There are the proverbial Four, of course, but they lead to a torrent of new queries.  Like why those questions are themselves never directly answered in the Haggadah.  And why they (and so much else in the Haggadah) are “four”?  And why they must be asked even of oneself, if no one else is present.  Not to mention scores of others on the oddities of the Haggadah’s text.  As the old jokes have it, we Jews seem to respond to questions with only more.

Why the Haggadah is so question-saturated is an easy one.  Because the Seder revolves around the next generation.  It is the communication of the saga of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt to our children, and thus cannot be undertaken in a merely recitative manner.  “Questions and Answers” is a most basic teaching tool, as are singing, number games, and alphabetical acrostics, all elements found in the ancient pedagogic perfection we call the Haggadah.  So none of those educational aids should surprise us.

Karpas, though, should.

Because karpas, the vegetable dipped in saltwater at the start of the Seder, is truly baffling.  Although it is the subject of one of the Big Four questions, it not only does not have an answer; it seems that it cannot have one.

For the Talmud itself asks why we do it, and answers, “So that the children will notice and ask what it is for.”

At which point, presumably, we are to respond, “So that you will ask, dear children!”

To which they may be expected to respond, “All right, now we’re asking.”  And so forth.

Karpas seems to be the verbal equivalent of one of those Escher lithographs where figures march steadily but futilely up strange stairs only to again reach their starting point below.  Why we do it is an inherently unanswerable question.

Some insight, though, may be available by considering yet another unanswerable question, perhaps the most fundamental one imaginable: Why we are here.

The Talmud (Eruvin 13b) recounts that the students of Shammai and those of Hillel spent two and a half years arguing the question of whether “it would have been better for humankind not to have been created.”

And, intriguingly, they came to conclude that man would have been better off uncreated, and added only that now that we humans find ourselves here, we must strive to examine and improve our actions.

The famed 19^th century Torah-giant Rabbi Yisroel Salanter addressed the meaning of the argument and its result.  Needless to say, he explained, the students of Shammai and Hillel were not sitting in judgment on their Creator.  What they were in truth arguing about was whether mankind, with its limited purview, can possibly hope to comprehend the fact that G-d deemed it worthwhile for humankind to exist.

And they concluded that we cannot.  We are unable to fathom what good the Creator saw in providing one of his creations free will.  It is surely better that mankind is here, but why cannot be known.

After all (they likely noted), free will makes sin inevitable.  And humans, in fact, seem entirely prone to bad behavior.

Past history and current events alike evidence man’s choosing evil over good at almost every turn.  We humans are eminently self-centered, and precious few of our thoughts concern how we might be better givers, not takers, better servants of the Divine.

What has this to do with karpas?

Perhaps nothing.  But perhaps much.

Because disobedience of G-d, the very definition of sin, has its roots in the first man and woman’s act of independence.  And one of the results of their choice was a change in the fundamental relationship they (and we) had (and have) with the earth on which we depend.

“Thorns and thistles [the earth] shall bring forth for you,” was the pronouncement, “and you shall eat the grasses of the field.”

In, of all places, the sole Talmudic chapter that deals with the Seder, we find the following passage:

Said Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: “When G-d told Adam ‘and thorns and thistles…and you shall eat the grasses of the field,’ Adam’s eyes welled up with tears and he said, ‘Master of the Universe, am I and my donkey to eat from the same feed-bag?’  When G-d continued and said, ‘By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread’ [i.e. human food will be available for you, but only through hard work], Adam’s anguish was quieted.” (Pesachim 118a)

Could the meaning of Adam’s lament be that since humanity’s progenitor had proven through his insubordination the inevitability of humans choosing evil, man would seem to have been better off as merely another mindless, choiceless animal, a two-legged donkey?

Could that terrible thought be what brought tears to his eyes?

And, finally, could it be that the manifestation of the earth’s response to his sin, the lowly vegetation it will now naturally bear for him and which he is sentenced to eat – could that be… the karpas?  And the saltwater in which it is dipped, his tears and the sweat of the brow?

Could it be, in other words, that the question of why we dip karpas in saltwater is specifically constructed to be unanswerable precisely because it alludes to an unanswerable cosmic question?

What, though, is the memory of history’s first sin doing at the very onset of a festive gathering?

The key to the mystery may lie in remembering that the Seder is not only the start of Pesach but the beginning of a period that will culminate in the holiday of Shavuos.  The seven weeks between the first day of Pesach and Shavuos are in fact counted down (or, actually, up) with the “counting of the Omer” on each night of those forty-nine.

When Adam hears G-d’s pronouncement that his sin has relegated him to eating “the grasses of the field” like animals, yes, he cries, but he is reassured that he will still be able to eat bread, human food, albeit “by the sweat of your brow” – with hard work and effort.

On both Pesach and Shavuos, bread plays a prominent role.  On the former, we eat unleavened bread; on the latter, the day’s special Temple offering consists of two loaves of bread,  which – in stark contrast to most flour-offerings – must be allowed to rise and become chametz.

Leaven is a symbol of the inclination to sin (“What keeps us [from You, G-d]?” goes the confession of one talmudic personage, “the leaven in the dough”).  Perhaps, then, the period between Pesach and Shavuos, between the holiday of leaven-less bread and that of leavened bread, reflects our acclimation to the human propensity to sin.  It leads us to ponder that sin’s inevitability should not render us hopeless, but rather that our selfish desires are – somehow – a force that can be channeled for good, for service to G-d.

Shavuos, then, would be the celebration of our having accepted – even if not fully comprehended – the goodness inherent in our existence despite our inherent shortcomings.  It is, thus, the response, if not ultimate answer, to the unanswerable question of why we are here.  And so our bread on that day is purposefully leavened; it has absorbed and incorporated sin’s symbol.

What allows for the “redemption” of our propensity to sin?  The Torah, whose acceptance at Sinai is celebrated on Shavuot.  For the Torah is that which “sweetens” the inclination to sin and makes it palatable.  As a famous Midrash renders G-d’s words: “I have created an inclination to sin, and I have created the Torah as its sweetening spice.”

Our base desires, the source of our sinning, are not denied by the Torah, but rather guided by it.  We are not barred from enjoying any area of life, but shown, rather, how to do so, how to utilize every human power and desire in a directed and holy way.

Pesach, then, is the symbolic start of the process of growth.  It is the time to eat only pristine, unleavened food, to deny ourselves every sign of the inclination to sin, the better to be able, over the ensuing forty-nine days, to slowly absorb the powerful sin-inclination, to work on ourselves (by the sweat of our brows), and acclimate ourselves to what it represents … gradually, day by day, until Shavuos. 

Only then, having labored to attain that growth, may we – by the sweat of our brows – eat true, fully developed, leavened bread.  For, if we have labored on ourselves honestly and hard, we have learned to temper and manage our inclinations to sin with the laws and guidance of the Torah.

Pesach is thus a perfectly propitious time for a hint to the great unanswerable question of how man’s existence can be justified despite his sinful nature.  For it is on Pesach specifically that we begin to develop our ability to channel the human powers that, left unbridled, result in sin.

And so, at the Seder, as we dip the karpas in the saltwater, reenacting Adam’s sentence by eating a lowly vegetable, animal food, dampened with a reminder of his tears, his question should come to mind: “Am I and my donkey to eat from the same feed-bag?”

But so should something else.  Because the reminder of his tears – the saltwater – is a reminder no less of his hope, the sweat of his brow, the hard work that can lead us to become truly human, choosing, servants of G-d.  That hard labor is what justifies our existence; it is our astonishing privilege in this wondrous world.

© 2021 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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The Chasam Sofer probably never saw a black person.  There weren’t likely very many in 19^th century central Europe.  But he certainly knew they existed.  After all, they are mentioned in a posuk, the one that opens the haftarah of parshas Kedoshim, which was this past Shabbos.  There, Kushites—Kush is generally identified as a kingdom in central Africa—are a simile for Klal Yisrael.

“Behold, you are like the children of Kush to Me,” the navi Amos (9:7) quotes the Creator addressing the Jewish People.

“Just as a Kushite differs [from others] in [the color of] his skin,” comments the Gemara (Moed Katan, 16b), “so are the Jewish people different in their actions.”

One might assume that the intention of that explanation is simply that, while most people often act thoughtlessly or selfishly, Jews, if they live as they should, do otherwise, planning their every action, concerned about their obligations to the Creator, and to others.

But the Chasam Sofer’s interpretation of the Talmudic comment (he apparently had “the righteous” in place of “the Jewish people”) goes in a different direction, and makes a point as fundamental as it is timely.

His words:

“It is well known that every Jew is required to observe all the mitzvos.  But there is no single path for them all.  One Jew may excel in Torah-study, another in avodah (service, or prayer), another in kindnesses to others; this one in one particular mitzvah, that one in another.  Nevertheless, while they all differ from each other in their actions, they all have the same intention, to serve Hashem with their entire hearts.

