Standing Your Ground

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve spent time the course of these last weeks pondering the case of poor Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager who was shot and killed at the end of February by the community watch coordinator in a gated community near Orlando, Florida. How this will all play itself out in the courts, who knows? Whether George Zimmerman, the shooter, will eventually be convicted of second-degree murder remains to be seen. If this will turn out to be a precedent-setting trial with far-reaching implications or merely a case of someone being made to pay the price for behaving recklessly in public can also not yet be known. From every vantage point, in fact, there are far more questions so far than there are answers. As the arraignment of the shooter is only scheduled for the end of May, it seems clear that this is going to remain a raw, upsetting issue for Americans to contemplate well into the summer and probably long after the summer as well. And it also goes without saying that the specific way Florida’s bizarre “Stand Your Ground” law will be interpreted in the context of the incident at hand—an interpretation that has yet to become obvious to anyone, including, it seems, our most senior jurists—will be at the heart of the matter.

Yet, for all the lack of clarity regarding all the issues mentioned above, there are also many aspects to the story regarding which all Americans can surely agree. The death of a child is a tragedy for us all regardless of the circumstances that bring it about, an unspeakable horror for that child’s family, a disaster for any society that wishes to think of itself as civilized and secure. Trayvon leaves behind parents and an older brother, and we can surely all agree that their grief does not need to be explained or justified with reference to what the boy may or may not have done in the minutes prior to his death. And, of course, none of us can dispute that whatever good Trayvon might have done in the world had he lived will now be left undone. (Whether the same will eventually have to be said of George Zimmerman will depend on the outcome of his trial.) Nor do I think this national paroxysm of emotion we have been experiencing over the last month and a half has been unhealthy or unwarranted. Indeed, I am proud to be part of a nation that grieves for the loss of a single child regardless of its circumstances and regardless of whether that child’s death does or does not turn out eventually to be a legally punishable offense. And the recently re-opened investigation into the 1979 disappearance of little Etan Patz leaves me feeling the same way: horrified and dismayed by the story itself, but also proud to be part of a nation that considers it entirely reasonable to pursue the disappearance of a single child this long after the fact even if the only truly plausible outcome to the renewed interest in the case seems now to be the possibility of bringing some belated closure to his parents.

Today, however, I would like to write specifically about the “Stand Your Ground” law that is at the heart of the Trayvon Martin case and which is similar to laws on the books in sixteen other states as well, New York State not included. To understand those laws, however, it is necessary first to understand the legal principle called the Castle Doctrine, which is defined the most simply as the right any home owner has—because a persons’ home is his “castle”—to use force, including deadly force, against an unwanted intruder when, as the New Jersey version of the law reads, “the actor reasonably fears imminent peril of death or serious bodily harm to himself or another." The idea is simple, then: if someone invades your house and you feel reasonably that your life or anyone’s life, or your or anyone else’s physical wellbeing, is in serious danger, you have the right to attack that person without becoming liable to subsequent prosecution. The concept of the “Stand Your Ground” law is simply the same concept applied to wherever an individual might be when he or she reasonably fears imminent peril, and not just one’s home or (in some versions of the Castle Doctrine) one’s car or workplace.

As noted, there are sixteen states along with Florida that have expanded laws based on the Castle Doctrine into laws loosely called "Stand Your Ground" laws. (These laws have also been called “Line in the Sand” laws or “No Duty to Retreat” laws, but in the wake of the Trayvon Martin affair it seems the “Stand Your Ground” label will be the one that sticks.) Nor is this a specifically Floridian issue: all together there are thirty-two states, not including New York, that have or are currently considering enacting some version of Castle Doctrine or “Stand Your Ground” laws on the books.

From a Jewish point of view, the most interesting part of the issue has to do with the concept of self-definition: the right to self-defend using deadly force without needing to fear subsequent prosecution becomes operative when an individual, to cite the Arizona version of the law, “reasonably believes himself or another person to be in imminent peril of death or serious physical injury.” In other words, the laws grants an individual the right to act on how he or she feels at any given moment regardless of how an uninvolved bystander might understand the situation and also regardless of any details regarding the situation that come out afterwards, for example as part of a police investigation, but which the individual applying the deadly force has no way of knowing at the moment. It’s all about how you feel, about whether you self-define as an individual in imminent peril of death or physical injury.

Should thoughtful citizens condemn these laws simply because no legal system can function well—or even, perhaps, at all—when accused individuals can simply announce that they felt some specific way at the time of some specific incident, then walk away from the proceedings secure that no prosecutor, no matter how skilled, can prove beyond any sort of reasonable doubt that that person was not feeling that way at the time of the incident? You could argue just that, I think, and reasonably. And yet Scriptural precedent is equivocal. I am thinking specifically of the passage in Deuteronomy that sets forth the various grounds for exemption from military service. (My colleague and my friend, Rabbi Ben Kramer, has just been writing about these laws and I’ve been reading along as he’s worked, so my understanding of this specific passage is based to a certain extent on his interpretive efforts.) The law as set forth in Deuteronomy 20 seems to be based on the rational supposition that the ability of an army to fight effectively will be seriously hampered by having in the ranks individuals whose hearts will be elsewhere and who consequently will possibly be thinking more of their own survival than of playing whatever role necessary to achieve victory.

There are four grounds for exemption, of which three seem to go together. If a soldier, for example, has betrothed a woman but not actually married her, he is deemed exempt from military service because he will be overly focused on the possibility of some other man marrying his betrothed should he die on the battlefield. The same situation pertains for the soldier who recently has built a new home but has not yet moved into it (the Torah talks a bit vaguely about “dedicating” the house, presumably by affixing a m’zuzah to the doorpost and moving in)—he too, it is feared, will be over-focused on his own survival and the concomitant possibility of someone else moving into his new home in his place. And the same too applied to the soldier who recently has planted a vineyard, but who has yet to harvest from it its grapes—his mind too could possibly be elsewhere—and specifically on his own survival instead of the good of the fighting corps—and so he too must be exempted from service. These three exemptions are easy to understand and easy to prove: either a soldier is or is not engaged to be wed, and he should be able easily enough to prove his status, as should the owner of a new home or a new vineyard. But the fourth category is the more interesting one, as it grants an exemption from service to the timorous, faint-hearted soldier, who must be sent home not because of unfinished business elsewhere but simply because, as the Torah says explicitly, his terrified presence will demoralize his fellow soldiers and induce in them the same fearfulness to which he himself has fallen prey.

