Pandemic Purim

Purim was a slightly melancholic experience at Shelter Rock this year: first we cancelled the dancing, then we cancelled the party, then we cancelled the whole evening so as best to conform to the advice we were getting indirectly from the CDC in Atlanta, less indirectly from the Nassau County Board of Health, and not at all indirectly from physicians in the community who felt we would be putting people—and particularly our seniors—at risk by bringing them together in large numbers in a confined space. I suppose some must have felt we were over-reacting. But can you really over-react when we are talking about the health and welfare of a whole community and specifically of its oldest and youngest members? Better safe than sorry!

And yet, even so, the whole experience left me feeling a bit despondent, a bit blue—but not specifically because I was or am suffering over the decision itself. When I analyzed my thinking, in fact, I realized that my mood had more to do with the way the decision—and the whole coronavirus outbreak—had somehow managed to shift the way I think about Purim itself, moving me along from considering it basically to be about the great success of the Jews of Persia in standing together to defend themselves to focusing instead on just how vulnerable those people were in the first place, how completely they would surely have been annihilated if Queen Esther hadn’t found the courage to enter the king’s throne room uninvited, if she hadn’t found the words to stir the king to action on her people’s behalf, if she hadn’t been the paragon of virtue and bravery as which we more than reasonably remember her. It all worked out well, of course. But it also could not have…and that sense of vulnerability is what I noted coming to the fore in me and displacing the raucous delight our happiest holiday generally elicits in me easily.

And then I read Meir Soloveitchik’s essay published in the New York Times on Purim day itself. Rabbi Soloveitchik, the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue on Central Park West, is one of my favorite essayists. (He is also only the synagogue’s tenth rabbi since the American Revolution, which detail seems impossible to believe and yet is apparently true.) He writes in several different forums, all of which I try to keep up with, but this Op-Ed piece for the Times (click here) made a special impression on me both because it both confirmed my mood but also because it helped me understand about the whole concept of vulnerability that had somehow come to the fore in my thinking about the holiday.

Rabbi Soloveitchik’s basic point is that there is something slightly both slightly self-serving and seriously strange about celebrating the happy end of the Purim story without pausing to contemplate the political instability that is, after all, at the heart of the tale. He cites a comment made by his uncle, the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s in the latter’s book, Days of Deliverance: Essays on Purim and Chanukah, which I would like also to quote. “If,” the elder Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote, “a Prime Minister who just yesterday enjoyed the full confidence and trust of the king was suddenly convicted and executed,” he reflected, “then who is wise and clairvoyant enough to assure us that the same unreasonable, absurd, neurotic change of mood and mind will not repeat itself?” And, of course, the answer is that none of us is: King Achashveirosh is depicted in the Megillah as the most terrifying political figure of all: the idiot-king possessed of immense and unchallengeable power who is so pathetically eager to please the world that he basically agrees to whatever proposal is put to him no matter how malign or barbaric, and no matter how reliable or unreliable the person putting it to him might be.

The younger Rabbi Soloveitchik, the essayist whose work I so admire, then goes on to ask the obvious question: if his uncle’s observation is correct, which it certainly is, then why exactly is Purim celebrated as a holiday at all? It’s a good question. And his answer is also a good one. Queen Esther, he writes, embodied precisely the character traits— and foremost among them initiative, bravery, and insight—that made it possible for the Jews to survive both the terrifying imbecility of an Achashveirosh and the malign savagery of a Haman. And so we celebrate, not the specific incident that gave rise to the holiday, but rather the possibility of heroism that constitutes its greatest lesson. That last phrase “the possibility of heroism,” comes directly from the final paragraph in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s essay, where he writes that, for all Purim “marks the fragility of Jewish security,” it also represents the possibility of heroism in the face of that vulnerability. And then the essay concludes with the thought that Purim “is therefore a holiday for our time. Around the world, and especially in a Europe that should know better, anti-Semitism has made itself manifest once again. As Esther’s example is celebrated, and Jews gather in synagogue to study her terrifying tale, we are reminded why, in the face of hate, we remain vigilant — and why we continue to joyously celebrate all the same.”

In my weekly letters, I have returned again and again to the topic of heroism and the specific question of what constitutes a true hero. (Click here or here for some examples.) Esther certain qualifies: untrained in diplomacy or in strategic negotiation techniques, she somehow nonetheless found a way to identify her people’s foes’ Achilles’ heels—Haman’s preening megalomania and Achashveirosh’s pathetic need to please—and bravely to use them artfully and cleverly in the defense of her people. And so Purim really is a holiday for our time. We all feel ever more vulnerable in the world than ever as the number of anti-Semitic incidents at home and abroad multiplies, as anti-Semitic tropes creep into public discourse in a way that even a few years ago would have felt unimaginable, and as the world’s eagerness to placate Iran, Israel’s most vicious foe, feels more and more ominous with every passing week. The obvious question is how to respond forcefully effectively. And to that specific question, Purim offers a very good answer: with cunning, with forthrightness, with intelligence rooted in an honest understanding of our enemies’ motives, with selflessness and singlemindedness, and with courage and bravery. And so, because Queen Esther was the embodiment of all of the above, we celebrate her success…even though, at the same time, we take note of just how precarious the security the Jews of old Persia surely felt before Haman came to office truly was. And that vulnerability can serve us well…if we can get over our skittishness in its regard to allow it to guide us an understanding of how things actually are in the world.

Of course, all Americans are feeling vulnerable this week as the coronavirus spreads unchecked throughout thirty-eight of the fifty states and 117 of the world’s countries including every nation in Europe. But is that sense of vulnerability a problem or an asset? Or is it just the right emotion for us all to bring to the table as we prepare to elect a new (or not new) president in November? Indeed, perhaps we should be coming to the New York State primary on April 19 or the general election on November 3 possessed not of our usual American sense of invincibility but rather of a sense of the vulnerability we are all facing…and demanding that those who would be our leaders respond to how things actually are not with bluster, let alone with unfulfillable empty promises, but with the same combination of intelligence, bravery, and chutzpah that Esther brought to the table when she risked everything to prevent a catastrophe of immense proportions from befalling her people.

Since neither major party has actually nominated a candidate for the presidency, the challenge facing the American people is not prematurely to decide who to vote for, but rather thoughtfully to decide what qualities we wish to characterize those who would be our leaders. Starting from a deep sense of our vulnerability, our national and international interconnectedness to other people and peoples, and our deep and abiding sense of our personal responsibility for the welfare of others sounds like the right approach to me! Even if Queen Esther were somehow to come back to life and become a naturalized American citizen, she still would not be eligible to run for the office of President. So we’re going to have to go with someone who embodies her finest qualities, someone possessed of the courage and the cleverness, the altruism and the cunning to lead us out of this mess we find ourselves in. And who will that person be? That, of course, remains to be seen!