“Behold the Kushite.  Inside, his organs, his blood and his appearance are all the same as other people’s.  Only in the superficiality of his skin is he different from others.  This is the meaning of ‘[different] in his skin,’ [meaning] only in his skin.  Likewise, the righteous are different [from one another] only ‘in their actions’; their inner conviction and intention, though, are [the same,] aimed at serving Hashem in a good way.”

There are two messages to glean here.  One—which wasn’t intended by the Chasam Sofer as a message at all, but as a truism—is that people of different colors are only superficially different from one another.  What lies beneath our shells are the same veins, sinews and organs, no matter our shades.

The Chasam Sofer’s novel message, though, is that there are different ways, no one of them any less essentially worthy than any other, of serving Hashem.

All too often we fall into the trap of thinking that we, or our children, must follow a particular trajectory and land in a particular place in life.  But when Chazal teach that “just as people’s faces all differ one from the other, so do their minds,” they are informing us otherwise, that there are different, equally meritorious, trajectories, different, equally praiseworthy, landing places for different people.  It’s not just that people are dissimilar and will choose a variety of vocations, excel in a variety of fields, and establish individual priorities.  It’s that in all our diversity of vocations, fields and priorities, we can be entirely equal servants of Hashem.

Consider Rav Broka, who, the Talmud recounts (Ta’anis 22a), was often accompanied by Eliyahu Hanavi, and once asked the prophet whether in a certain marketplace there were any people who merited the World-to-Come.  The individuals Eliyahu pointed to turned out to be a prison guard who made special efforts to preserve prisoners’ moral integrity and who interceded with the government on behalf of his fellow Jews; and a pair of comedians, who used their humor to cheer up the depressed and defuse disputes.

One wonders if the parents of those meritorious men felt disappointed at their sons’ choices of professions.  Or whether they realized that there are, in the end, many paths that can lead to the World-to-Come.

© 2011 AMI MAGAZINE

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Like Dayeinu.

On the surface, it is a simple song – a recitation of events of Divine kindness over the course of Jewish history, from the Egyptian exodus until the Jewish arrival in the Holy Land – with the refrain “Dayeinu”: “It would have been enough for us.”  It is a puzzling chorus, and everyone who has ever thought about Dayeinu has asked the obvious question.

Would it really have “been enough for us” had G-d not, say, split the Red Sea, trapping our ancestors between the water and the Egyptian army?  Some take the approach that another miracle could have taken place to save the Jews, but that seems to weaken the import of the refrain.  And then there are the other lines: “Had G-d not sustained us in the desert” – enough for us?  “Had He not given us the Torah.”  Enough?  What are we saying?

Contending that we don’t really mean “Dayeinu” when we say it, that we only intend to declare how undeserving of all G-d’s kindnesses we are, is the sort of answer children view with immediate suspicion and make faces at.

One path, though, toward understanding Dayeinu might lie in remembering that a proven method of engaging the attention of a child – or even an ex-child – is to hide one’s message, leaving hints for its discovery.  Could Dayeinu be hiding something significant –in fact, in plain sight?

Think of those images of objects or words that require time for the mind to comprehend, simply because the gestalt is not immediately absorbed; one aspect alone is perceived at first, although another element may be the key to the image’s meaning, and emerge only later.

Dayeinu may be precisely such a puzzle.  And its solution might lie in the realization that one of the song’s recountings is in fact not followed by the refrain at all.  Few people can immediately locate it, but it’s true: One of the events listed is pointedly not followed by the word “dayeinu.”

Can you find it?  Or have the years of singing Dayeinu after a cup of wine obscured the obvious?  You might want to ask a child, more able for the lack of experience.  I’ll wait…

…Welcome back.  You found it, of course: the very first phrase in the poem.

Dayeinu begins: “Had He taken us out of Egypt…”  That phrase – and it alone – is never qualified with a “dayeinu.”  It never says, “Had You not taken us out of Egypt it would have been enough for us.  For, simply put, there then wouldn’t have been an “us.”

The exodus is, so to speak, a “non-negotiable.”  It was the singular, crucial, transformative point in Jewish history, when we Jews became a people, with all the special interrelationship that peoplehood brings.  Had Jewish history ended with starvation in the desert, or even at battle at an undisturbed Red Sea, it would have been, without doubt, a terrible tragedy, the cutting down of a people just born – but still, the cutting down of a people, born. The Jewish nation, the very purpose of creation (“For the sake of Israel,” as the Midrash comments on the first word of the Torah, “did G-d create the heavens and the earth”), would still have existed, albeit briefly.

And our nationhood, of course, is precisely what we celebrate on Passover.  When the Torah recounts the wicked son’s question (Exodus12:26) it records that the Jews responded by bowing down in thanksgiving.  What were they thankful for?  The news that they would sire wicked descendants?

The Hassidic sage Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein (1856-1926), known as the “Shem MiShmuel,” explains that the very fact that the Torah considers the wicked son to be part of the Jewish People, someone who needs and merits a response, was the reason for the Jews’ joy.  When we were merely a family of individuals, each member stood or fell on his own merits.  Yishmael was Avraham’s son, and Esav was Yitzchak’s.  But neither they nor their descendents merited to become parts of the Jewish People.  That people was forged from Yaakov’s family, at the exodus from Egypt.

That now, after the exodus, even a “wicked son” would be considered a full member of the Jewish People indicated to our ancestors that something had radically changed since pre-Egyptian days.  The people had become a nation. And that well merited an expression of thanksgiving.

And so the subtle message of Dayeinu may be precisely that: The sheer indispensability of the Exodus – its importance beyond even the magnitude of all the miracles that came to follow.

If so, then for centuries upon centuries, that sublime thought might have subtly accompanied the strains of spirited “Da-Da-yeinu’s,” ever so delicately yet ever so ably entering new generations of Jewish minds and hearts, without their owners necessarily even realizing the message they absorbed.

© 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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This middle-aged fellow, apparently something of a stranger to a shul, had just been “called up” from his seat in the back of the small shul to make the blessing on the Torah.

They get so nervous, I thought to my cynical, teen-age self that day several decades ago; they should really come more than just a few times a year, if only to get the feel of things.  The blessings, after all, are not very long, the Hebrew not particularly tongue-twisting.

“Asher Bochar Banu Mikol Ho’amim (who has chosen us from among all nations)” – I prompted him in my mind – “V’nosan lonu es Toraso (and has given us His Torah).”

C’mon, man, you can do it.

His life was passing before his very eyes; you could tell. The occasion, for the man on the bima, was both momentous and terrifying.

Then he did something totally unexpected, something that made me smirk at first, but then made me think, – and made me realize something profound about our precious people.

He made a mistake.

Not entirely unexpected.  Many a shul-goer, especially the occasional one, leaves out words here and there, reverses the order, or draws a traumatic blank when faced with the sudden holiness of the Torah.  That would have been unremarkable.  But this congregant was different.

His mistake was fascinating.  “Asher bochar bonu”  he intoned, a bit unsure of himself, “mikol,” slight hesitation, “…haleylos shebechol haleylos anu ochlim.”

The poor fellow had jumped the track of the Torah blessing and was barreling along with the Four Questions a Jewish child asks at the Passover seder!  “Who has chosen us from…all other nights, for on all other nights we eat…”!!

For the first second or two it was humorous.  But then it struck me.

The hastily corrected and embarrassed man had just laid bare the scope of his Jewishness.  He had revealed all the associations Judaism still held for him – all that was left of a long, illustrious rabbinic line, for all I knew.

My first thoughts were sad… I imagined a shtetl in Eastern Europe, an old observant Jew living in physical poverty but spiritual wealth.  I saw him studying through the night, working all day to support his wife and children, one of whom later managed to survive Hitler’s Final Solution to make it to America and gratefully sire a single heir, the man on the bimah.

We have so much to set right, I mused, so many souls to reach, just to get to where we were a mere 70 years ago.

But then it dawned on me.  Here stood a man sadly inexperienced in things Jewish, virtually oblivious to rich experiences of his ancestral faith.

And yet, he knows the Four Questions.

By heart.

When he tries to recite the blessing over the Torah, the distance between him and his heritage cannot keep those Four Questions from tiptoeing in, unsummoned but determined.  The seder is a part of his essence.

I recall a conversation I once had with a secular Jewish gentleman married to a non-Jewish woman and not affiliated with any Jewish institution.  His en passant mention of Passover prompted me to ask him if he had any plans for the holiday.

He looked at me as if I were mad.

“Why, we’re planning an elaborate seder, as always.”

