Thoughts on Purim

Nachmanadies confirmed, at the great Disputation of Barcelona in 1263, the “accusation” made by the Jewish apostate Pablo Christiani that Jews are, in fact, not the People of the Bible, rather we are the People of the Talmud. Jews have understood what it means to be a Jew primarily through the eyes of the Talmud and not through the eyes of the “Written” Torah. This does not mean that instead of simply being fundamentalists towards the text of the Bible, we are now fundamentalists towards the text of the Talmud, rather this statement of Nachmanadies was meant to convey the way in which Jews approach texts in general.

We are all familiar with the Talmudic story regarding the three want-to-be converts turned away by Shamai and subsequently embraced by Hillel. The second of these want-to-be converts proclaims before Shamai and Hillel his acceptance of the Written Torah and his denial of the Oral Torah. Hillel converts him, in spite of this heretical belief, and begins teaching him the Hebrew Aleph-Bet (which interestingly started after the conversion took place). On the second day of these Aleph-Bet lessons, Hillel teaches what he had said yesterday was an Aleph is actually a Tav. The convert is obviously confused, to which Hillel responds, “If you can rely on me for the Aleph-Bet then you should rely on me regarding the Oral Torah.” I believe Hillel is arguing here the post-modern contention that language and texts only have meaning and truth only in as much as they are adopted in a community. Hillel is pointing out that, in some cultures, the letter Aleph could very well be a Tav. An Aleph is only an Aleph because a community recognizes it to be such. Hillel sees the convert’s desire to live the real “truth” of the Written Torah in a societal vacuum as absurd. Being the People of the Talmud and not the People of the Bible does not mean that we privilege the Talmud’s “truth” over the Bible’s- rather that we see the very notion of truth as only marking the extent to which a certain language and text have been accepted as meaningful and relevant in a specific community. The search for an eternal metaphysical truth is a potentially hopeless endeavor. To seek out direction and ethics in the here and now promises to be a much more fruitful search. Hillel is teaching the convert that just as the Aleph is only significant because it has been deemed to be an Aleph by a living community, so a path to God is only significant if its language corresponds to a living community of which one is a part. This was the great insight of the Rabbis of the Talmud, who proclaimed “These and these are words of the Living God”: that the Written Torah is only relevant if translated to the present tense. In other words, there is no text without interpretation and there is no interpretation without community.

This brings us back to Purim. The Talmud sees the Purim story as representing a paradigm shift in the ways in which God relates to the world. To paraphrase Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, following on the heels of the primordial tzimtzum (the kabalistic idea in which God limited himself, as it were, to allow “room” for a physical creation), Purim is a second and more extensive tzimtzum. God does not appear in the story because He willfully removes himself from it. All of the characters are thus completely free to act of their own volition-a rare occurrence in the Torah. The Exodus story, in that sense, is the lesser story of redemption. If redemption means freedom, then a redemption brought about solely through the actions of human beings (as in the Purim story) an not as a result of “the outstretched arm of a vengeful God”, is the greater redemption story.

The Rabbis also locate, within the Purim narrative, the early seeds of the rabbinic period: human beings, endowed with free will, searching, on their own terms, for relevant meaning in the sacred texts who are also not constrained by any metaphysical prophetic interpretation. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg sees the Holocaust as the Purim story gone terribly wrong. They are both instances of unrestrained free human beings acting on their own volition without any heavenly intervention. Tragically in the case of the Holocaust, Haman came out on top. In theological terms, Greenberg interprets the Holocaust as a final tzimtzum, where human beings become cognizant of the awesome human potential to do the greatest good and the greatest evil.

Hopefully, Purim is the day when we remind ourselves that we are free to think and act as we choose. This is of course expressed in the obligation to intoxicate oneself to the point where you can no longer distinguish between Haman and Mordechai, because in fact there is no difference; metaphysics did not determine their actions, rather they did. We are all free to determine our own fate. To be truly free one must be strong. Let us have the strength to build strong and relevant Jewish communities, not because we think that is our metaphysical destiny but because we know that these communities will be a true source of good for the world. Happy Purim!