Fear and Loathing II: Ambivalent Principals/Ambivalent Principles

Still shopping around for a cheder for our son, Shmuel.

Though I think our search may have ended - though not with success. We realized yesterday that our experience in the past - with the neighborhood school - was not just an isolated event, but endemic to a system in which there is simply no 'interest' to pursue mainstreaming as a value.

Yesterday, was the latest. Another principal, this time in a school outside our neighborhood. His argument was as follows: 'you are not from our community; we don't know you; you should go to the schools in your own neighborhood.'

As readers of OMT will know, we've already been to the schools in our neighborhood. So we told the principal - this time my wife was doing the talking - that we knew of his reputation for progressive education and openmindedness, so we were turning to him. 'It was an opportunity for his school.'

He could have turned us out of the room - he had provided his argument (reasonable, though not exactly courageous) - but he kept talking...and talking. And the more he talked, the more he became excited - gesticulating, standing over us, his voice getting progressively louder.

I could see it coming - first the tears in the corner of my wife's eye, and then - with that one more finger point in the face: the outburst of tears. No drama here; this was the real thing: 'Don't you know we've come to you because no other cheder will take our Shmuel?'

Exit stage left.

The principal - I thought (after trying to calm my wife) - had good principles; he just could not express them, at least not to us. As Hamlet says to his mother: 'The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.' All the principal's protesting - really uninstigated - was a defense against a voice within: the principal doth protest too much, methinks! His heart was telling him something his head did not want to hear - so he went on and on defending against his own inner voice. Too bad the outer voice was directed at us!

So there is ambivalence in our community - even among unprincipled principals.

Not much of a pragmatic consolation, but maybe the acknowledgment of such ambivalence - of our voices within - might mark the beginnings of change.

'Whose Letter is it Anyway?': Aristotle, Esther and the Art of Letter Writing

I think the first philosophical question I pondered was that posed by a Razzles advertisement: 'candy or gum?' My first brush with categorical indeterminacy - Razzles, it turns out, depending on your perspective is both candy and gum (but in both cases revolting).

On Purim, there's another one of those category confusions - Megillat Esther refers to itself as both an igeret, a letter, and as a sefer, a book. Our sages point out this generic ambiguity: 'Megillat Esther is both a book and a letter.' When the Megilla refers to itself as a letter, Esther's name precedes Mordechai; when it refers to itself as a book, Mordechai's name comes first. So whose letter - or book - is it anyway?

A book has permanence, written for the generations; while a letter partakes of the day to day - the quotidian. Our sages tell us that the Megilla's establishement as a book entailed its inclusion among the rest of sacred scriptures, canonized for the generations. But even when included with those sacred texts - older sacred scrolls included not only the five books but the books of the prophets and writings as well - the Megilla has to be on parchment of a different size. At once sacred like the rest of the books in our tradition, but at the same time separate, distinguished from the rest of the books of the Torah - and different. To make matters more complicated, our sages explain that the events that transpired in Shushan had already been written, and were catalogued in the Baghdad Library: 'I am in the Persian Chronicles,' say Esther! So - if we have the chornicles - why do we need another version, the hybrid book/letter which is Megillat Esther?

The events of Shushan do seem - on their surface - to be the stuff of the everyday, material for a letter or maybe even a newspaper report. In the Megilla, there are court intrigues, domestic disagreements, beauty contests, sleepless nights, lotteries. Not the events we associate with the rest of the Torah, not even what we would associate with a successful literary work. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues for the importance of 'unity of action.' All parts of the story - down to the last detail - must serve the end of the plot. If there is an episode that doesn't fit, Aristotle advises the author, 'Get rid of it!' The Megilla, by Aristotelian standards, is a failure - nothing fits! A history that seems without reason, random, episode after episode - like the history present in Macbeth's 'tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.' Pesach, by contrast, the first holiday in the Jewish liturgical cycle, shows the providential hand of G-d at every turn. But in the story of Purim, there is no evidence of G-d's presence; the divine name is absent. Purim is the contemporary holiday - contemporary in the sense of accomodating our experience of G-d's absence. 'Where do we find Esther's name in the Torah?' - our sages ask. In the verse from Deuteronomy - וְאָנוֹכִי הַסְתֵּר אַסְתִּיר - and 'I will hide my face,' anochi hastir astir. Esther - and the work that bears her name - is associated with hiddenness.

And yet. The history that bears no evidence of the divine presence reveals itself - in the end - to show an order which we did not originally suspect. The apparently random details of the Megilla prove to be essential to the salvation which comes at the end. Those events - check them out tonite - which seemed all to conspire towards the destruction of the Jews of Shushan ultimately lead to their salvation. The episodes are intrinsic to the story - with the right perspective, the Megilla turns into an Aristotelian success story - where every event is necessary to the whole. V'anha'fuku - and everything turned around! We didn't know, but the letters from Shushan is sacred.

The Persian Chronicles will not do: for chronicle just lists events; they don't tell a story. Only Esther gives a complete narrative - with all of the necessary links between what readers in Bagdhad may have construed as unrelated events. The version in the Persian Library chronicled an unconnected set of random events; but the Megilla, unified through the consciousness of Esther, tells a story where everything fits, so see even in the apparent randomness of events, G-d's providential presence is revealed. To the question: whose Megilla is it anyway? The answer (the envelope please!) is undoubtedly Esther's. So Esther's name precedes Mordechai when it comes to authoring the 'letter.' But when Esther approaches the sages of her generation, asking to establish her letter as part of the Holy Writings, then Mordechai's name precedes her for his role - as member of the Sanhedrin - in transforming the letter into a book.