Astonished at the sudden revelation of a vestige of religious custom in his life, I told him as much.  He replied, matter of factly, he would never think of abolishing his Passover seder.  I didn’t challenge him.

When living in Northern California, I became acquainted with other Jewish families seemingly devoid of religious practice.  I always made a point of asking whether a seder of any sort was celebrated on Passover.  Almost invariably, the answer was… yes, of course.

It is striking.  There are more types of haggadahs than other volume in the immense literary repertoire of the Jewish people.  The Sixties saw a “civil-rights haggadah” and a “Soviet Jewry haggadah.”  Nuclear disarmament, vegetarian and feminist versions followed.  At the core of each was the age-old recounting of the ancient story of the Jews leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah.  It is as if Jews, wherever the circumstances may leave them, feel a strange compulsion to preserve the Passover seder and its lessons whatever the costs, and whatever the form most palatable to their momentary persuasions.

Events that took place millennia ago – pivotal events in the history of the Jewish nation – are regularly and openly commemorated by millions of Jews the world over, many of whom do so out of an inner motivation they themselves cannot explain.

They may not even realize what they are saying when they read their haggadahs, beyond the simplest of its ideas:  a Force saved their forefathers from terrible enemies and entered into a covenant with them and their descendants.

But that is apparently enough.

A spiritual need that spawns an almost hypnotic observance of the seder by Jews the world over is satisfied.  And even if, after the seder, mothers and fathers go back to decidedly less than Jewishly observant lives, their daughters and sons have received the message.

As did their parents when they were young, and their parents before them.

The seed is planted.

The seder is indisputably child-oriented.  Recitations that can only be described as children’s songs are part of the haggadah’s text, and various doings at the seder are explained by the Talmud as intended for the sole purpose of stimulating the curiosity of the young ones.

For the children are the next generation of the Jewish nation; and the seder is the crucial act of entrusting the most important part of their history to them, for re-entrustment to their own young in due time.

And so, in the spring of each year, like the birds compelled to begin their own season of rebirth with song, Jews feel the urge to sing as well.  They sing to their young ones, as their ancestors did on the banks of the Red Sea, and the song is a story.  It tells of their people and how the Creator of all adopted them.  And if, far along the line, a few – even many – of us fall from the nest, all is not lost. For we remember the song.

Just like the man on the bimah.

© 2007 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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It was a very long-ago Purim (the child is now a father and accomplished talmid chochom) and a group of us had rented costumes to use in Purim visits to homes while collecting for a worthy charity. The gorilla suit was very realistic (and very hot).

Sheftel, as I’ll call the boy (because it’s his name) was around three years old at the time. I was around 19. I felt bad, and immediately removed my head—that is to say the gorilla’s.

Sheftel’s eyes shrunk back to their normal size and the scream that had lodged in his lungs never made it to his wide open mouth. He saw it was only me.

When, a bit later, I replaced my gorilla head, Sheftel let out a scream. I reminded him from inside that it was only me. He screamed again. I took off the head and he immediately calmed down. I put it back on and, once again, he screamed.

Children, apparently, have to reach a certain stage before they realize that a costume is only a costume, that the person wearing it remains the person wearing it even when he’s wearing it. Sheftel had yet to internalize that truth.

Related and more poignant is the lesson of an old Yiddish joke, about Yankel informing Yossel that, unfortunately, Shmelkeh had just passed away. “Shmelkeh?” asks Yossel, “the guy with the oversized ears?”

“Yes, that Shmelkeh,” Yankel says sadly.

“The fellow with the terrible skin condition, the rash covering most of his face?

“Yes,” once again.

“The Shmelkeh missing an eye, and with the large wart on his chin?

“Yes, yes, that Shmelkeh,” Yankel confirms.

“Oy!” exclaims Yossel. “Azah shaineh Yid!” (“Such a beautiful Jew!”)

Superficial things, we come to realize if we’re perceptive, are, well, superficial. Masks, in other words, mask.

The theme of misleading appearances is, of course, central to Purim. Esther, the heroine of the historical happening commemorated on the day, hides her identity from the king who takes her as his queen. Her very name is rooted in the Hebrew word for “hidden,” and is hinted to, the Talmud teaches us, in words the Torah uses to refer to Hashem “hiding” Himself, rendering his providence undetectable.

Which it is in the Purim story. The absence of Hashem’s name from Megillas Esther reflects the fact that His presence was not overtly evident in what happened. Yet, His “absence” was itself but a mask; Divine providence, in the form of delicious ironies, informs the story at every turn. From Achashverosh’s execution of his first queen to suit his advisor and then execution of his advisor to suit his new queen; to Mordechai’s happenstance overhearing and exposure of a plot that comes to play a pivotal role in Klal Yisroel’s salvation; to Haman’s visiting the king at the perfectly wrong time… Hashem’s presence loudly hums, so to speak, in the background. If anything merits being called The Purim Principle it would be: Nothing is an Accident.

Even the very symbol of meaningless chance, the casting of lots, turns out to be Divinely directed and crucial to the Purim miracle.

Klal Yisrael, too, is “masked.” The people seem beholden to an idolatrous, lecherous king, and readily participate in his grand ball where he celebrates, of all things, the finality of the Beis Hamikdosh’s destruction, chalila.

But that was, as the Talmud teaches us, a merely superficial stance. In truth, behind the unimpressive Jewish veneer lay Jewish hearts dedicated to Hashem. And when events began to blow like a strong wind, the masks were ripped away. Our ancestors, in their fasting and prayers, showed their true essence.

Is it any wonder that on Purim we wear masks? And make fun—of ourselves and even (good naturedly) of others? What we mock are the masks we all wear, the particular character each of us projects. The mockery declares that such things are superficialities, camouflaging what really matters: the Jewish soul that resides in, and ultimately defines, us.

© 2012 AMI MAGAZINE

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As a boy growing up in the 1960s, I became intrigued with handwriting analysis. It’s an intriguing notion, an almost obvious one: our character traits are subtly expressed in our handwriting. Every person is unique, after all, and so is every person’s handwriting. Our brains are the physical organs that mediate our “selves” and ultimately produce our writing. It seems reasonable that our handwriting unconsciously reveals things about our personal characteristics. The revelations will be subtle, to be sure, but with enough research, studies, and testing, it should be possible, the reasoning goes, to establish rules to allow for the accurate analysis of personality from handwriting.

And, indeed, the claim that such rules are available and can be practically applied, at least by experienced initiates, is the fundamental principle underlying the discipline of graphology, or handwriting analysis.

I read whatever material on the topic I could find. In the end, though, I concluded that if graphology were in fact a science, it was too inexact and fuzzy to be of any use. And so I lost interest and moved on to model rocketry.

But graphology, to understate things, went on quite well without me. Today, there are scores of books on the topic; companies specialize in analyzing handwriting; individual graphologists offer their services for a fee; people use graphological analyses of their strengths and weaknesses to make life decisions; and employers routinely evaluate applicants at least partly on graphologists’ judgments of handwriting. (The use of graphological profiles as an employment tool is particularly popular, for reasons not clear, in Western Europe and Israel.)

Some Clarifications Up Front

When approaching the subject of graphology, it’s important to realize that the phrase “handwriting analysis” is sometimes used to refer to an expert document examiner’s comparison of a person’s handwriting with writing introduced as evidence in a civil or criminal trial. In such cases, the analyst (often called a “questioned document examiner”) is simply comparing details in one sample of handwriting with those in another and rendering his or her judgment about whether both were produced by the same person. Such expertise has nothing to do with graphology, the assertion that people’s character traits are discernable in their handwriting.

A second important point to keep in mind when investigating graphology, at least as it is embraced by most people today, is that it is presented as a scientific discipline. There are those who claim a mystical ability to divine personality and facts about individuals from their handwriting, just as there are people who claim to be able to do the same from facial birthmarks or palm creases or tarot cards. Some of those methods, depending on how they are used, may be halachically forbidden, although there have been Jewish mystics who, it is claimed, could “read” a person from his face or his writing. Whatever the merits of such claims, though, graphology’s contemporary promoters do not claim any such supernatural divination. What they say they do, rather, is a form of scientific analysis, the interpretation of handwriting quirks and patterns, based on what they claim to be a cause-and-effect premise, to yield subjects’ psychological, occupational, and even medical attributes.

A Little History

The earliest use of handwriting as a window into the mind may go back to the Roman emperor Nero, who is said to have judged people by their writing. The first written treatise on graphology is generally considered to have been produced in 1625 by an Italian named Camillo Baldi. In the nineteenth century, members of the Catholic clergy in France founded “The Society of Graphology” and one of them, Abbot Jean-Hyppolyte Michon, wrote several books on the topic. Within a hundred years, German thinkers had embraced the idea that state of mind affects handwriting; and Americans soon followed, with the establishment by a Kansas shorthand teacher of the International Graphoanalysis Society in 1929. (“Graphoanalysis” refers to one of a number of different schools of graphological methodology, which all differ in their assignment of meanings to certain writing patterns.)