Interestingly, the Torah itself sets this fourth exemption apart, setting it clearly on its own and in its own category but without saying exactly why. What the ultimate reason is, who can say? (Rashi has the idea, based on a passage in the Talmud, that it has to do with who formally announced the exemptions to the men in the ranks, but that is only one possible explanation.) In my opinion, thinking along with Ben Kramer here, the issue has to do specifically with the question of an individual’s right to self-define.
The sages in ancient times debated whether there needed to be physical evidence of the soldier’s pusillanimousness or if the soldier could simply announce that he feels too terrified of battle—for whatever reasons at all—and needs to be permitted to go home. There are many different opinions regarding how such inner terror could be adequately “proven” (one idea in the Talmud is that the test should be whether a man can keep his bladder closed when he is shown an unsheathed sword), but the law ultimately requires that the soldier’s inner fearfulness be manifested in some demonstrable way: merely saying he feels that way is not to be enough.

I think that line of thinking could be thoughtfully applied to the debate surrounding the “Stand Your Ground” laws. Clearly, there are moments when anyone can prove that his life is in danger. One can imagine many scenarios in which any reasonable onlooker would conclude as much, and the right to defend one’s own life, or the life of another person, against imminent attack is a basic human right. The question worthy of debate has to do with the degree to which one can self-excuse for using deadly force against another person by self-defining as someone who felt his or her life to be in danger. Is it reasonable simply to require a defendant to assert as much under oath? That seems to be the way the laws in many states are written. But even our sages in ancient times understood the perils involved in allowing such an unbridled right to self-define to function as a get-out-of-jail (or, in the Scriptural mode, a get-out-of-the-army) card. It seems to me that a legal system cannot function well if accused individuals are awarded the right to avoid responsibility for their actions merely by saying after the fact how they felt at the time. If a jury of reasonable citizens cannot be convinced that they too would have felt their lives in danger had they been in the defendant’s shoes at the specific moment under consideration, then the mere assertion that one felt oneself to be in danger should not be enough to require a verdict of not guilty.

Yom Ha-atzma'ut 5772

The best Yom Ha-atzma’ut of my life was in 1984. We were living in Jerusalem that year, because I had the great good fortune to have been awarded a post-doctoral fellowship for a year’s worth of research and study at the Hebrew University. (This was before I came to my senses and remembered that I had become a rabbi in the first place to serve actual Jewish people in the congregational setting, not to lecture to mostly non-Jewish undergraduates in university classrooms.) My oldest son, Max, had been born a week earlier. Even that is a bit of a story—no one plans for a child to be born on Yom Ha-shoah, obviously, but that was nonetheless when Max ended up entering the world. At first, Joan and I were both a bit dismayed, confused by the weirdness of the greatest day of our lives to date falling precisely on the Jewish people’s national day of remembrance for the k’doshim who perished during the Holocaust. But once we calmed down, we saw things differently.

My whole life, I think it is fair to say, had to that point been one long, complicated response to the Shoah. In many ways, it still is. (The same could be said, probably, for most of us. But we do differ in how we embrace that thought, or even if we allow ourselves to embrace it in terms of actual life choices and not merely worldview.) For me personally, even despite having spent a lifetime in the congregational rabbinate, I believe that the most profound way in which I have personally responded to the Shoah was to marry and then to become the father of Jewish children, thus seeing to it as best I could that the Jewish people would rise from the ashes, if not quite phoenix-like than at least in terms of me personally doing what I could to create a viable future generation of engaged, committed Jewish young people. And so, at least eventually, Joan and I concluded that perhaps giving birth to a firstborn child on Yom Ha-shoah—and in the thriving capital city of an independent Jewish state, no less—was not something to be regretted or stoically accepted, but rather something to be embraced, to be considered richly meaningful and deeply satisfying. And so was Max born on Yom Ha-shoah in 1984, forty-one years almost to the day after the Jews of Warsaw—and my father’s people came originally from a shtetl just outside Warsaw—rose up in their futile, yet incredibly noble, effort to die not as victims but as heroes. Could any of those people fighting the Germans in Warsaw have imagined my little baby being born in the thriving capital of a Jewish state possessed of its own powerful army just four decades later? I doubt it! But I, blessed (as are we all) with hindsight, could see them…and I could also see my baby, my little Yerushalmi, coming into the world precisely on a day that once Jewish children only died.

Boys born on Yom Ha-shoah, like all Jewish healthy boys, have their brit milah eight days later. Yom Ha-shoah falls on the twenty-seventh of Nisan. Normally, Yom Ha-atzma’ut is eight days after Yom Ha-shoah, but the dates are altered slightly from year to year to avoid interference with Shabbat observance. And so it came to pass in 1984 that eight days after the day of Max’s birth was not Yom Ha-atzma’ut at all, but Yom Ha-zikaron, the Memorial Day devoted to remembering both the members of the Israel Defense Forces who died in the service of their country and also those who died before statehood was proclaimed in the effort to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel. It’s a somber day in Israel, one that is marked with memorial ceremonies, with some national minutes of silence, and with a general sense of somber gratitude to those who paid the ultimate price so that the State might come into being, then endure. And Yom Ha-zikaron is always followed immediately by Yom Ha-atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, which commemorates specifically the day on the Jewish calendar, the fifth of Iyar, on which statehood was proclaimed in 1948. Max’s whole first week was fraught with symbolism! His bris, held in the gorgeous home of friends of ours on Tel Chai Street in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, was held in the late afternoon on Yom Ha-zikaron.

It was a warm day. My mother-in-law and I made the trek to Machane Yehudah earlier in the day to buy fruit and cakes and other treats to serve to our guests. The brit milah itself was fine. (By that I mean that the mohel was fine and our guests were fine. The sandek, Joan’s great-uncle Mordechai, was fine too. As first-time parents, Joan and I were slightly in shock.) But the best part was still to come: evening fell, the sky was suddenly filled with fireworks, our baby was fast asleep, and the entire nation began to celebrate…not precisely Max’s entry into the covenant, but its own birthday, the birthday of the State of Israel. Now that was a Yom Ha-atzma’ut to remember!

Since then, no Yom Ha-atzma’ut has come or gone without bringing me back to those days in Jerusalem. As you all know, I harbor no ambivalence at all about my Zionism or about my unyielding support for the State of Israel. I’ve just finished reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book, Jerusalem: A Biography, which I heartily recommend to you all. It is a long read, but a fascinating one…and one that will bring to your attention all sorts of details about Jewish history and about the history specifically of the Jewish community in Jerusalem that you will probably not have known. (Many of them, I too did not know.) It is a rich book, a powerful book…but its power for me personally lay not in the accuracy of its detail (which is impressive in its own right), but in the backdrop it provided for my family’s great Yom Ha-atzma’ut in 1984.

