Purim

Waiting for Salvation, Finding Meaning in the Madness

Aryeh Bernstein, 5763

The Rambam writes at the end of Hilkhot Megillah (2:18):

This is pretty strange. Of all the Biblical books to select as the most eternal, Megillat Esther is hardly the most obvious choice. Maybe the moral power of Amos? No. The sensual intimacy of Shir Ha-Shirim? Uh-uh. The uplifting spirituality of Psalms? We'll do without it. The literary drama of Shmuel? Null and void. But Megillat Esther, the most secular book in the Tanakh, in which God is hidden-never mentioned even once-whose heroes have names of pagan gods (Mordekhai = Marduq; Esther = Astarte/Ishtar), a book that takes place entirely in exile, this is the book to accompany us into the next world.

The gemara in Shabbat 31a tells us the questions that the Holy One will ask us on the Day of Judgment to enter the world-to-come. One of the questions, we are told, is "?צפית לישועה"("Did you wait expectantly for salvation?"). If the experience of actively waiting for salvation is so central to a proper Jewish life, it stands to reason that we can learn a lot from the moments in which Jews have actually experienced salvation. The Psalmist says, "רָאוּ כָל אַפְסֵי אָרֶץ אֵת יְשׁוּעַת אֱלֹהֵינוּ"-"All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God" (Psalms 98:3). The gemara asks, When was this verse fulfilled? "When did the ends of the earth see the salvation of God? In the days of Mordekhai and Esther" (Megillah 10a). "אימתי ראו כל אפסי ארץ את
                                                                                         ישועת אלהינו? - בימי מרדכי ואסתר."
What was so great about the salvation of in the days of Mordekhai and Esther? God is nowhere to be found in the story and their victory seems decidedly un-Godly. The victory was that the Jews were allowed to defend themselves from attack and that they succeeded in killing many of their enemies. This is the paradigm of God saving us, that we should expectantly yearn for every day, and that if we don't we might not get admitted into the world-to-come? What's going on here?

Rav Yitzchak Hutner (Pachad Yitzchak on Purim, #10) notes that we serve God on two different planes, that of mitzvot and aveirot (commandments and transgressions) and that of optional, or non-obligatory matters ("divrei reshut"). For example, now, on Purim, we are obligated to hear Megillat Esther in the night and the day, to give mishloah manot (gifts to friends) and matanot la'evyonim (gifts to the poor), and to have a festive meal during the day of Purim. Those are mitzvot. There is no explicit law, however, regarding having Purim parties at night, dressing in costumes, and so forth. Those are "divrei reshut", and are an important avenue for seeking out how best to serve God, in the spirit of the verse "בְּכָל דְּרָכֶיךָ דָעֵהוּ" ("in all your ways, know Him", Proverbs 3:6). The Talmud (Berakhot 6a) tells us that God fulfills mitzvot in parallel to our fulfillment of mitzvot. Just as our tephillin are inscribed with passages that give honor to God, God's tephillin, according to the gemara, contain the verse "Who is like your nation Israel, a singular nation on the earth?" (I Chronicles 17:21). Rav Hutner reasons that just as humans have both mitzvot and divrei reshut in their service of God, God must, as it were, have both mitzvot and divrei reshut as well.

I have tried to avoid translating "divrei reshut" to English not only as an educational ploy in pursuit of a greater Hebrew vocabulary, but also because, as Rav Hutner points out, we have here a linguistic problem. In secular speech, we tend to think of "permitted", "optional", or "non-obligatory" things as matters that are totally out of the realm of law-permitted and forbidden-such that we don't really care one way or the other how they turn out in the end. That couldn't be farther from the truth, however, in religiously sensitive thinking. Everything matters. Nothing is neutral; there is no such thing as an action that makes no difference in the world. In other words, there is nothing that God doesn't care about. What are "divrei reshut", then, and how are they different from mitzvot and aveirot? The distinction is that the relation between an "optional" matter and God's will is never immediately clear, as opposed to mitzvot and aveirot, which we know right away are either good or bad for the world. Divrei reshut demand much more evaluation and can become understood only in time, when we achieve more clarity as to the consequences they bring about. I will take it a step further than Rav Hutner and say that all actions are choices that bring about certain consequences in the world. Mitzvot and aveirot are conventions that the Jewish people has developed or been given that articulate that in certain situations, experience or forethought can predict the basic outcome, and therefore, the action you are about to perform is either a mitzvah or an aveirah. Divrei reshut-most of the choices we face in life-are matters that have no convention, or at least do not yet have one.

Just as we serve God through actions whose consequence will become clear only later, so too, according to Rav Hutner, God acts for the sake of Israel in ways that become clear only after the fact. In the liberation from Egypt, God honored Israel through "mitzvot", such as the splitting of the sea. In the Purim story, God acted through "divrei reshut", miracles cloaked in the natural turns of history. Only after the fact can we look at the big picture and see that God wasn't actually hidden after all, and that there was some meaning to the madness of our lives.

That is why waiting for redemption is exemplified by Purim, of all stories. Waiting for redemption is a complex process. It does not mean yearning for "The Big Event", when, in a blaze of light, everything will suddenly all become clear. It means paying close attention to the slow, steady, accumulation of little details, finding meaning in them, seeking out and writing a coherent narrative where others might not bother, preferring to accept (or determine) that their lives are random. The creative work is ours, to stay curious about the redemptive possibilities in our choices. Mordekhai suggests to Esther that perhaps it is for this very moment that she became queen. Esther stands at a life-and-death crossroads and makes a choice (Esther 4:12-16). We have to face these details and choices, from which God's face is hidden, with the conviction that God's face can be revealed, that is, that we can construct meaning and make things better than they are now.

Megillat Esther, then, is the most eternal of the prophetic books because it is the most real. It is real because it is absurd on the face of it, just like our world, and requires patience and great effort to be made coherent. It is the story through which we are most tested whether we really do wait longingly for salvation. Through the slow, ridiculous turns of a mad world, with no signs and wonders, can we muster the stamina to create sense out of it all?

For the Jews of Shushan, at the end of it all, there was "light and happiness and rejoicing and pleasure"-"לַיְּהוּדִים הָיְתָה אוֹרָה וְשִׂמְחָה וְשָׂשֹׂן וִיקָר" (Esther 8:16 and the Havdalah service). "כֵּן תִּהְיֶה לָנוּ"-"So should it be for us."