It wasn’t until the 1950s, though, that experimental claims of graphology’s validity as a psychological tool were put forth, and its popularity began to soar both in America and Europe.

Method in the Manuscript

Although, as noted earlier, there is no canonical school of graphology, but rather an assortment of schools that each claim a particular technique of ferreting details of a mind from the writing that it has produced, most graphologists pay particular attention to the size and slant of characters, their curvature, and things like the pressure of upward and downward strokes. A right slant generally correlates with extroversion, and a left slant with introversion. The shape of the letter ‘t’ and the way it is crossed are important markers in most systems, as are the size of the personal pronoun “I” and the way it is rendered. Anyone interested in the finer points of the methodology used by the various approaches within graphology can choose from dozens of books and papers outlining the details of all the various systems.

Sifting Through the Studies

The intricacy of the systems utilized by graphologists is clear, as is the popularity of graphology itself. But is it justified? Have the claims made on its behalf been borne out by facts? Has handwriting analysis been proven to be a useful tool? The answers are clearer than one might expect, and—at least to some—may be surprising.

There have been literally hundreds of studies aimed at finding evidence for graphologists’ claims. The ones that have demonstrated efficacy on any level for handwriting analysis have been those conducted by graphologists themselves, or have appeared in journals where payment is rendered for the inclusion of papers. Objective studies in recognized professional scientific periodicals have yielded no evidence that personality traits can be reliably divined from handwriting.

Anat Rafaeli and Richard J. Klimoski, for example, studied expert graphologists’ interpretation of the handwriting of 104 real estate agents in 1983 and compared the assessments with the agents’ performance. No relationship was found. In a 1992 survey of research on handwriting analysis for personnel selection, Mr. Klimoski concluded that the “credible, empirical evidence” does not support the claims of graphology as applied to personnel selection.

In 2009, Carla Dazzi and Luigi Pedrabissi published a paper in Psychological Reports on a study they conducted about graphology and summarized their findings thus: “No evidence was found to validate the graphological method as a measure of personality.”

Even one of the very few studies that yielded a slightly greater correct/incorrect ratio in the judgments of graphologists over a control group—a 1973 paper for the Netherlands Society of Industrial Psychology—provides little succor for proponents of handwriting analysis. The Dutch researchers concluded that for judging an individual, “…graphology is a diagnostic method of highly questionable and in all probability minimal, practical value.”

More enlightening are the results of “meta-analyses” of studies on the issue. A meta-analysis is essentially an evaluation of a group of studies, which—since the weaknesses of individual studies are diluted in the pool of others considered—yields a clearer and more accurate picture.

In one such meta-analysis of 17 graphology studies in 1988, Efrat Neter and Gershon Ben-Shakhar found that graphologists were no better than nongraphologists in predicting future performance by examining an applicant’s handwriting. The researchers concluded that in cases where “neutral scripts” (writing samples whose content did not reveal anything about the writers’ lives, attitudes or interests) were used “the validities of the graphologists were near zero.” Their results, they wrote, suggested that the source of whatever “limited validity” may have been demonstrated for graphologists’ appraisals “may be the script’s content”—in other words, the content of the writing sample, not the handwriting itself.

In 1992, Australian researcher Geoffrey Dean published, in the journal of the American Psychological Association, a review of 200 studies of graphology’s efficacy. He found that no graphologist of any of the schools of handwriting analysis fared better than untrained amateurs making guesses from the same materials presented to the graphologists. In the vast majority of the studies surveyed, neither group exceeded chance expectancy.

The late professor of psychology Barry L. Beyerstein was a particularly blunt critic of graphology, calling it “scandalous that a pseudoscientific ‘character reading’” like handwriting analysis “should be used to make decisions that can seriously affect people’s reputations and life prospects.”

“The scientific literature,” he said, “overwhelmingly supports the notion that handwriting analysis is pseudoscientific bunk.”

The Handwriting Analysts’ Response

What do graphologists say when confronted with such comments and the results of studies finding no validity to their claims?

To answer that question, I interacted with accomplished handwriting analysts. They don’t dispute the fact of the scientific findings but insist that the studies are flawed. Some will point in the direction of their own, or other graphologists’, studies. Others claim that if handwriting analysis were unreliable, courts would not employ it. But I could find no evidence that any court of law in the United States has ever relied in any way on graphology (although, again, comparisons of handwriting samples to identify writers is commonplace in courts).

And some say, in effect, leave the studies aside; look instead at the facts—namely the convictions of their clients, who claim that analyses of their handwriting (or that of others that they have submitted) have been accurate, even astoundingly perceptive.

When such claims are examined, though, they tend to lose some luster. In many cases, the accuracy of the readings can plausibly be tied to the content of the written questions or writing sample submitted. The graphologist need not have consciously intended to mine that content but may nevertheless have registered elements of it in his mind, which later emerge in his evaluation. In cases of public figures, the evidence of reputations often seems to inform (again, consciously or not) analyses of their handwriting.

An example would be one graphologist’s analysis of presidential candidates’ handwriting before the 2008 elections. He concluded that Senator John McCain has an “optimistic nature” and also “a restless inner temperament, with elements of impulsivity and impatience. He can blow up in an instant… prefers to defend the given order and is stubborn, determined and unyielding in his approach to life.”

And, the analyst added, the senator is a “maverick.” All of which is common knowledge.

As to then-Senator Barack Obama, an analyst said that he “needs to always be the center of attention,” has a “seemingly informal style” and “has overcompensated for an absent father and a overbearing mother and grandmother.” (The same handwriting expert also saw in Mr. Obama’s writing “a Christian cross and the alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet… hinting at the crescent, the symbol of Islam.”)

And, in consonance with popular opinion at the time, he added on a radio program that “Barack’s signature scared the daylights out of me.”

Or/But/While

In other cases, vagueness and what might be called “or/but/while” statements allow people to see perception where in fact there may be none.

Examples of vague, open-to-many-meanings, or universally applicable phrases include things like: “divided nature,” “compatible with most people,” “protects innermost feelings,” “strives for independence,” “always asking questions and seeking answers,” and “sense of pride and dignity”—all actual phrases culled from random published analyses of handwriting samples. At first glance each phrase might seem to communicate something clear and discrete; but a second look and bit of thought yields the realization that each phrase is sufficiently vague to apply to almost anyone. Or consider (also from an actual analysis) the following: “Had trouble with parents in teens.” The inherent vagueness of the word “trouble” and the essential psychology of adolescence combine to make such an assessment more of a truism than a revelation.

Someone, however, predisposed to seeing himself in a graphological analysis would readily feel, about any or all of the phrases above, that the graphologist has indeed divined elements of his personality.

“Or/but/while” statements also abound in most graphoanalyses. Those would be things like the following (also culled from random actual readings): “has an opinion… [either] because he has character, or because he is arrogant”; “can be compatible with most personalities but will not hesitate to argue her point of view”; “charming in social situations while remaining socially distant”; “take[s] great pains to be impartial… [but] can be contentious, argumentative”; “takes [money] seriously but doesn’t allow financial concerns to consume him.”

The upshot of “or/but/while ” statements is that the subject can choose to focus either on what precedes the “or,” “but” or “while,” or on what follows it. If he’s inclined to want to believe his character has been plumbed, he’ll likely zero in on the description he feels suits him best.

A Case Study

The more daring graphologists, however, do indeed include, at least inter alia, clear assessments in their analyses of handwriting samples, descriptions of character traits that are neither vague nor qualified. It would seem that evidence for graphology’s effectiveness would assert itself in such judgments.

“Moshe,” who is something of a public figure, challenged a respected graphologist to provide scientific evidence for the efficacy of handwriting analysis. The handwriting professional told him that the fact that people found analyses of their handwriting to be accurate descriptions of themselves is the only evidence needed. And he offered to analyze Moshe’s handwriting. Moshe confided to me that he took up the offer but, to make the experiment a truly “blind” (unbiased, scientific) one, he submitted instead the handwriting of someone else—“Tzipporah”—whose character traits are markedly different from his. He is analytical, philosophical, lawyerly, and gregarious; she is intelligent but emotive, quiet, and unpretentious. While he is systematic, very organized and calculated, she has more of a “go with the flow” personality. He is very self-assured; she is modest and reserved.

The following are Moshe’s words, after receiving the detailed analysis of “his” (actually, Tzipporah’s) handwriting:

Most of the analysis reflected things about me that are easily available on the web. And those things are simply not true about [Tzippora].