Obviously, I had known that there have been Jews living in Jerusalem since biblical times. But the almost unimaginable tenacity that has made permanent the bond between a people and its holiest city is what Montefiore brings to the fore in his book, which also describes in detail the background of the Arab sense of Jerusalem being one of Islam’s holy cities and also the history of Christian Jerusalem and its relationship to world Christendom. I came away from reading the book deeply imbued with a sense that our family’s minuscule role in the history of the city—Joan and I are, after all, the parents of one single Jewish Yerushalmi among millions and were the hosts of one single brit milah among the brisses of millennia—has a context that makes it not only meaningful, but profoundly so.

Yom Ha-zikaron falls next week on Wednesday. Yom Ha-atzma’ut in on Thursday. We in the diaspora have chosen to live on the sidelines, yet we should not allow that thought to justify a sense of disengagement from either event. Therefore, I recommend two simple, highly doable ways of commemorating both days. On Yom Ha-zikaron, I suggest that you consider lighting a yahrtzeit candle in memory of all those who gave their lives so that Israel might live. And on Yom Ha-atzma’ut, I suggest you consider coming to shul and there reciting the version of the Al Ha-nissim prayer we add to the Amidah on that day only, the one that acknowledges the victory of newly-born Israel over its mighty enemies as a miracle for which Jews everywhere should be grateful. It isn’t much. No one will know that you light a candle or, other than everyone else who shows up, that you came to shul. I can promise you they’ll be having way more fun in Israel! But both acts would be something rather than nothing…and pausing on Yom Ha-zikaron to remember those who gave their lives so that Israel might live and then again on Yom Ha-atzma’ut to thank God that we were all privileged to see the a thriving, self-reliant Jewish state in the land of Israel in our own day—that doesn’t sound like such an inappropriate way to nod to two days that only appear at first blush to be more about Israelis than about American Jews such as ourselves.

Remembering - Pesach 2012

Can it really be that Pesach is so soon upon us? Part of me is always caught unawares as this holiday more than any other feels as though it sneaks up on us—and, yes, there may be a bit of denial in there, which is not only the river in this particular tale we are about to tell—but perhaps this year part of the reason I’m feeling that way especially profoundly is because the winter never really came, thus making it that much more disorienting for spring suddenly to have arrived and, with it, Pesach, called in our tradition chag ha-aviv, the springtime holiday. But another part has to do with the nature of Pesach itself, for in its own way, Pesach is the quintessential festival of unexpected things.

We naturally tend to focus on the end of the story, but the truth is that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for many centuries. In Parashat Bo, for example, the Torah gives the specific number of 430 as the sum total of the years that Israel was in Egypt. We rarely think of the story in terms of those long, unaccounted-for centuries, but there’s something there well worth contemplating. To say the same thing in other words, the Israelites we always focus on are the ones whom God led forth with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” But those were the lucky ones, the liberated ones who escaped, the ones with whom the Haggadah wants us to self-identify…but 430 is a very long prelude to the story and that part of the tale is obviously about the Israelites who did not leave Egypt, who never met Moses, who groaned under the exhausting burden of their labors, but whom no one brought forth anywhere other than to another week of slaves’ work. The story we tell at the seder is about the lucky ones. But there were a lot of unlucky ones too, people whose stories are just a bit too blithely passed over.

In response to that thought, I suggest that we take a moment to consider that number, 430. To set that figure in its modern context, 430 years ago was 1582. Does that feel like a long time ago? It should! The Gregorian calendar has just been invented. (1582 was the one solar year in recorded history that had way fewer than 365 days in it. In most of Europe, by virtue of a papal bull imposing a new calendar on the West, Thursday, October 4, was followed directly by Friday, October 15. So if someone ever asks you what happened, say, on October 13, 1582, the correct answer is absolutely nothing!) The new calendar wasn’t the only news that year, however. The eighteen-year-old Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, that year as well. Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest Christian mystics (whose autobiography I recommend to you enthusiastically as an exquisite example of spiritual introspection well worth anyone’s time to peruse), died that year.

But can any of us name any of our direct ancestors who were alive in 1582? I am more or less certain that not one of us can! And I also cannot. We all must have had ancestors alive then, the men and women who produced offspring whose further reproductive efforts eventually led to all of us being born to our parents, their direct descendants. Yet they are lost to us, those men and women, and in that mysterious way that the past simply slips away even despite our best efforts to hold on tight. Most of us could only guess vaguely where those ancestors—the great-great-grandparents, say, of our grandparents’ great-grandparents—would have lived. (I’ve observed many times from the bimah that only the smallest number of us can name all eight of his or her eight great-grandparents, let alone name all sixteen great-great-grandparents. (Your great-great-grandparents are only your grandparents’ grandparents! But who can even say their names, let alone speak about their lives? Will the grandchildren of our grandchildren say the same of us? Don’t even go there—some questions are best left unanswered!) So now consider how things must have been in Egypt as generation followed generation without leaving a trace behind of any sort other than the building projects on which they worked. But even that work went unacknowledged and unmemorialized, somewhat in the same way that the great skyscrapers of New York nowhere record the names of the people who actually built them.

My point is that 430 years is a long time. And, on top of that, the Israelites living in Egypt lived there without any of the things we ourselves have come to rely upon as memory aids in terms of keeping our family legacies intact. They had no photographs, obviously, no home movies. We know nothing of their lives in Egypt, in fact, not even their names. The beginning of their story, we know a little. The first decades must have gone well. Indeed, Joseph was forty-four years of age when the famine that brought his people to Egypt finally ended. Yet when he died sixty-six years later at age 110, they were still there, apparently having forgotten entirely about going home when the famine ended that had brought them there in the first place. And then there eventually came to power a Pharaoh who “knew not Joseph,” and that must have been some time after that, long enough later for the memory of a personality like Joseph to have faded from the national recollective consciousness sufficiently for the new king to know nothing of his legacy or of the offer of friendship that his predecessor had made to Joseph’s father and family. So even the figure of 430 years, which references the years of Israelite slavery in Egypt, does not reveal the full story because there must have been almost a century that preceded that during which the Israelites were in Egypt as welcomed guests and not as slaves. So let’s say, roughly, that this is actually a story covering five hundred years of which the Torah tells the story of the final one only.

