Purim 2024

Purim begins on Saturday night. Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It feels like we’re ready.

And it also feels like we couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from somewhere. When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim. That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually does come from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place. Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs and haters.

But much-younger-me was unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details, of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia. And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad people being defeated instead of the good people.

Eventually, much-younger-me grew up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere.

So I was in. But not entirely. In 1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for years after reading Schindler’s List (then still called Schinder’s Ark) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was always with me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade.

And that brings me to Purim 2024, the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical, quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable.

Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we can surely observe it eighty years later too!  But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to speak as current-me, as who I am today.

We live on the razor’s edge, all of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought. As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there if they wished—they all seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim and, yes, having great fun at the same time.

Living on a razor’s edge is uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from somewhere. And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all. That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least eventually, from somewhere.

 

Ezra and Esther

Being an ancient book, the Bible makes many of its best points using all sorts of literary techniques that are unfamiliar to modern readers. Sometimes these are subtle flourishes that only someone reading truly carefully would ever notice. But other instances are totally overt, fully visible, and noticeable by even someone just casually perusing the text. The willingness of the narrative to depict the same individual as being two different ages at the same time is a good example: to most moderns, passages that do that have a clumsy feel to them and suggest that some ancient editor must have been asleep at the switch and simply failed to see a giant discrepancy that could easily have been fixed. (To see an essay I published years ago about that specific feature of the scriptural text, click here.) But discrepancy is more wisely taken as a literary feature of the text, as a kind of riddle fully intended to teach something to those who take the time to solve it.

Also in that category is the apparent willingness of Scripture to present two versions of the same story that are essentially incompatible with each other. The most famous example of that would be in the very beginning of the biblical text, where Genesis starts off with two wholly irreconcilable accounts of the creation of humankind. Many and clever have been the attempts of countless commentators to “fix” the problem by finding a way to fit the stories together into a single, cogent narrative. But the far more interesting way to approach the problem is to understand this opening riddle as one of many places in the text of Scripture in which the same story is told in two discordant versions not to confuse or to annoy, but to invite the reader to exploit the differences between the two conflicting texts to learn a lesson that Scripture prefers for some reason to teach subtly rather than fully openly.

As Purim approaches, I’ve been thinking how that approach to mismatched texts can be applied not solely to texts within a biblical book, but also to the larger biblical corpus itself. (I have an essay about that too: click here.) In other words, taking the Bible as a book (as opposed to a collection of books) allows the reader to approach the full text of Tanakh as a single literary unit to which the interpretive rules generally brought to bear in explicating passages within specific single books can be fruitfully applied.

In the second of my two essays mentioned above, I applied this principle to a huge difference between the biblical books of Jeremiah and Daniel, one that would be simple to wave away as a mere instance of misspelling on the part of one or both authors. Today, I would like to apply that same principle to the biblical books of Esther and Ezra. And then I would like to apply the lesson that comparison suggests to our present situation as Jewish Americans.

The Book of Ezra, one of Scripture’s most understudied books, begins where Chronicles leaves off: with the surprise announcement that, as one of his first royal edicts, Cyrus, king of Persia, formally ended the exile in Babylon and told the Jews living in modern-day Iraq and Iran that they could return to Israel and re-establish Jewish life in that place. It’s a complex story. The edict of Cyrus itself appears in Scripture in several different versions. The specific relationship between the work of the Chronicler (as the anonymous author of Chronicles is chummily called by scholars) and Ezra and its own sister work, the Book of Nehemiah, is a matter of endless scholarly debate. But, for all that, the storyline itself is clear as day. In the waning days of the Kingdom of Judah (the sole remaining Jewish state in its day, the northern Kingdom of Israel having been dismantled by its Assyrian overlords more than a century earlier), the Babylonian hordes arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. There was a brief window of opportunity during which the coming debacle could have been averted. (The prophet Jeremiah was at the peak of his powers in the months leading up to said debacle and promote surrender as a means of survival.) But the king of Judah wouldn’t hear of it. And what ensued was the razing of Jerusalem’s walls, the slaughter of countless citizens, the destruction of the Temple, and the annihilation of the nation’s hopes for some sort of continued existence as an autonomous state. What ensued is known as the Babylonian Exile. Some Jews—the poorest and least educated ones—were ignored. But the rest of the nation—the royal court, the scholars, the businesspeople, the upper and middle artisan classes—were taken off into exile and forced to attempt to survive while “weeping on the shores of Babylon.”

