There’s a curious Purim-related
story in the Talmud about two scholars, Rabbah and Rabbi Zera. One year they got
together to celebrate the festival and they became – as is the custom, in fact
the halachah, the religious
requirement – completely drunk [rat-arsed is I think the technical term]. So
drunk that Rabbah attacked Rabbi Zera and killed him. On the next day, the
Talmud goes on, Rabbah prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf and brought him back to
life. The next year, Rabbah went to Rabbi Zera and said “Will my honoured
teacher come, and we can again celebrate Purim together.” To which Rabbi Zera
replied: “A miracle doesn’t take place on every occasion”. (Megillah 7b)
Once bitten, twice shy is the
expression that comes to mind. Just a couple of bits of biographical
information about these two characters. Firstly, Rabba, a third century teacher
in the Babylon religious academies, was famous for always starting his lectures
with a joke, or a humorous story, to get his students in a relaxed frame of
mind. (It’s one of the few useful practical tips that I ever picked up from the
Talmud). And there’s one quotation in the Talmud from Rabbi Zera that is worth reflecting
on: ‘One should never promise a child anything which one
does not intend to give it, because this would accustom the child to
untruthfulness’. (Sukkot 46b)
That’s a piece of difficult (but practical) child-rearing
wisdom, the psychological importance of which it has taken us another 1700
years to really appreciate. Parental sadism comes in many guises, often
unconscious, but here’s an example of everyday casual sadism that parents can
try and do something about: don’t make promises to children that you know you
aren’t going to keep. You may feel it makes
life easier now, but you are storing up trouble, for them and for yourself.
Let’s return to the story. Obviously, although
the characters in it are real historical figures, it’s a fable - not quite a
parable, but a piece of imaginative playfulness: we know that once they are
dead, people don’t come back to life, whether you pray for them or not. So what
is the story getting at? Is it a critique of the dangers of drunkenness? Is it
an implicit acknowledgement – a
millennium and a half before psychoanalysis and Melanie Klein - that
aggression, murderousness, is just below the surface of even the most educated
or pious of human hearts? And that it
doesn’t take much, just a few drinks, to
loosen up inhibitions and for this innate and powerful energy in us to burst
out in violent and destructive fashion?
Maybe this little Talmudic tale Is dealing (in semi-humorous fashion, humour
being one of the archetypal Jewish defenses against pain) with one of the
complex strands of feeling that lies underneath the celebration of Purim.
Perhaps it is addressing the darkness at the heart of the Book of Esther, a
book which has as its anti-hero a genocidal character intent on the elimination
of a whole people because he finds one of them, Mordecai, objectionable. You will
recall how, in the Biblical story, Mordecai doesn’t bow down to King
Ahasuerus’s right-hand man, Haman, who has been raised high above the other
officials at the court. In other words,
Mordecai the Jew won’t give enough respect to Haman the Agagite.
What we need to remember (the text keeps
pointing to this) is that they are both outsiders within Persia – the Jew and
the Agagite. And Haman’s personal insecurity as an outsider is demonstrated
when his feelings about the other outsider spill over into a wish to kill them
all off. Haman can’t do away with, eliminate, his own outsider status, however
high he rises in the Persian court. But he can project his own demons onto the
Jew – as has been done countless times through history right up to the politics
of Hungary (or Iran) today – and then Haman the Agagite attacks the person (and
the group) whose difference mirrors his own. And in an instant, the personal
has become the political. And so in this strange book of 10 brief chapters, set
in the diaspora (the only Biblical book that is), we have a story filled with banquets
and drinking, dancing girls and Oriental
opulence – and the beginnings of genocidal anti-semitism.
This is why this little festival, that’s over
almost before it begins, is one we don’t really take seriously, maybe can’t
take seriously. We have to make it for children, and concentrate on the fun and
the fancy costumes, make it into a Jewish Mardi Gras, have a bit too much to
drink maybe, but not so much that we, like Rabbah in the Talmud, discover the
depths of our own aggression. And yet our brief Talmudic tale invites us to
look at this dark core of Purim. After all, it tells of one rabbi killing
another one: as if to say Jews can be murderous too, we are human too. And this picks up the last chapters of the Book of
Esther which tell us how the Jews were given permission to defend themselves
against the pogroms that were, the story says, unleashed against them through
the King’s decree, the decree that Ahasuerus agrees to, prompted by Haman’s murderous
rage.
This permission to defend themselves comes in a
second decree that the King issues, because once the first royal decree is
spoken and sealed it can’t be unspoken, revoked. Once the knowledge is out
there that genocide is conceivable as a policy of state, it can’t be unthought.
All that can happen, the story illustrates, is that the people under threat are
allowed to defend themselves. And this they do, and a bloody massacre ensues, as
the story narrates how the Jews, the potential victims, become the aggressors and kill 75,000 of their enemies. In Liberal
synagogues they used to omit this part of the text – if they celebrated Purim
at all - and one can understand why they had qualms about the story. But it is a
text that needs to be read if we are to think about the universal nature of
human aggression – and that Jews are not exempt from the most primitive of
human emotions.
But there’s something more that needs to be said
about all this. And it’s linked to our Talmudic fable, or I am going to link
it. It’s in the punch-line, Rabbi Zera’s wry, dry, sardonic response to Rabbah’s
follow-up invitation to celebrate Purim with him the next year: “A miracle doesn’t take place on every occasion”, each
time you need it. One of the things you might know about the Book of Esther is
that – and it’s unique in the Hebrew Bible because of this – it does not
contain within it the name of God. God is completely absent. The rabbis of the
Talmud couldn’t quite cope with this and they hastened to show how although
God’s name was missing, God was nevertheless hidden inside the story, hinted
at in particular phrases in the text,
like “help will come from another place”
(Esther4:14). And they pointed out that Esther’s name is closely related to the
Hebrew word for ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’, ‘secret’, nistar.