Things must have been going on just as always when, out of the blue, things changed. Scripture says that God took note of the Israelites’ suffering, that God “heard” their groaning and moaning. But would that specific generation of slaves necessarily have suffered more than the previous ones? And even if it were so that the misery inflicted upon the Israelites was that much worse in Moses’s generation than in earlier times, would it have seemed that way to the Israelite slaves themselves in Moses’s day? I don’t see why it would have. Indeed, how could they have known how much worse or better they had it than their ancestors from a century or so earlier? My guess is that they would have had no way at all to know that and that redemption must have seemed to them, other than perhaps in retrospect, unearned and inexplicable, an example of divine beneficence not only unanticipated but unanticipatable.

After the fact, most historical events develop a feel of unavoidability to them. But that is truly only how things seem in retrospect and to the Israelite slaves in Egypt, the notion that freedom was nigh, that the hour of their long-awaited redemption was upon them…it must have seemed like the most unimaginable of miracles. Later on, the stories they recorded spoke of the various signs and wonders that God brought against the Egyptians as acts of judgment. But surely the redemption itself, after so many generations of nameless, faceless Israelites lived and died as slaves, was the greatest miracle, the greatest example of God’s presence in history.
That’s how we tell the story. But it behooves us also to pause and remember all those who never made it out, who lived and died in captivity, whose hopes for freedom never came to fruition. It is, after all, on their backs that the story unfolds, on the backs of the uncountable millions who lived and died so that those who had the good fortune to live at precisely the right moment to experience redemption might go free.

As we approach Pesach, I invite you to consider the endless generations of Jews who didn’t make it out alive, who lived and died without breathing free, without experiencing even a day’s respite from their misery. It is on their back that the story unfolds! And so, when the Haggadah invites us to consider ourselves as though we were slaves in Egypt—and the temptation is mighty to consider ourselves as the slaves for whom the sea parted, for whom the manna fell, for whom the presence of God became manifest atop Sinai—I propose we pause also to think of ourselves as the people in the back story, the ones who lived and died so that the other people, the heroes of the Haggadah, could experience the signs and wonders that led to their freedom.

It is in the nature of backstories not to be so interesting. That’s why we call them backstories, because they serve to highlight not themselves but precisely the people in the foreground. But they are there, and their ghosts are hiding between the pages of the Haggadah just as surely as are those of their more illustrious descendants, the generation that fled slavery and became a free people. They are all our ancestors…and this Pesach I think it would behoove us all to spend at least a moment recalling their unhappy fate. The Haggadah, it is true, calls upon us to think of ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. My suggestion is simply that we also think of those who didn’t leave, who couldn’t leave, who simply entered and left the stage of history so that their descendants could become our ancestors, the ancestors of a free people traveling the path from history to destiny, from Kadesh to Nirtzah, from redemption-past to redemption-future.

The Less Bad Alternative

I didn’t expect to find the Supreme Court deliberations regarding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 to be especially engaging. And, in some ways, I wasn’t disappointed. The Democrats said what their script required them to say. The Republicans said what their script required them to say. Nor did the justices themselves deviate much from the expected path: each asked sharper questions of the lawyers representing the side of the aisle with which he or she is generally not identified than of the lawyers representing the point of view usually associated with that justice, yet generally without abandoning the necessary mantle of presumed judicial impartiality regarding matters before the court. (I was initially amazed, but also impressed, that the justices felt they would, or even could, hear enough from both sides in just six hours to make it possible to render a decision. The darker side of my personality wondered if that was simply because they all already knew how they were going to vote and didn’t want to waste more than three days listening to pointless presentations. But maybe, to grant the system the benefit of the doubt, the complexity of the issues involved simply demanded that a time-limit be set that absolutely would require the lawyers representing the parties to the suit—the attorneys-general of the twenty-seven states trying to overturn the act on constitutional grounds and the federal government—to get as quickly to the point as humanly possible.)

But in other ways I was wrong. Almost to my surprise, I’ve found these last three days fascinating. For one thing, discussing the ideal way to define, and the best way to defend, the civil rights of our citizens is not something ever lightly to pass by. And, indeed, if one thing came through as I listened and read my way through the week, it was that both sides were staking out the very same ground as the territory they were claiming to wish to defend: the rights of the citizenry to live free lives in a free state (and in fifty free states) governed solely by laws designed to protect their freedoms and not to burden or encumber their rights or their freedoms. By any measure, that will always be a debate worth undertaking! And so I thought I’d write this week about the issue from that specific vantage point: without claiming the background or the expertise in constitutional law necessary to proffer a truly informed decision about the extremely technical legal matters that are now before the court (both of which—the background and the expertise—I surely lack), I’d like to approach the issue from the far simpler vantage point of a citizen whose rights both sides claim they have come to the Supreme Court to protect.

There are certain rights that we as a society have determined exist outside the framework of wealth or social status. I believe, for example, that we in this country are universally of the opinion that even the poorest of the poor are entitled to drink clean water; surely no one seriously thinks that parents who do not earn enough money to pay income tax and who therefore do not participate personally in subventing the costs involved in keeping our water supply clean and free of pollutants should be expected to make their peace with their children having to drink brackish, filthy, or contaminated water. We feel the same way about clean air; no one seriously argues, or ever would seriously argue, that we should reasonably permit levels of air pollution in towns and neighborhoods mostly lived in by people who earn too little meaningfully to participate in the effort to keep our air clean than we would ever tolerate in richer, more affluent places. When you think about it, we feel that way about a lot of things related to the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle—about the right to work in a smoke-free environment regardless of personal wealth or status, for example, or about the right of all children to be vaccinated against potentially life-threatening diseases as part of our national interest in protecting the public weal.

Clearly, there are also things in our world that we do deem appropriate to deny to people who cannot afford them. And there are lots of those things too, including some things that people of means would be loath to do without. In our society, for example, we do not consider owning an automobile to be a civil right despite the fact that finding a good job and earning a living is far easier in our society for someone who does own a car. Nor do we consider it to be the right of every citizen to have unfettered access to the Internet (also despite the fact that it must be impossible or almost impossible to find a job without such access) or to send his or her children to a summer camp in the country. Or to attend live concerts. Or to go to the theater. Or to see the Knicks play at the Garden or the Yankees at the new Yankee Stadium. The things in this category, we deem perks of wealth: if you can’t afford them, you have to do without them. And that, I suppose, is as it should be in a capitalist democracy: when simmered down to its most basic level, after all, the great perk of possessing wealth consists precisely of having the money to buy things you couldn’t have if you didn’t. Nor is that something to be decried or lamented, I don’t think: people shlep themselves out of bed in the morning and go to work precisely because they wish to have things they know they’ll never have if they don’t get up and go to work. (Nor is it fair to rephrase that thought to suggest that, in the end, it is greed alone that fuels our American society. What pushes us forward is the desire to live better lives, to be able to provide more for our children, to be able to be more generous with the needy, to better the world by bettering our own situations. To denigrate that grand set of internal impetuses baldly as “greed” seems, to say the least, meanspirited and more than a bit insulting to people, myself included, who work for a living.)