There is endless debate about the details: how many people went into exile, how many survived, how successful they were or weren’t in retaining their ties to their own Jewish culture while in a hostile environment. But none of that alters the basic the storyline: the Babylonians exiled some or many (but not all) the Jews and then, when they were defeated in turn by Cyrus of Persia, those Jews and their descendants were permitted to go home and it is their story that the Book of Ezra tells. Nor is the moral of the story hard to suss out: Jewish life in exile is possible, but the only real hope for continued Jewish existence lies in return to the land. Yes, Cyrus’s decree specifically permits any who wish to stay behind and support the returnees financially (“with gold, silver, goods, livestock, and valuables”). But the author’s point couldn’t be clearer: exile is barely bearable and only briefly. When the opportunity presents itself to return to Zion, the people who care about their own future get going—because that is where their future lies. From there, life progressed. In the chronology put forward in Ezra, Cyrus is replaced on the throne by Darius, who is followed by—surprise!—King Achashveirosh, known to all from the Esther story. (His “real” name was Xerxes, and he was followed by his son Artaxerxes, who was on the throne in Ezra’s own day.)

Let’s go back to Achashveirosh. I love that he has two names. (I do too, as do most diasporan Jewish types.) And I love that he’s mentioned not only in the book that is so much “about” him, but also in other books: here in Ezra and also once in the Book of Daniel (whose author thought he was Darius’s father, not his grandson. Whatever.) And thus does he serve as the link between Ezra and Esther by appearing in both, albeit briefly in Ezra and at length in Esther.

The storyline of Esther is known to all who have ever been in shul on Purim. But that story contains some riddles generally left unposed, thus also unsolved.

A terrible decree goes forth calling for true genocide, for the total eradication of the Jewish people. The edict is met with astonishment by the people, who are given a full eleven months to prepare for their execution. Eventually, things end up well. But I’m focused on what happens before that happens. The people are in a panic. They appear to inhabit every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. The portrait drawn by the Chronicler and by Ezra of a people temporarily banished from its homeland and more than eager finally to abandon exile and return to Israel seems oddly out of sync with the scene depicted in Esther. Cyrus reigned for about twenty years, from 550 BCE to 530. Darius reigned for about forty years after that. And then we have Achashveirosh/Xerxes, who came to the throne in about 465 BCE and who reigned for about forty years. In Cyrus’s day, the Book of Ezra has the Jewish people returning en masse to the Jewish homeland and leaving a few stragglers behind. But, a mere century later, the Book of Esther depicts a Persian empire with Jews living in all 127 of its provinces and apparently well settled in and, until Haman, secure.

And how do the Jews in the Megillah respond to impending genocide? (This is, of course, real genocide they were facing, not the phony kind modern-day anti-Semites see whenever Israel dares defend itself forcefully against its enemies.) They weep. They fast. They daub themselves with ashes, essentially pre-sitting shiva for themselves while they still can. But no one seems to remember that Israel—then called Yehud (the Persian version of Judah)—was one of those 127 provinces. And that there was no specific reason for the Jews, instead of cowering in terror, not to return to their own ancestral homeland and there to defend themselves against their enemies. This course of action—forceful, beyond justifiable, and possible even fully successful—this seems to have occurred to no one.

The Jews seem to prefer their misery. Mordechai forbids Esther to reveal her Jewishness to the king until precisely the right moment. But surely the Jews of Shushan knew that Esther was Jewish—how could they not have? They all seem to know who Mordechai is. And Esther was his ward, an uncle’s daughter whom he had adopted and promised to raise. Surely she too would have been known to all. And yet no one seems to light upon the idea of getting Esther to beg the king for permission to return to Zion  and there, in their own homeland, to resist the terror-onslaught planned by wicked Haman.

And so we have two worldviews in conflict: the one set forward in Ezra in which it goes without saying that the future of the Jewish people depends on their ability to flourish in Israel and the one in Esther that seems to think that the best hope for Jews in the diaspora is to hope that salvation from even the most extreme version of violent anti-Semitism (i.e., the kind that promotes genocide as its end goal) is to pray that salvation comes, to quote Mordechai himself, “from somewhere.”

Or do we? Could the point of Esther be to show the folly of charting a future for the Jewish people by hoping for salvation “from somewhere” or anywhere? The Jews of Persia were saved because of Esther’s daring and Mordechai’s cunning. But that their plan works at all is presented as something just short of miraculous. The Jews of Persia are depicted as powerless and foolish…and wholly unable to see that their only real hope rests in returning to Zion and there flourishing out in the open and fully in the light as proud members of the House of Israel. Ezra simply starts off by taking that for granted. Esther depicts a people gone astray a mere century later. Reading each in each other’s light is meant, I think, not to confuse, but to challenge those inclined to suppose that Jews can be safe by relying on others and hoping for the best and, to encourage them, ayin l’tziyyon tzofiah, to see where the ultimate destiny of Israel lies. 

Seeking Solace in Small Things

I’m feeling the weight of it all these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how precisely it may have come about.

Paired with the rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats, directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.

And so I’ve found myself seeking solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and survived.

The first is, of all things, an earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging. There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death: when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr. Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just recently, the earring was discovered.

It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful. Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past (which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be unable to shake off.

My second small thing is even tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing: a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7^th or 6^th century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that place.

Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always something left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by remembering.

And my third small thing is, of all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I ❤️ Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims, visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I ❤️ Jerusalem” pin, an ancient version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.