Other parts of the analysis are open to broad interpretation, and in some cases even contradictory. For example, it claims the writer is ‘not meticulous about details’ and ‘given to procrastination’ but in the very next paragraph says he is “organized, with good planning skills” and, earlier, that he ‘pushes himself’ and “rarely allow[s] obstacles to deter him.”

And where the analysis does state clear “facts,” they are generally without basis—either regarding me or “Tzippora.” Neither of our fathers were delinquent in establishing “clear direction” in life. Neither of us has “past experiences [that] have created aggressive feelings.” Neither of us had unusual “trouble with parents” in our youths, and certainly don’t “blame” ourselves for that nonexistent trouble. There is much more, too, that is wildly inaccurate about both “Tzipporah” and me.

The graphologist didn’t even indicate that the writing was that of a female, not a male like me.

Moshe does not believe that the handwriting analyst consciously sought to fool him. He thinks the graphologist actually believes in his ability to see character traits in handwriting. “But,” says Moshe, “he is wrong. He somewhat described things fairly well known about me—even though it wasn’t my handwriting he analyzed—and totally struck out when he tried to go further.”

Where There’s A Will…

There will always be people who want to believe that they can obtain insight into themselves through various means. Whether they pursue a psychotherapist or a soothsayer, their goal is the same: to better understand themselves and, hopefully, better utilize their strengths, address their weaknesses,  and live better lives. And so it might well be asked what gain is to be had by presenting handwriting analysis in its true colors—something bearing the patina of “science” but lacking any evidence for its validity. After all, even if it is just a parlor game, where’s the harm in playing it?

The answer lies in the stark fact that many who seek analyses of their (or others’) handwriting actually make life-altering decisions based on what they are told. A potential marriage partner may be nixed, or a job not offered. One graphologist told me that his skills resulted in a student being revealed as guilty of a crime committed in his yeshiva. He claimed that the student subsequently admitted his guilt. But there have been many cases of admissions of guilt under pressure that turned out—on the basis of hard evidence or eyewitnesses— that emerged only later to be false. A handwriting analysis can itself be a crime, and not a victimless one.

There are, however, effective ways to receive accurate and truthful information about one’s character, strengths, and weaknesses; and to obtain useful advice for how to make life-choices. For a believing Jew, the path to such good advice has been clearly pointed out by Chazal, in Avos (1:6): “Choose for yourself a rav,” the Sages advised, “and acquire for yourself a friend.”

And when you need personal guidance, turn to them.

© 2011 Ami Magazine

The post appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

And she was present at our Shabbos table on her yahrtzeit this year.  She even taught my grandson a song.

Two year old Shmuel, who was visiting with his parents and little brother, is an adorable, rambunctious little boy; to his good fortune, his propensity to display his impressive pitching arm and ability to break things have been divinely counterbalanced with preternaturally blue eyes and a smile that could melt Pharaoh’s heart. He’s a quick learner too.

At one point, someone at the meal claimed to be directionally challenged, needing to consciously think about which way was right and which was left.  I smiled as I realized, and explained, how I came to have a split-second recognition of which way is right.

When I was a little boy, probably a bit older than Shmuel, I would accompany my mother on Shabbos afternoons to the shul in Baltimore’s LowerParkHeights neighborhood where my father, may he be well, was rabbi.  There, she would host a gathering of neighborhood children for snacks and songs and stories.  One song has remained with me over the more than half-century since.  It consisted of the verse “Kol rina viy’shua bi’oholei tzaddikim; yemin Hashem osoh choyil”: “The sound of rejoicing and salvation is in the tents of the righteous; Hashem’s right hand does valiantly” (Tehillim 118, 15).  And, in the song, the word for “right hand”—“yemin”—was repeated with gusto thrice, each time with everyone thrusting a right fist into the air.

And so, I recounted, I need only think of the word yemin and my right arm starts automatically to move. I demonstrated the song and the motion, much to the amusement of Shmuel, who then shouted “Yemin!” three times, complete with hand motion.  As we all laughed, I realized with a start that, my goodness!, my mother had just reached through the years—on her yahrtzeit no less!—and taught her great-grandson a song.

Of course, I think she is constantly teaching him, many other more important things as well.  Every time I am moved to do something kind or considerate, I know it is her legacy (bequeathed to her no less by her parents) that I am, if imperfectly, embracing, and hopefully passing on to others.  My wife and I, and our children—Shmuel’s mother among them—along with their spouses are all links in a chain of generations, passing on the Jewish beliefs and values we have absorbed from our forebears to the young with whom we have been entrusted.  In fact, being such links is arguably our most important role in life.  And whether we’re adequately filling it should be our constant concern.

More recently, my wife, perhaps in the spirit of chaos associated with the season, invited Shmuel’s parents to leave him with us for the Shabbos before Purim, an offer they couldn’t refuse.  We had a wonderful time hosting our grandson.  He managed to break only one child-proof gate, open only one child-proof cabinet (though several times) and drop just one book into the aquarium.  (My wife’s quick move prevented Shmuel’s socks from following.)

That Friday night, when I returned from shul, the house was very quiet.  Shmuel had been put to bed, but hadn’t yet fallen asleep.  To soothe him and ensure that he didn’t climb out of his crib (something in which he has considerable expertise and experience) and wreak havoc, our daughter was sitting in the darkened room with him.  He was babbling quietly, probably planning his mischief for the next day.

While we were waiting for the babble to fade to the peaceful slow breathing of well-deserved sleep, my wife excitedly motioned to me to come closer to the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar.

And then, bringing me a rush—and a smile leavened with a tear—I heard what she had: “Yemin!” Shmuel’s little-boy voice was piping. “Yemin! Yemin!”

© 2011 AMI MAGAZINE

The post A Song From Beyond appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

But the story’s too good, and its message too meaningful, to leave unshared.

“Mama Jean,” as she liked to be called, was the cook in a small yeshiva where I studied many, many years ago.  She was a very large, very jovial, very middle-aged ethnic Italian from “the other side of the tracks.”  While she was serving us pasta with meat sauce, her son was serving a life sentence in San Quentin.

Her first year with the yeshiva brought revelations to both us and her.  We learned about fresh oregano.  And she learned about strange Jews.  How they could feast so incessantly on Sabbaths and holidays, eating odd things like cholent, and how they suddenly ate nothing at all on fast days.

When Purim was imminent, we thought Mama Jean should be prepared for yet a new strangeness.  Gingerly, we told her about breaking the fast after Taanit Esther, about the festivities of that night and the next day, about the festive meal, about how some might be drinking a bit more than they otherwise might.  She wasn’t fazed and not only prepared a royal spread (and special punch) for the yeshiva but watched the singing and dancing from the kitchen throughout the day.

It was a wonderful Purim, what I remember of it.  What I clearly remember, though, was an early morning later that week.  My mind is sharpest in pre-dawn hours, and I had entered the yeshiva’s beis medrash, or study hall. well before morning services.

Expecting an empty room, I was startled to see a formidable form sitting on the floor before a bookcase at the back of the hall.  Mama Jean was oblivious to my arrival, deeply engrossed in an English holy book that had been on a shelf.

When she sensed my presence, she was startled, and I apologized.  “But Mama Jean,” I said, “What are you doing here?”

She stood up and smiled sheepishly.  “Avi,” she said.  “I’m thinking about becoming Jewish.”

Mama Jean struck me as an unlikely convert (and, to the best of my knowledge, never became one).

“Why?” I asked, sincerely curious.  “Purim” was her response.

Her elaboration has remained with me for decades since.  “Over my years,” she explained, “I’ve seen a lot of people plenty drunk.  But I’ve never seen so many people so drunk… without a single fight.”  All that she had seen at the yeshiva, she explained, was friendship, joy, laughter, tears, and religious devotion.

Mama Jean, I realized, had sensed what the rabbis of the Talmud teach: that a person’s true character is evident in “his cup”—in how he acts when intoxicated.  She had perceived Klal Yisrael.

The Talmud (Shabbos, 88a) teaches that something was missing when our ancestors received the Torah at Mt.Sinai, something only supplied centuries later by the Jews in Persia at the time of Mordechai and Esther.

Because the revelation at Sinai involved an element of coercion: “G-d held the mountain over the Jews’ heads like a gigis (a barrel).”  Explains the Maharal: The powerful nature of the experience, the terrifying interaction of human and Divine, left no opportunity for true free choice.

And for years that “coercion” remained a moda’ah, a “remonstration,” against the Jewish People.  Until the Purim story.  Then, the Jews chose, entirely of their own volition, to perceive G-d’s presence where it was not obvious at all.  Instead of seeing the threat against them in mundane terms, they recognized it as G-d’s message, and responded with prayer, fasting, and repentance.  And by choosing to see G-d’s  hand, they supplied what was missing at Sinai, confirming that the Jewish acceptance of the Torah was—and is—wholehearted, sincere and pure.