Health care, however, we have placed in the former category. Not because it must be there by law, but because we as a society have determined that it shall be there, that it should be there. As a result, we do not deny health care to sick people in our country. Public hospitals are barred from turning people away from merely because it is not obvious how exactly they are going to pay for whatever services are rendered. Even private hospitals are barred by the Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Law of 1986 from turning away patients in emergency situations. We underwrite vastly expensive programs like Medicaid specifically to provide health care to citizens and legal residents unable to afford their own health insurance. (And to say “vastly expensive “ is to say almost nothing at all: in 2010, the federal government spent $275 billion on Medicaid, up from $118 billion in 2000.) But not all the uninsured or under-insured qualify for Medicaid—and, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 Current Population Survey, there were approximately 49.9 million Americans who did not have health insurance in 2010. So we are talking about scores of millions of people whom we can’t quite bring ourselves to shut out of the system, but who are personally not bringing anything into it. And that is the crux of the problem, as I finally understand it in the wake of this week’s hearings: we lack the heartlessness simply to tell people who can’t afford health insurance simply to do without health care, yet the burden of paying for that care ends up falling squarely on the shoulders of the insured. And that, it seems to me, was the crux of the matter as it played itself out in the Supreme Court this week.

So what do I think, I felt myself challenged to ask, as I listened along to the debate in the course of this last week. Is it the greater infringement on the civil rights of citizens for them—for us!— to be obliged by law to carry health insurance or pay a commensurate fine for failing to do so? Or is it the greater infringement on the civil rights of those same citizens to be unable to escape paying for other people’s health care just because the system operates on the backs of the insured and the taxpayers? Surely, both impact negatively upon the civil rights of the average (insured, tax-paying) citizen. It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with that! And so the question, as I think I heard it being framed, comes down to determining which constitutes the greater infringement on those rights, thus the greater evil, thus something for our nation to determine that it wishes to avoid even if it means opting for an alternative that is only slightly less unpalatable. The real alternative—making healthcare into a commodity and letting people who can’t afford it simply do without—seems to be unimaginable to most citizens, which reality frames the debate as being essentially between two alternate alternatives to that one. And thinking of the issue in that specific way is what transformed the hearings this week, at least for me personally, from something dull and perfunctory into a debate I felt drawn into and engaged by.

Our Jewish tradition understands the obligation to care for others to be a function of our obligation not to burden others by failing to care for ourselves. Therefore, our first obligations in terms of healthcare provision is for us to make sure we ourselves are properly looked after. And our obligations move out in concentric circles from there: first to our spouses and children, then to our parents and siblings, then to our extended families, then to our neighbors, then to other residents of our towns and cities, then to the wider world. At the heart of the matter, though, is the expectation that society functions best when the first responsibility of each citizen is to avoid burdening others by accepting responsibility for his or her own needs…and only then by expanding out one’s ability to attend to the needs of others in reasonably drawn concentric circles of obligation. That sounds like sound thinking to me. And so I find myself, after wading reading and listening all week, hoping that the baby does not end up getting tossed out with the bath water. If the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turns out either partially or entirely to be inconsonant with constitutional law, surely a decision the Supreme Court is entitled to make, then I hope we can find a constitutionally-acceptable way for each of us, prosperous and less prosperous alike, to shoulder our fair share of the burden of healthcare in our country, thus personally to become responsible for our country being a place in which no one’s life is ever forfeit for lack of funds to see a doctor, and in which all citizens share reasonably and fairly in the costs involved with making that noble goal part of day-to-day reality for us all.

Toulouse

Like all of you, I’ve been glued to the news this past week as the drama in Toulouse has unfolded day by day. As I write this, in fact, CNN has just announced that the police have confirmed the death of Mohammed Merah, the man who is said to have confessed personally to seven murders over these last two weeks, including the slaying of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two children Aryeh and Gabriel (ages six and three), Miriam Monsonego (age eight), Imad Ibn-Ziatan (age thirty, a French paratrooper), Abel Chennouf (age twenty-five, a corporal in the French army), and Mohamed Legouad (age twenty-four, a French army private). To say that each death was a tragedy is almost to say nothing at all because each of these young people—young soldiers serving in the defense of their country, innocent children on their way into school for what was to have been a normal school day, a rabbi devoting his life to the instruction of Jewish children—each of them embodied unlimited potential to do good in the world. Each had a future. Each had the potential to change the world. Now, of course, none will. Even their murderer, age twenty-three, is dead. And his death too is a tragedy—a tragedy because, instead of succumbing to the rage-filled hatred apparently instilled in him by his Al Qaeda handlers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he too could have had a future. He was a citizen of France, a pluralistic democracy. He was thus a heir, at least in theory, to French culture, to French learning, to the sense of égalité and fraternité that have characterized French society at its most enlightened since, well, the Enlightenment. He will have none of that now. Nor, obviously, will he have a chance to be presumed innocent before being convicted of his crimes and sentenced, as he surely would have been, to life in prison, thus even in defeat sending a valuable lesson to his co-citizens that mindless violence leads only to perdition, never to paradise.

Now, of course, none of that is to be. Rabbi Sandler will teach no more classes. His little boys will not grow to adulthood, nor will little Miriam. The three soldiers, all cut down in the prime of life by a fanatic who found it objectionable for French citizens to serve the French people in the French armed forces because of their ethnic origins outside of France, will serve no longer. And the assassin too will have no future, no possibility of redemption, no chance to seek atonement or repentance. The world, of course, will keep spinning. Toulouse, a provincial city that not one American in a thousand could have found easily on a map until earlier this week, will return to normal. Even Jewish life in that place will resume, diminished yet resilient, as the Ozar Hatorah school re-opens, as a new teacher is quietly hired to replace Rabbi Sandler, as the children’s cubbies are without drama or ceremony simply re-assigned to other children for their future use. In their barracks, the soldiers’ lockers too will be re-assigned. In the end, they will all simply vanish from the stage to be remembered vaguely as yet more victims of mindless terror. I myself don’t recall the names of the Chabad rabbi and his wife who were murdered in Mumbai in 2008. Or the name of the poor woman murdered at the Seattle JCC in 2006. (Just for the record , they were Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, and Pamela Waechter. But I had to look that up, which I just did.)