For the rabbis of the Talmud,
God is always present even when He seems to be absent. But I think that the
writers of the Book of Esther were in a sense more radical than that, more
daring. For they created a story, a fable – and it is a fable because these
characters aren’t historical figures, the names Mordecai and Esther seem to be
based on the names of the Middle Eastern gods Marduk and Astarte – they created
a fable filled with a deadly diasporic seriousness.
And the seriousness is that
it portrays how a whole people, the Jewish people, need to depend not on the
Holy One of Israel, God, and his miraculous interventions into history on their
behalf. That’s the Pesach story, the foundational story of national liberation.
But that era has gone, say the authors of this subversive book: what the Jewish
people have to depend on now is their native wit, their sechel, as Mordecai does when he reads the times right and decides
how to intervene; and they need to depend on their personal courage, as Esther
does, courage and self-sacrifice; and they need to use everything they have at
their disposal, and in Esther’s case that includes her sexual allure. Anything
and everything that is human needs to be brought into play, the authors of the
Book of Esther show us, to ensure Jewish survival in an era in which God is no
longer involved as it was thought He was in days of old.
That’s why the Book of Esther
is perhaps the most contemporary of Biblical books. It places Jewish
continuity, Jewish survival, in our own hands; and it became a sacred book,
part of the Hebrew canon, in a way which suggests that the authors thought:
this is how holiness works now, through the human.
But I think they did
something even more daring in their telling of the story, even more daring than
illustrating how the divine now works through people, in what they do, what
they say, how they behave, what they risk, what they sacrifice. The Book also shows that this kind of human activity might
not be enough to ensure our survival as a people. It may also be the case that
our fate, individual or collective, also depends on luck, or chance. Because
time and again in the story the events revolve around chance happenings – or
what we think of as chance happenings.
Remember those two minor
characters Bigthan and Teresh? They plot to assassinate the king, and Mordecai
just happens to be there and overhear them when they are plotting, and he gives
the information to Esther who reports it to the king in Mordecai’s name. It
didn’t need GCHQ to listen in to all the conversations going on in the country:
Mordecai just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Chance,
luck, co-incidence, ‘beshert’? But
the whole story revolves around this incident, this random, chance event.
There’s nothing in this story like you find in the rest of the Bible: “And God
said to Mordecai, ‘By the way there’s a plot brewing, and this is what you must
do...’”. The miraculous – if that’s what we want to call it, though the story
doesn’t – is all happening within the realm of the human, the everyday.
And chance keeps on turning
up in the tale. So there is the night – and it is placed at the epicentre of
the 10 chapters at the beginning of chapter 6, as if this is the hinge around
which everything revolves – the night when the king can’t sleep. It could
happen to any of us. What is more ordinary than that? A character can’t sleep
and he wants something to distract him and he orders the court records to be
brought to him, the recent chronicles of the times, and the page he turns to –
chance, fate, luck, the sheer sacred randomness of life – the page he turns to
tells about the plot against him and who gave the tip-off that saved him,
Mordecai the Jew. And the story moves on, catalysed now by this new knowledge
the king has and his decision to reward our man Mordecai.
He was told this before, by
Esther, but he didn’t register it; but now he reads it and history turns on
what he reads that sleepless night. And the lowly Jew is raised up and becomes
the new right-hand man – and the high and mighty Haman is brought low – brought
low by (ah, irony) being hung up on a tree,
a tree prepared (again, irony) for his mortal enemy. Everything is turned on
its head – and in fact the verb ‘turned’, ‘overturned’ (hafach) keeps popping up in the text. Nothing is as it seems. Everything can be
turned into its opposite. This is life now, the authors intuit and hint at throughout
their tale. You can use your native wit and your seductive charms and your
bravery – and they can take you so far. But you also have to reckon on chance,
contingency, luck, randomness – there is no divine Being controlling it all,
the Biblical authors suggest.
This is a frightening,
disturbing vision. And we might well want to hide from it. To put on our masks,
to dress up as other than we are, to drink until we can no longer recognise the
difference, as the rabbis of the Talmud decreed for us, between ‘Blessed is Mordecai’ and ‘Cursed is
Haman’. To recognise – if only on one day of the year - that murderers can
become victims, and victims murderers; that the secure boundaries we imagine
between good and evil are not so secure; that good and evil may be categories
we need to construct for ourselves in order to exist in society but we
shouldn’t assume too much about their solidity: they are liquid qualities,
fluid as wine. So the good that Mordecai did required Esther to deceive the
king by withholding her Jewish identity, untruthfulness here (pace Rabbi Zera) being a virtue – and
all of this slippage between good and evil takes place in a world where God
does not appear as He did in former times, or was said to do. We can no longer
depend on miracles to save us – this is Rabbi Zera’s amused (?) but profound
recognition.
What we poor, confused
mortals are then left with on Purim – what anchors us within this elision of
normal boundaries, and in the absence of miracles – is that other Purim
tradition, that is already spoken about
in the Esther text, where what is
decreed is a time ‘of feasting and
gladness, a time for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor’
(Esther 9:22). Misloach manot – small
gifts of food for friends; and mattanot
l’evyonim –financial donations to the impoverished, who are always with us,
always in our midst.
What we are left with are small
acts of kindness, beyond good and evil. The dramas of history can sweep us
away, the rulers of the world can issue decrees that destroy our lives; and
then build them up again. But meanwhile, while the wheels of history turn, on
the ground, what we are left with, humbling and holy, is friendship and
generosity. It’s all we have to rely on. Let’s treasure it.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
March 15th 2014]