When I think of my early morning conversation with Mama Jean, I think of the Talmud’s image of G-d “holding the mountain over their heads,” and, especially, of the phrase “like a barrel.”  What’s with that?  Is a mountain overhead not frightening enough?  Who ordered the barrel?

A gigis, however, throughout the Talmud, contains an intoxicating beverage.

In Pirkei Avos, we are taught not “to look at the container, but at what it holds.”  I suspect that advice may apply here.  The Jewish nation’s reaction to coercion may not reveal its truest nature; what does, though, is how we express our dedication in a state of mindless purity. 

© 2011 AMI MAGAZINE

The post Mindless Purity appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

But I was still young enough to place the image of his subsequent years in Siberia – as a guest of the Soviet Union, which deported him and others from his yeshiva in Vilna – alongside my high school trials for comparison.  At the age when I was avoiding study, he was avoiding being made to work on the Sabbath; when my religious dedication consisted of getting out of bed early in the morning to attend services, his entailed finding opportunities to study Torah while working in the frozen taiga; where I struggled to survive the emotional strains of adolescence, he was struggling, well, to survive.  As years progressed, I continued to ponder our respective age-tagged challenges.  Doing so has lent me some perspective.

As has thinking about my father’s first Passover in Siberia, while I busy myself helping (a little) my wife shop for holiday needs and prepare the house for its annual leaven-less week.

In my father’s memoirs, which I have been privileged to help him record and which, G-d willing, we hope will be published later this year, there is a description of how Passover was on the minds of the young men and their teacher, exiled with them, as soon as they arrived in Siberia in the summer of 1941.  Over the months that followed, while laboring in the fields, they pocketed a few wheat kernels here and there, later placing them in a special bag, which they carefully hid.  This was, of course, against the rules and dangerous.  But the Communist credo, after all, was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and so they were really only being good Marxists.  They had spiritual needs, including kosher-for-Passover matzoh.

Toward the end of the punishing winter, they retrieved their stash and, using a small hand coffee grinder, ground the wheat into coarse, dark flour.

They then dismantled a clock and fitted its gears to a whittled piece of wood, fashioning an approximation of the cleated rolling pin traditionally used to perforate matzohs to ensure their quick and thorough baking.  In the middle of the night the exiles came together in a hut with an oven, which, as the outpost’s other residents slept, they fired up for two hours to make it kosher for Passover before baking their matzohs.

On Passover night they fulfilled the Torah’s commandment to eat unleavened bread “guarded” from exposure to water until before baking.

Perspective is provided me too by the wartime Passover experience of my wife’s father, I.I. Cohen, may he be well.  In his own memoir, “Destined to Survive” (ArtScroll/Mesorah, 2001), he describes how, in the Dachau satellite camp where he was interned, there was no way to procure matzoh.  All the same, he was determined to have the Passover he could.  In the dark of the barracks on Passover night, he turned to his friend and suggested they recite parts of the Haggadah they knew by heart.

As they quietly chanted the Four Questions other inmates protested.  “What are you crazy Chassidim doing saying the Haggadah?” they asked.  “Do you have matzohs, do you have wine and all the necessary food to make a seder?  Sheer stupidity!”

My father-in-law responded that he and his friend were fulfilling a Torah commandment – and no one could know if their “seder” is less meritorious in the eyes of Heaven than those of Jews in places of freedom and plenty.

Those of us indeed in such places can glean much from the Passovers of those two members – and so many other men and women – of the Jewish “greatest generation.”

A Chassidic master offers a novel commentary on a verse cited in the Haggadah.  The Torah commands Jews to eat matzoh on Passover, “so that you remember the day of your leaving Egypt all the days of your life.”

Rabbi Avrohom, the first Rebbe of Slonim, commented: “When recounting the Exodus, one should remember, too, ‘all the days’ of his life – the miracles and wonders that G-d performed for him throughout…”

I suspect that my father and father-in-law, both of whom, thank G-d, emerged from their captivities and have merited to see children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, naturally do that.  But all of us, no matter our problems, have experienced countless “miracles and wonders.”  We may not recognize all of the Divine guidance and benevolence with which we were blessed – or even the wonder of every beat of our hearts and breath we take.  But that reflects only our obliviousness.  At the seder, when we recount G-d’s kindnesses to our ancestors, it is a time, too, to look back at our own personal histories and appreciate the gifts we’ve been given.

Should that prove hard, we might begin by reflecting on what some Jews a bit older than we had to endure not so very long ago.

© 2009 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

The post Our Own Private Passover appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

Such passages have their p’shat, or straightforward intent.  But they also have less obvious layers, like that of remez – or “hinting” – unexpected subtexts that can be revealed by learned, insightful scholars.

One such meaning was mined from the Four Questions that are asked, usually by a child, at the Passover Seder service.  The famous questions are actually one, with four examples provided.  The overarching query is: Why is this night [of Passover] different from all the other nights [of the year]?

“Night,” however, can mean something deeper than the hours of darkness between afternoon and dawn.  In Talmudic literature it can be a metaphor for exile, specifically the periods of history when the Jewish People were, at least superficially, estranged from G-d.  The sojourn in Egypt is known as the “Egyptian Exile,” and the years between the destruction of the FirstHolyTemple in Jerusalem and its rebuilding is the “Babylonian Exile.”

“Why,” goes the “‘hinting’ approach” to the Four Questions, “is this night” – the current Jewish exile – “different” – so much longer – than previous ones?  Nearly 2000 years, after all, have passed since the SecondTemple’s destruction.

In this reading, the four examples of unusual Seder practices take on a new role; they are answers to that question.

“On all other nights,” goes the first, “we eat leavened and unleavened bread; but on this night… we eat only unleavened.”  The Hebrew word for unleavened bread, matza, can also mean “strife.”  And so, through the remez-lens, we perceive the first reason for the current extended Jewish exile: personal and pointless anger among Jews.  The thought should not puzzle.  The SecondTemple, the Talmud teaches, was destroyed over “causeless hatred.”  That it has not yet been rebuilt could well reflect an inadequate addressing of its destruction’s cause.

The second: “On all other nights we eat all sorts of vegetables; but on this night, bitter ones.”  In the Talmud, eating vegetation is a sign of simplicity and privation.  Amassing money, by contrast, is associated with worries and bitterness.  “One who has one hundred silver pieces,” the Talmudic rabbis said, “desires two hundred.”  So the hint in this declaration is that the exile continues in part because of misplaced focus on possessions, which brings only “bitterness” in the end.

“On all other nights,” goes the third example, “we need not dip vegetables [in relish or saltwater] even once; this night we do so twice.”  Dipped vegetables are intended as appetizers – means of stimulating one’s appetite to more heartily enjoy the forthcoming meal.  In the remez reading here, such “dipping” refers to the contemporary predilection to seek out new pleasures.  Hedonism, the very opposite of the Jewish ideal of “his’tapkut,” or “sufficing” with less, is thus another element extending our current exile.

And finally, “On all other nights, we sit [at meals] at times upright, at times reclining; this night we all recline.”  During other exiles, the “hint” approach has it, there were times when Jews felt downtrodden in relation to the surrounding society, and others when they felt exalted, respected, “arrived.”  In this exile, according to the remez approach, we have become too comfortable, constantly “reclining.”  We view ourselves at the top of the societal hill, and wax prideful over our achievements and status.

Thus, the Four Questions hint at four contemporary Jewish societal ills that prolong our exile: internal strife, obsession with possessions, hedonism and haughtiness.

However one may view that “hint” approach to the Seder’s Four Questions, looking around we certainly see that much of modern Jewish society indeed exhibits such spiritually debilitating symptoms.  Arguments, which should be principled, are all too often personal.  “Keeping up with the Cohens” has become a way of life for many.  Pleasure-seeking is often a consuming passion.  And pride is commonly taken in petty, temporal things instead of meaningful ones.

Most remarkable, though, is that the above remez approach to the Four Questions is that of Rabbi  Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, best known for his commentary on the Bible, the Kli Yakar.

He died in 1619.  Imagine what he would say today.

© 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

The post The Four Answers appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung puzzled over such happenings, which he felt were evidence of some “acausal connecting principle” in the world.  In a famous essay, he named the phenomenon “synchronicity.”

To those of us who believe in a Higher Power, synchronistic events, no matter how trivial they may seem, are subtle reminders that there is pattern in the universe, evidence of an ultimate plan.

My family has come to notice what appears to us to be an increase of such quirky happenings in our lives during the month (or, as this year, months) of Adar.