It is natural to respond to the deaths of children differently than to the deaths of adults. And it is also natural to respond to the death of unarmed civilians differently than to the deaths of soldiers. But the key for us to remember is that these seven, a group of individuals unknown to each other in life, have somehow been linked permanently to each other in death. And I would like to consider what they have to say to the world not as individuals, but as a group formed in death, as people who would almost never have met had they lived yet who have ended up linked to each other both posthumously and permanently. What Rabbi Sandler would have made of Corporal Chennouf, or vice versa, I have no idea. Whether under other circumstances they could have befriended each other, I also do not know. At best, it would have been unlikely. But these unanswerable questions are not what I want to write about today.

The dead in Toulouse are, by any measure, an odd group: four Jews and three Muslims; two Franco-Israelis and five French citizens with no other passports or allegiances; four men, two boys, and a girl; a rabbi, three soldiers, and three schoolchildren. Together, they can serve to remind us that Muslims are as often the victims of terror as its perpetrators, and that the mindset of the terrorist is nowhere nearly as meaningfully rooted in political philosophy or in religion as in rage, in a kind of dementia so severe that even the murder of a little girl at point blank range is deemed not only justifiable but reasonable, even virtuous. Although they would surely bristle at the comparison, the terrorists of the world, in this like all true fanatics, have more in common with each other than with the more reasonable elements within their own religious or ethnic groups. That being the case, it is folly, I believe, to try to reason rationally with people who have embraced terror as a valid means of political self-expression, and for the same reasons that it is pointless to attempt to argue rationally with irrational people. The whole concept of being irrational is that you don’t see things rationally! And the whole concept behind the worldview that countenances the murder of children to make some vague point about your nation’s politics or some other nation’s policies or practices is no less bizarre. In other words, to describe the murder of Miriam Monsonego as a valid response to Israel’s insistence that the Hamas terrorists who control Gaza be inhibited in their ability to send missiles against Israel’s southern towns and villages is to abandon rational discourse and move into the realm of true craziness. That Nicolas Sarkozy said as much the other evening was heartening. But that there are quarters in the world in which Mohamed Merah will be celebrated as a martyr also goes without saying and that is not heartening at all.

We should not respond to violent irrationality by mouthing our own set of irrational platitudes. The Mohamed Merahs of this world are not going to calm down and become rational because we would like them to. Al-Qaeda is not going to morph into a political party worthy of participation in the democratic process, and neither is Hamas or Hezbollah. To confuse the kind of mindless rage that yields incidents like this week’s in Toulouse with the kind of dissent that is healthy for any democracy and crucial for its wellbeing is as pointless as it is outrageous. To descend so far into the pit of moral relativism so as not to be able to distinguish between reasonable military action taken in defense of one’s own country and violent terrorism undertaken with no specific goal in mind other than the murder of innocents is to come perilously close to abandoning moral thinking entirely.

And yet the world dithers. No less a personality than the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, came perilously close the other day to equating the murder of Rabbi Sandler’s children with the plight of the children of Gaza. Back-pedaling furiously, she tried (and is apparently still trying, although only semi-successfully) to undo the damage. But the remark itself was and is still out there, as is its raw, unpalatable implication that when Hamas terrorists locate their missile launchers in civilian neighborhoods and use local children as shields, the fate of those children is no less the fault of Israel than the death of the children in Toulouse. To decry that kind of skewered parallelism is merely to state the obvious. But I wonder how many people out there secretly agree with High Representative Ashton’s comments even as she labored to take them back.

Our job, other than making even more secure our schools and our synagogues in the wake of the Toulouse massacre, is to remind the world that once a forest fire is raging it becomes impossible to save any particular tree. And similarly will the world never be safe or secure until the notion of terrorism itself is made such anathema that no one will want to be labelled a terrorist. We have all become inured to the problem, so used to the regular flair-ups of unprovoked violence against innocent civilians that even 9/11 seems different from Madrid and London (and Mumbai and Buenos Aires and Seattle and now Toulouse, plus countless other sites of terrorist murder inside and outside of Israel) only in terms of the magnitude, scope, and intensity of the disaster. Is it imaginable, even remotely, that a time could come when the murder of innocents ceases to serve as the ultimate political statement? I’d like to think so. I actually have to think so. Because if I stopped thinking so, then I also would be obliged to abandon my belief in the ultimate redeemability of the world. And that, being the cornerstone of my faith, is not something I am prepared to give up lightly. Or at all, actually. The challenge, therefore, is not to wonder whether the peoples of the world could ever renounce mindless violence and live together in peace, but to ask ourselves what exactly it is we ourselves are doing to bring the world to the messianic moment, to the edge of redemption. And if the answer to that question is unsatisfying, then the proper response—and particularly as Jewish people everywhere prepare to celebrate the ultimate Festival of Freedom in just a few weeks’ time—is to see the tragedy in Toulouse as a burden we must all share: the perpetrator because he committed an unspeakable crime, his handlers in Pakistan and Afghanistan because they inspired incomprehensible villainy, and the rest of us because we have too easily made our peace with living in an unredeemed world.

The End of Knowledge As We Know It

Perhaps some of you felt the same peculiar pang in your hearts that I felt in mine when I opened the paper on Wednesday and read that the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer exist as a printed work after the 2010 edition sells out, but will instead continue on solely as an on-line enterprise. I’m hardly in a position to complain, given that I can’t actually remember the last time I opened a printed encyclopedia to look something up. Nonetheless, and despite my own partial responsibility in creating the climate that led to the Britannica’s demise, I still find myself saddened by their decision and—this is the more rational part of the response—possessed of the conviction that some sort of line in the history of human intellectual pursuits has been crossed with their decision to acquiesce to the reality of the age of digitized information. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit too much to say. But it does feel momentous, the thought that future generations will not encounter culture or science packaged in anything like the way I first encountered them as a child.) So maybe I will complain, just not too loudly, lest I sound like one of those people who endlessly laments the disappearance of bookstores and record shops but who personally stopped buying books and CDs in stores once they became available on-line for less money and for less effort. But wait a minute…I am one of those people! And, that being the case, why shouldn’t I also regret that volumes that I personally haven’t opened in decades will no longer be updated and printed annually for me to continue not to consult? Why not? A bit of inconsistency never killed anyone! (For my younger readers, CDs were silver disks with music embedded in them that people used to buy before music began simply to waft through the air directly into people’s iPods. I’ll explain what books were some other time.)