Our practice - watch in synagogue tonight - is to unroll the Megilla on the bima before we start reading it. We read the Megilla like a letter, to show that we are not reading from the other books of the Torah (And we also roll it up in the end showing how all the details are collected - igeret also means to colllect - in the scroll). All who hear the Megilla must know that this letter/book is fundamentally different from the other books of the Torah. The Megilla must be read as a letter to emphasize that the what we are reading could be - and is! - on a par with reading a newspaper, current events. A letter is merely transitory and temporal, a disposable witness to the life and times of daily life - a testimony to our own recurrent sense of 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.' The events of Shushan are the everyday. But when the Jews of Shushan fasted and repented, then from out of the meaningless randomness of life, the hester panim revealed itself. When at the end, events are revealed through the eyes of Esther, the letter becomes a book. Esther asked of the sages 'make my letter into a Book!'; turn my account of the everyday into a Book on a par with the other Holy Writings! Show the way in which the everyday - the dark repetitions of seemingly unredeemed history - are also a pattern of the divine!

A happy Purim!

Esau to Jacob: 'Carpe Diem, Dude'

The most famous meal in the Bible - Jacob's pot of lentils. His brother Esau comes from the field hungry and asks about the red stew. 'Who died?' - knowing that lentils are the food of mourners. 'Our grandfather, Abraham' -Jacob replied. Esau halted - 'Zeidi is dead?' Jacob nods, Esau pauses, composes himself and proclaims - 'if Abraham is dead, there is no Judge and no Justice,' and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob.

Esau did not think that Abraham was going to live forever. To be sure, Abraham told his children and grandchildren the covenant that G-d had sealed with him - that his seed would inherit the land of Israel. Esau knew as much. He also knew that his grandfather would die - at 'a ripe age,' as G-d had told him - before seeing that inheritance. But there was another part of G-d's message that Esau also remembered: that Abraham's offspring were to be enslaved as 'strangers in a strange land' where they would be 'oppressed and enslaved for four hundred years.' Esau was the first born, and he thought he would bear the brunt of the exile. 'Not for me,' he thought. So our sages reveal the motivation for what the Bible tells us happened next: Esau 'ate, drank, got up and left, and scorned his birthright.'

From Esau's perspective, as long as Avraham was alive, as long as the family dwelled together in the Land of Israel - so long as G-d's presence was immediately felt, then he could believe in the one true Judge and his Justice. But when Abraham died and there was the likelihood of exile, then Esau claims 'there is no Judge and no Justice.' No more birthright. Better to enjoy, to eat and drink. 'Pass the lentils,' he tells his brother. Carpe diem. Sieze the day for tomorrow we die. For now, it's party on.

Jacob however is different. His faith is born when G-d's presence is no longer immediate; in the face of loss and death and exile, he agrees to buy the birthright -with all that entails. Esau knows for a certainty that his grandfather's seed will inherit the land. Just as assuredly as the 'tick' of a clock is followed by a 'tock,' Esau knows that the descendants of Abraham will receive their portion. But the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' - between the promise of redemption and its fulfillment - is interminable to Esau. The interim promises too much hardship. So he proclaims: 'There is no Judge, and no Justice.' Jacob by contrast - when he purchases the birthright - shows himselt ready to suffer the long night of exile.

Jacob embodies the faithful waiting of Israel - even after Abraham is dead - when there is no prospect of redemption, but rather suffering. As a people, today, we have our own 'tick'-'tock,' beyond the inheritance of the land promised to the Patriarch. Our 'tick' is Genesis, our 'tock,' the end of days, the coming of Mashiach. Sometimes the wait - the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' - seems interminable. So long that we may forget the end: 'is this the promised end?,' Shakespeare's King Lear asks anxiously. Not yet...

When Maimonides lists his principles of faith, number twelve of the thirteen is the belief in the Mashiach, the messenger of G-d - he is not divine himself - who proclaims the end of days. Maimonides does not merely say: 'I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Mashiach.' You would have thought that would suffice, but in an uncharacteristic expansiveness, Maimonides continues: 'and even though he delays - with all of this - I will wait, every day, for him to come.'

Even though he delays, the duration between the 'tick' and the 'tock' does seem endless! Yet even though he delays, אם כל זה - 'with all of this' - I will wait. 'With all of this' - if a principle of faith can be poignant and poetic this quailifes. 'This' - this is what Esau will not bear - the suffering, the anguish, the waiting for redemption. Yet the children of Israel, with all of this they declare, with all of this - they will nonetheless wait every day for him to come. And how much of this there has been!

My twelve year old daughter asks: 'Is Mashiach coming?'

'Yes! He is!'

'We want Mashiach now!'

We are a generation of instant gratification - even when it comes to Mashiach! Children can afford such an attitude. But as adults, it sometimes seems like there is 'no Judge and Judgement,' like the clock has permanently stopped, and that the 'tock' will never come. So we teach our children - and ourselves - not to be like Esau. For with the need for instant gratification comes disappointment, and the indulgence in the pleasures of the moment dressed up in Esau's resigned 'carpe diem!' Yes, we know Mashiach is coming - he is! - but we also know the fine art of waiting. 'With all this' - with Jacob - we still believe!