That would make sense, of course, since Adar is the month of Purim, the Jewish holiday that is saturated with seemingly insignificant “twists of fate” that turn out to be fateful indeed.  From King Achashverosh’s execution of his queen to suit his advisor and later execution of his advisor to suit his new queen; to Mordechai’s happenstance overhearing and exposure of a plot that comes to play a pivotal role in his people’s salvation; to Haman’s visiting the king at the very moment when the monarch’s insomnia has him wondering how to honor Mordechai; to the gallows’ employment to hang its builder…  The list of drolly fortuitous happenings goes on, and its upshot is what might be called The Purim Principle: Nothing is an Accident.

The holiday’s very name is taken from an act of chance – “purim” are the lots cast by Haman, who thinks he is accessing randomness but is in fact casting his own downfall.  He rejoices at his lottery’s yield of the month during which he will have the Jews destroyed: the month of Moses’ death.  He does not realize that it was the month, too, of his birth.

The contemporary Adar coincidences I’ve come to expect are often about trivial things, but they still fill me with joy, as little cosmic “jokes” that remind me of the Eternal.  One recent evening, for example, I remarked to my wife and daughter how annoying musical ringtones in public places are, especially when the cellphones are programmed, as they usually are, to assault innocent bystanders with jungle beats and rude shouting.  “Why can’t they use the Moonlight Sonata?” I quipped.

The very next day at afternoon services, someone’s cellphone went off during the silent prayer.  Usually my concentration is disturbed by such things but this time the synchronicity of the sound only made me more aware of the Divine.  Never before had I heard a phone play the Moonlight Sonata.

Only days later, my daughter saw a license plate that intrigued her.  It read: “Psalm 128.”  What a strange legend for a car, she thought.  That very night she accompanied her mother and me to a wedding.  Under the chuppah, unexpectedly, a group of young men sang a lovely rendition of… yes, you guessed it.

Other times, the Adar coincidences are more obviously meaningful, clearly linked to Purim.  A few Adars ago, a striking irony emerged from a new book about Joseph Stalin.  It related something previously unknown: that after the infamous 1953 “Doctors Plot,” a fabricated collusion of doctors and Jews to kill top Communist leaders, the Soviet dictator had ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Siberia, “apparently,” as a New York Times article about the book put it, “in preparation for a second great terror – this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.”

Two weeks later, though, Stalin took suddenly ill at a dinner party and, four days later, it was announced that he had died.  His successor Nikita Khrushchev recounted how the dictator had gotten thoroughly drunk at the dinner party, which ended in the early hours of March 1.  Which, that year, fell on the 14^th of Adar, Purim.

This year, too, I was synchronicity-struck by an unexpected piece of Adar information.  It materialized as I did research for a speech I was to give about the destruction of a small Lithuanian town’s Jewish community during the Holocaust.

The most famous extant document about Nazi actions in Lithuania is what has come to be known as the Jager Report, after SS-Standartenfuehrer Karl Jager (whose surname, incidentally, means “hunter” in German; “as his name so was he”: he hunted Jews).  Filed on December 1, 1941, and labeled “Secret Reich Business,” the report meticulously details a “complete list of executions carried out in the EK [Einsatzkommando] 3 area” that year.

It records the number of men, women and children murdered in each of dozens of towns and ends with the grand total of the operation’s victims – 137,346 – and the words: “Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK3…”

Standartenfuehrer Jager, however, only oversaw the operation; he didn’t get his hands dirty with the actual work of shooting Jews.  That he left to a “raiding squad” of “8-10 reliable men from the Einsatzkommando,” led by a young Oberstumfuherer called Hamann.  Joachim Hamann.

May his name, and that of his ancient namesake, be blotted out, and our days be transformed, in the Book of Esther’s words, “from sorrow to gladness and from mourning to festivity.”

 © 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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We sat listlessly on our bunks, waiting impatiently for the high point of our day – our meager ration of bread.  It was my seventh month in Dachau’s Death Camp #4.

“Do you know that tomorrow is Purim?” I asked, trying to distract my brothers in suffering, and myself, from our painful hunger.

“How do you know?”

“It’s freezing! Purim can’t be for another month.”

“No, no!” some protested. “Srulik doesn’t make mistakes like that! He has a good memory.”

“Crazy Chassidim!” others grumbled. “You’ve nothing else to worry about besides when Purim falls this year? What’s the difference any more between Purim and Pesach, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur? Isn’t it always Tisha B’Av?”

The debate gathered force among the block’s “mussulmen” – the eighty living skeletons crammed tightly into a virtual wooden tomb overgrown with grass.

It was the hour before nightfall.  We lay in the camp infirmary on wooden boards covered with a thin layer of straw, our eyes riveted on the curtain separating us from the block elder’s spacious quarters.

Suddenly the curtain parted, and the block elder stood there with his henchmen, bearing our bread rations; it had been nearly twenty-four hours.  Each inmate measured his ration wordlessly with his eyes, and compared it to his neighbor’s, each convinced that the other had received more.  At such times, best friends became bitter rivals and within minutes the stingy portions were devoured.  But our stomachs felt as empty as before, the gnawing hunger made all the more intolerable by the realization that it would be a full day before the next piece of bread.

Having just suffered through a bad bout of typhus, I fell back on my board, and fast asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt dizzy; my head was like a leaden weight.  I began to conjure images of my past, of my parents and my sisters, Gittel and Mirel… how I used to study in the study-hall of the Chassidim of Ger.   Mostly, I remembered my grandfather, Reb Herschel, who loved me and would take me, his only grandson, along whenever he went to the Gerer Rebbe. I pictured the Chassidic leader’s face, his eyes overflowing with wisdom and love, penetrating my very soul.

Will I ever have the merit, I wondered, to press myself once again into the crowd of Chassidim gathering around the Rebbe, to learn from him how to be a good Chassid and a G-d-fearing person?

“Time to pray, Srulik.”

My friend’s voice shook me from my reverie.  The memories vanished.  I was back in the pit of hell.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Let’s wash our hands and daven.”

Then it struck me.

“But it’s Purim!” I exclaimed.  “We have to organize a minyan!”

My pain and pangs receded.  Summoning strength, I went to wash my hands and face and then to find some others to complete our minyan. Perhaps, I thought, I might even find someone else who could recall a few more verses from the Megillah so that we might fulfill something of our sacred Jewish obligation to publicly read the Book of Esther.

G-d responds to good deeds undertaken with dedication.  A copy of the second book of the Bible, with the Book of Esther appended, was discovered by my friend, Itche Perelman, a member of the camp burial squad.

We were elated.  Such a find could only be a sign that our prayers had been received in Heaven and that the redemption was near.  Our excitement grew.  Who remembered the hunger, the cold, the filth, the degradation?  No one gave a thought to the dangers involved in organizing our prayer group, to the possibility of a German or kapo deciding dropping in unexpectedly. Even those who the day before had scoffed at the “crazy Chassidim” seemed excited.

“Who will read the Megillah?” someone asked.

The lot, so to speak, fell on me.  Within moments, volunteers managed to locate some clothing for me since, like all the inmates of the infirmary, I had been assigned nothing more than a blanket with which to cover myself. And so, dressed in a camp uniform, a towel wrapped around my head in place of a yarmulka, I read the words: “and Haman sought to destroy all the Jews.”

When I read of Haman’s downfall, and that “the Jews had light and happiness, joy and honor,” the spark of hope that glimmers in every Jew’s heart ignited into a flaming torch. “Dear L-rd of the Universe!” I know each of us was thinking, “Grant us a wondrous miracle too, as you did for our forefathers in those days. Let us, too, see the end of our enemies!”

When I finished, everyone cheered.  For a brief instant, the dreadful reality of the death camp had been forgotten. Having exerted the rest of my strength on the reading, I sat breathless, but my spirit soared.

When people’s actions are pleasing to G-d, even their enemies are reconciled to them.  The block elder, who usually strutted in with a scowl, smiled as he entered that day, ladling the soup without cursing at anyone. And the ever-present jealousy among us inmates seemed to turn into generosity.  Instead of complaints that someone else had received more potatoes, I heard things like “Let Srulik get a bigger portion of soup today!”

Instead of bemoaning the present, we dreamed of the future, of when the German demon would inherit his due, when this Jewish suffering would end.  And like a river overflowing its banks, thoughts of redemption burst forth from broken hearts.  One mitzvah led to another, to further acts of spiritual heroism. Someone decided to forgo the small piece of bread he had saved from the previous day, and offered it to his comrade. Another made a gift of a piece of potato, and these two “portions”, which only yesterday would have caused ill will, now became the means by which the inmates could fulfill the mitzvah of “sending gifts of food, one to another.”

Those precious “Mishloach Manos” were passed around from one to the other, until they finally landed on my lap. Everyone decided that I should be the one to keep them in the end as compensation for my services.