We didn’t own a Britannica when I was growing up, but my Uncle Raph and my Aunt Molly did. It was kept in a low bookcase facing the front door of their apartment on Highland Avenue in Queens, so you couldn’t miss it when you came to visit. And I certainly didn’t miss it, not ever. I believe the story is that my uncle won it appearing on some radio quiz show long before I was born, which detail only added to its luster in my mind: the thought that one could actually win such a thing in a contest was only one step removed from my own fantasy that I might one day receive a set of books like that as a present for Chanukah or for my birthday. And I coveted those books! As some readers may recall, they were very handsome volumes, each bound in brown leather with golden letters on the spine that distinguished the tomes not only from each other but also from every other book I had ever seen. They even had a particular smell to them, those books, something hard to describe but not at all unpleasant. In my child’s eyes, those books were the embodiment of knowledge, the source of all truly reliable information, something to be proud of being related to someone who owned a full set of which. My father told me many times that my Uncle Raph, who was revered in our family both for the breadth and the depth of his knowledge (and who, incidentally, was one of the few true autodidacts I’ve ever met), had read the entire thing.

Could that be true? Even now, it seems unimaginable to me: I don’t know what edition my aunt and uncle owned, but the index of the 2007 edition listed a quarter of a million topics covered and another half million sub-entries under those topics. Even if the earlier editions were shorter (which I have no specific reason to think they were), that’s still an awful lot of reading even for a man possessed of my uncle’s thirst for knowledge and talent for mastering intellectual challenges. The World Book, which we also didn’t own but which many of my friends did have at home, paled by comparison. Everything paled by comparison. I wanted a Britannica at home, just like my uncle and aunt. I wanted to read the whole thing too, starting with the aardvarks and working my way through to the Zulus, just like my uncle did (or may have). And I wanted people to see our books too as soon as they stepped into our apartment and thus come to think of our home as a place in which people who truly revered learning. I was that kind of kid. (I heard that! Is it that obvious?)

It never happened. We never bought the books. I don’t recall even discussing buying them. I’ve certainly never read them, not entirely and not even mostly. When I need some information nowadays, even to find out when and where the Britannica was first published (1768-1771, in Edinburgh), I go to Wikipedia. It’s free. It’s always there. (I have the Wikipedia app installed on my phone, so it really is always there.) It’s remarkably accurate and generally, at least as far as I can see, free of bias. There’s a Britannica on-line site as well, but it costs $70 a year for full access. Part of me wants to pay, but the other part of me—I heard that too, but isn’t “frugal” a nicer way to say the same thing?—can’t quite bring myself to fork over the money. What for? So I can gather even more material I’ll never find the time actually to read? Plus, you can always amuse yourself, also for free, by perusing Wikipedia’s index of articles in Yiddish or Yoruba or Xitsonga. (There are editions of Wikipedia in an astounding 283 languages. Who even knew there were that many languages in the world to look things up in?)

The demise of the print edition has been coming for a long time. In 1990, they sold about 120,000 copies of the thirty-two volume set. This year, only a little more than two decades later, they printed a mere 12,000, of which they have managed to sell only 8000 copies at $1395 per set. It’s not that much money. For the same money, roughly, you can spend somewhere between 250 and 300 hours at the movies. But you could read the Britannica for years and years—really, for a lifetime—and never be done learning what there is to know in the world. And yet, as noted above, who am I to lament the demise of the printed edition? I myself wouldn’t dream of getting in my car and driving to a library to look something up in an encyclopedia, much of parting with $1395 to look that same thing up at home. Nor does anyone with an internet connection have to: for $70 you can have the whole thing in your pocket or your purse. And for free you can have Wikipedia, which paradoxically by its very existence proves the need for encyclopedias in the modern world, just not for printed ones bound in leather that weigh a ton and are the opposite of portable. (By way of comparison with the EB, Wikipedia has 21 million articles, 3.8 million of them in English. On the average month, Wikipedia receives about 2.7 billion pageviews from the United States alone. And since all the information lives in the cloud somewhere, it doesn’t take up any space at all, not on your bookshelves and not on your hard drive either. It’s just there, something in the spirit of what the psalmist described God as being nimtza me’od—“intensely present.”)

And so the world moves forward into unknown and unknowable future. Features of our childhoods that once felt absolutely permanent and fully real turn out to be fully impermanent and totally replaceable. The print edition of the Britannica was a kind of anchor for me as I was growing up and trying to invent myself, something the mere existence of which proved (at least to the young me) that knowledge was attainable (if not quite finite), that you could—if you only had enough patience and sitzfleisch—find in one single place more or less everything there was to know. So I was wrong, so what? I felt beckoned to by those books, called to see just what (I naively imagined) everybody else in the world knew about everything and that somehow only I had yet to find out.

My uncle and aunt are gone now, as are my parents and all of their siblings. That much of the world, we all know. But who ever thought the Britannica would vanish, that it even could vanish? I related to the article in the newspaper Wednesday not that differently from the way I responded at the end of Planet of the Apes when the monkeys come across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and you realize this has all been happening on earth: that the Statue of Liberty is a man-made thing that could somehow be destroyed is obviously true…but who can imagine it not being there watching over the harbor? I suppose one could say the same thing about the Twin Towers. But perhaps that is the big lesson to be learned from all of the above, both the horrific and the relatively benign: nothing is truly permanent, everything is in a constant state of change. As King Kohelet noted millennia ago, the rivers are constantly flowing in to the sea, but the sea never seems to fill up but merely exists in the context of ongoing change so that its apparent permanence is just an illusion and nothing more. Can the same be said of human knowledge, even absent the innately ephemeral nature of the printed books in which it has up until now been presented to the reading public? That, I suppose remains to be seen!

Queen Esther: The Day After

Friday is Shushan Purim, the day after “real” Purim that commemorates the fact that the Jews of Old Shushan were so successful in defeating their would-be assailants that they required a second day to mop things up, an element of their story to which we nod slightly by giving this day a special name and, frankly, not much else. Still, it’s a nice touch. How many other holidays commemorate a victory against would-be oppressors so massive and far-reaching that it couldn’t even be accomplished on a single day? Other than Purim, I can’t think of a one. (Mind you, how many massive victories over murderous anti-Semites are in the pool to consider? Not so many!) But I had an idea while listening to the Megillah the other night that perhaps we should respond to the peculiar feature of Purim having an after-holiday by considering the aftermath of the story itself.

