shabbat 88a). Hashem educated us in such a way that we would be able to see Him not only when He revealed Himself to our senses and emotions in hail stones filled with fire, or a splitting sea, or a billowing mountain, but in the subtleties of our mind's eye. If your body is you as a newborn, and your heart you as a hormonal teenager, your mind is you as an elderly, experienced wo/man capable of seeing past the here and now, remembering the past, and projecting the future, and sensitive to the nuances in between.
It is a well-known fact that Megilat Esther is the only book of Tanakh in which Hashem's Name is entirely absent. We should now be more equipped to understand His hidden-ness.
Hashem's Ineffable Name, which is spelled י-ה-ו-ה, is understood by our Sages as an allusion to the fact that in the past היה, so much as the present הווה, and the future יהיה, Hashem is there conducting the timeless orchestra.
A slightly deeper understanding of this (and perhaps more precise in terms of the spelling of His Name) is that to "see" Hashem in the world one has to be able to comprehend how the הווה present is unfolding into the future (a "yud" in front of a verb conjugates it in the future tense) [Leshem].
Our mental CPU has to be running on full blast to be able to envision at once, the BIG PICTURE of where the Alm!ghty wants to lead us, and simultaneously see this unique moment, this Torah idea you're struggling to understand, this seemingly insignificant act of kindness to another -- how every freeze-frame of life is leading you to become the individual, and us to become the nation we are meant to become. This is, of course, a much more delicate task than the more coarse "Hollywood" revelation that a nation of slaves needed to jolt them out of their slavery, but we can understand how it is this challenge which raises us into spiritual adulthood.
The chessmaster can move the amateur into any position on the chess board that he desires. So too, the chessmaster playing another chessmaster can project at every move the possible directions that the other player is aiming towards. For us to be able to appreciate the greatness of the way Hashem moves His pieces on His board, we have to become, to the best of our abilities, "chessmasters" ourselves. This is not just in order to become a "chess expert" or "afficionado" for the sake of it. The Alm!ghty is not trying to put us in check mate; He wants us to be check chai. He does not want to keep a "secret agenda" from us; He wants to share His plans with us, and for us to join Him. He wants us to become the people we are destined to become -- if we choose to accept our destiny.
Hashem's Name is missing from the megillah because it is our job to see it written in. In this way, the megillah of Purim is the most accurate simulation of modern life -- a life in which Hashem's Presence is not always so obvious -- and sometimes, it seems, terrifyingly absent.
The reason, the Sfas Emes explains, that we must read the megillah twice is because the first time, we our flown over the panorama, from beginning to end -- as if with horse-blinders on -- following along scene by scene -- each detached from the next. Only once we've seen the big picture, how we were saved from a certain destruction, one more thorough than the Holocaust, can we appreciate that Hashem was there from the beginning.
That if Achashveirosh had not demagogically moved the capital to Shushan, Mordechai and Esther would not have been in proximity to influence the king...
That if Vashti had not refused to come out of her quarters, Esther would never have made it within the king's palace...
That if Haman had not pushed for the plan to oust Vashti, he would not have been in a position of sufficient power...
That if Mordechai had not been serendipitously elected to guard the palace gates, he would have never been privy to the conspiracy against the king.........
...and all the plot threads intersect.Hashem was there at every step, as the prospects for salvation grew bleak and even impossible.
In a era in which the word "random" is trendy -- in a time in which science itself is predicated on "essential uncertainty" -- when art is post-modern and meaning is everything but objective, the megillah remains extraordinarily contemporary for a 2,500 year old document. We must look deeper in this computer age to understand that just as all the semiconducters and transistors must be in place for the microchip to process, and just as chaos theory teaches us the delicate dependency of even a butterflies flapping wings, this world is not random at all, but rather, every detail is dependent on every other one. All too often, so pulled by the increasingly rapid flow of time, we fail to connect the dots in the world at large, and perhaps more importantly, in our own lives. This is the arena of our free choice: are we aware that the delicate balance of the entire world can very well depend on us (Rambam Hilchot Tshuva 3:4)?
As usual Excellent !
ReplyDeleteAlex B.
Keep em coming! David B.
ReplyDelete