We don’t ever go there. We get to the end of the scroll. The band is already warming up. They’re already frying up the falafel balls. It’s a challenge to keep people in their seats long enough to sing Shoshanat Yaakov, let alone to hang around to discuss the story of Purim in any detail at all. Perhaps that’s as it should be, even: Purim is about celebrating, and the huge party we have at Shelter Rock is always a huge amount of fun. So who doesn’t want to get the party started? And yet…thinking about where the story leads is a worthy way to lend meaning and dignity to the story that is at the heart of Purim observance. (The “what happens next” motif is not, after all, foreign to our way of analyzing our ancient books. What happens after the Torah narrative itself finishes with Moses’s death is told in detail, after all, in the Book of Joshua; we have just made a communal decision not to go there, but instead to begin reading the Torah again from the beginning of the scroll, that’s all. And Ruth, the other one of the five megillot with a clear narrative story line, in fact ends precisely by following the offspring of its protagonists for generations into the future.) Only the Megillah ends with a vague summary of how things wound up, but without peering even momentarily into the future or nodding to the “what happened next” questions that modern readers seem inevitably to want to ask about the characters in their favorite books.

If anything, the Megillah draws to its end with a surfeit of good news. King Achashveirosh invents a way to raise even more money by invented new taxes to impose on even the furthest flung reaches of his empire, thus making himself even more wealthy than he was at the beginning of the story (which, as you’ll recall, was already pretty wealthy). Mordechai ends up not only second-in-command to the king himself, but also formally, possibly even permanently, installed as the head of the Jewish community. (Moreover, the enormous power vested in him, the Megillah assures us, never went to his head, never made him imperious or overbearing, never made him into a self-absorbed little dictator so exaggeratedly concerned with the honor due his office as to turn himself into an ironic, if wholly unaware, parody of the very Haman whose downfall triggered the events that led to his own great success.) For their part, the Jews of the realm are safe under the protection of a wise and benevolent patron, their position in Persian society happily and unassailably secure. All, we are obviously supposed to imagine, is well for the Jews of Persia as the story ends with a brief final chapter clearly intended to wrap things up nicely and neatly.

But left unmentioned in this epilogue to the larger story is the player whose quick thinking and whose bravery were the true catalysts that led both to the people’s survival and to Mordechai’s amazing success, Queen Esther herself. Given that the maidens left unchosen to become queen were forever sequestered in a special harem placed under the watchful aegis of the eunuch Shaashgaz, we can suppose that no one simply walked away from the king’s bed in old Shushan and just went back home. And surely a queen would least of all have had that option available to her! And so we are left imagining poor Esther forever in place in the palace, a prisoner in a gilded cage stuck spending the rest of her life sleeping with her drunken nincompoop of a husband and either thinking the deliverance of her people to have been worth the price she was left forever afterwards paying or not thinking that. The questions that come next almost ask themselves. Did the Achashveiroshes eventually have children? Why wouldn’t they have?) But if they did, then was the next king of Persia himself a Jew, the son of a Jewish mother? Did Esther, having successfully come out of the closet to pursue her Jewishness openly once the events retold in the Megillah were well in the past? The next time the king asked her to ask for anything at all even unto half the kingdom did she ask that a mikveh be installed in the palace?

None of these questions has an answer. The story ends where it ends. Esther, far more of a literary figure than a historical one, exists only within the tale as told. But the question that readers are left with is one still well worth asking, and it is that specific question that Shushan Purim seems invariably to bring to my mind. Is the moral of the story that there actually is no bottom line, that anything at all is worth doing, any law worth breaking, any taboo worth ignoring, if it leads to the downfall of the enemies of the Jewish people? How that squares exactly with the obligation of fealty to the law every Jew theoretically bears as his or her part of the eternal covenant between God and Israel is a question that each must answer for him or herself. And yet, the Megillah’s deepest lesson—that the destiny of Israel is ultimately the responsibility of every single Jewish soul and that nothing (and certainly no norm of normal behavior) can be imagined to supersede that responsibility—cannot seriously be debated. Indeed, such is both the Megillah’s ultimate lesson and its most profound point. In fact, I imagine that it is that specific point that constitutes the ultimate reason Jewish people continue to read this story over and over. (Is that also the reason that the law requires that even a priest offering up sacrifices at the altar in the Temple abandon his efforts—which is to say, to abandon the formal worship of God—when the time comes to hear the Megillah read aloud? It could be!) And surely this specific lesson is the reason that the sages of classical antiquity declared that, although the advent of the messiah will eventually obviate the need to observe most Jewish festivals, Purim alone among the holidays of the Jewish year will never be considered obsolete or passé. Nor, taught the sages, will its back story ever be forgotten. Or its lesson regarding the role every Jew must play in fulfilling the destiny of the Jewish people ever be deemed to be of mere historical interest.

Obviously, Purim is about something that once happened, about a pogrom that failed to take place and about a people rising up instead to defend itself against those who were apparently already lining up to become their willing executioners. But it is also about Esther breaking so many different rules and going against so many different norms of Jewish behavior that they can barely be counted…and still being held up to the children, and especially to the girls, of every generation of Jewish people as a heroine who risked everything to save her people, and who in the end did save her people. By omitting to tell the rest of her story, the part that follows the story told in the Megillah, tradition is inviting the reader in, inviting all of his who gather annually on Purim to hear the Megillah to step into the narrative and ask ourselves if we have it in us to risk everything for the future of the Jewish people and to contemplate all that thought entails. Had Esther lost that beauty contest, she would have disappeared into the seraglio never to be heard from again. No one would recall her name, Nor would any of us know or care that she ever lived. But because she won—surely as much a gift of Providence as an instance of success deriving from her own efforts to risk her virtue to charm her sot of a king—she is not only not forgotten, but still, all these millennia later, cherished as a role model from whose example all may learn. Perhaps we can honor Shushan Purim, then, by asking what exactly actually it is that we have learned from her example. And then, once we have found it in us to answer that question, to proceed on bravely to the truly stress-inducing part of the exercise by asking ourselves whether we have internalized that lesson ourselves…and whether we have it in us to live up to the example Queen Esther set for us so many countless centuries ago.