I thought to myself, “Dear G-d, behold Your people, who in an instant can transform themselves from wild creatures to courageous, caring men and faithful Jews…”

And a verse welled up inside me: “Who is like you, Israel, a singular nation on Earth?”

“Precious Jews!” I said to the others. “Brothers in suffering!  Let us make but one request from our Heavenly Father: Next year in Jerusalem!”

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“Midrash,” although redefined of late by some to mean a fanciful, personal take on a Biblical account, in truth refers to a body of ancient traditions that for generations was transmitted only orally but later put into writing.

One such tradition focuses on the verse recounting how the dogs in Egypt did not utter a sound as they watched the Jewish people leave the land (Exodus, 11:7).  The Talmud contends that, in keeping with the concept that “G-d does not withhold reward from any creature,” dogs are the animals to whom certain non-kosher meat should be cast.  The Midrash, however, notes another, more conceptual “reward” for the canine silence: The dung of dogs will be used to cure animal skins that will become tefillin, mezuzot and Torah scrolls.

It is certainly intriguing that the lowly refuse of a lowly creature – and dogs are viewed by many Middle-Eastern societies as particularly base – should play a part in the preparation of the most sublime and holy of objects.  And that, it seems, is what the Midrash wishes us to ponder – along with the puzzling idea that silence is somehow key to that ability to sublimate the earthy and physical into the rarified and hallowed.  The particular silence at issue may be canine, but its lesson is for us.

Providing even more support for that thought is a statement in the Mishna (the earliest part of the Talmud).  “I have found nothing better for the body,” Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel remarks in Pirkei Avot (1:17), “than silence.”  The phrase “for the body” (which can also be rendered “the physical”) seems jarring.  Unless it, too, hints at precisely what the Midrash seems to be saying – that in silence, somehow, lies the secret of how the physical can be transformed into the exalted.

But what provides for such transformation would seem to be speech.  Judaism teaches that the specialness of the human being – the hope for creating holiness here on earth – lies in our aptitude for language, our ability to clothe subtle and complex ideas in meaningful words.  That is why in Genesis, when life is breathed by G-d into the first man, the infusion is, in the words of the Targum Onkelos, a “speaking spirit.”  The highest expression of human speech, our tradition teaches, lies in our ability to recognize our Creator, and give voice to our gratitude (hakarat hatov).  The first vegetation, the Talmud informs us, would not sprout until Adam appeared to “recognize the blessing of the rain.”  Hakarat hatov is why many Jews punctuate their recounting of happy recollections or tidings with the phrase “baruch Hashem,” or “blessed is G-d” – and it is pivotal to elevating the mundane.  So it would seem that speech, not silence, is the path to holiness.

Unless, though, silence is the most salient demonstration of the consequence of words.

After all, aren’t the things we are careful not to waste the things we value most?.  We don’t hoard plastic shopping bags or old newspapers; but few – even few billionaires – would ever use a Renoir to wrap fish.

Words – along with our ability to use them meaningfully – are the most valuable things any of us possesses.  To be sure, one can (and most of us do) squander them, just as one can employ a Rembrandt as a doormat.  But someone who truly recognizes words’ worth will use them only sparingly.  The adage notwithstanding, talk isn’t cheap; it is, quite the contrary, a priceless resource, the means, used properly, of coaxing holiness from the physical world.

And so silence – choosing to not speak when there is nothing worthwhile to say – is perhaps the deepest sign of reverence for the potential holiness that is speech.

Which brings us back to Passover.  As noted, the highest expression of human speech is the articulation, like Adam’s, of the idea of hakarat hatov – literally, “recognition of the good” – with which we have been blessed.  The Kabbalistic texts refer to our ancestors’ sojourn in Egypt as “the Speech-Exile,” implying that in some sense the enslaved Jews had yet to gain full access to the power that provides human beings the potential of holiness.

With the Exodus, though, that exile ended and, at the far side of the sea that split to allow them but not their pursuers passage, our ancestors responded with an extraordinary vocal expression: the epic poem known in Jewish texts as “The Song” (Exodus, 15:1-18 ).  Written in a unique graphic formation in the Torah scroll, it is a paean to G-d for the goodness He bestowed on those who marched out of Egypt – who went from what the Talmudic rabbis characterized as the penultimate level of baseness to, fifty days later, the heights of holiness at Mt.Sinai.

And so it should not be surprising that, whereas Jews are cautioned to use words only with great care and parsimony, on the Seder night we are not only enjoined to speak at length and into the wee hours about the kindness G-d granted our people, but are informed by the rabbis of the Talmud, that “the more one recounts, the more praiseworthy it is.”

© 2006 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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The man who recounted it had spent the war years, his teenage years, in the chilling vastness of the Siberian taiga.  He and his Polish yeshiva colleagues were guests of the Soviet authorities for their reluctance to assume Russian citizenship after they fled their country at the start of the Nazi onslaught.

He had already spoken of unimaginable, surreal episodes, fleeing his Polish shtetl with the German advance in 1939, of watching as his uncle was caught trying to escape a roundup of Jews and shot on the spot, of being packed with his Jewish townsfolk into a shul which was then set afire, of their miraculous deliverance, of the long treks, of the wandering refugees’ dedication to the Torah’s commandments.  And then he told the story.

We were loaded onto rail cattle-wagons, nine of us, taken to Novosibirsk, and from there transported by barge to Parabek, where we were assigned to a kolchoz, or collective farm.           

I remember that our first winter was our hardest, as we did not have the proper clothing for the severe climate     

Most of us had to fell trees in the forest. I was the youngest and was assigned to a farm a few miles from our kolchoz. The nights were terribly cold, the temperature often dropping to forty degrees below zero, through I had a small stove by which I kept a little warm. The chief of the kolchoz would make surprise checks on me to see if I had fallen asleep, and I would recite Psalms to stay awake. 

One night I couldn’t shake the chills and I realized that I had a high fever. I managed to hitch my horse and sled together and set off for the kolchoz.  Not far from the farm, though, I fell from the sled into the deep snow and the horse continued on without me. I tried to shout to the animal to stop, to no avail. I remember crying and saying Psalms for I knew that remaining where I was, or trying to walk to the kolchoz, would mean certain death from exposure. I forced myself to get up and, with what little strength I had left, began running after the horse and sled.

Suddenly, the horse halted. I ran even faster, reached the sled and collapsed on it.

Looking up at the starry sky, I prayed with all my diminishing might to G-d to enable me to reach the relative safety of the kolchoz.  He answered me and I reached my Siberian home, though I was shaking uncontrollably from my fever; no number of blankets could warm me. The next day, in a daze, I was transported to Parabek, where there was a hospital.           

My first two days in the hospital are a blur, but on the third my fever broke and I started to feel a little better. Then suddenly, as I lay in my bed, I saw a fellow yeshiva boy from the kolchoz, Herschel Tishivitzer, before me, half frozen and staring, incredulous, at me. His feet were wrapped in layers and layers of rags – the best one could manage to try to cope with the Arctic cold, without proper boots.  I couldn’t believe my eyes – Herschel had actually walked the frigid miles from the kolchoz!

“Herschel,” I cried, “what are you doing here?

I’ll never forget his answer.      

“Yesterday,” he said, “someone came from Parabek, and told us ‘Simcha umar,’ that Simcha had died.  And so I volunteered to bury you.”

The narrator paused to collect himself, and the reflected on his memory:

The dedication to another Jew, the dedication… Had the rumor been true there was no way he could have helped me. He had immediately made the perilous journey – just to see to my funeral! The dedication to another Jew …such an example!…

As a shiver subsided and the story sank in, I wondered: Would I have even considered such a journey, felt such a responsibility to a fellow Jew? In such a place, at such a time? Or would I have justified inaction with the ample justification available? Would I have been able to maintain even my humanity in the face of so doubtful a future, not to mention my faith in G-d, my very Jewishness…?

A wholly unremarkable story in a way, I realize. None of the violence, the tragedy, the horrors, the evil of so many tales of the war years. Just a short conversation, really. Yet I found so valuable a lesson in the story of Herschel Tishivitzer’s selflesness, unhesitating concern for little Simcha Ruzhaner, as the narrator had been called in those days: what it means to be part of a holy people.

The narrator concluded his story, describing how Hershel Tishivitzer, thank G-d, had eventually made his way to America and settled in New York under his family name, Nudel. And how he, the narrator himself, had ended up in Baltimore, where he married the virtuous daughter of a respected Jewish scholar, Rabbi Noach Kahn.  And how he himself had became a rabbi (changing many lives for the better, I know, though he didn’t say so) and how he and his rebbetzin had raised their children in their Jewish religious heritage, children who were continuing to frustrate the enemies of the Jewish people by raising strong Jewish families of their own.

And I wondered – actually, I still do – if the slice of Simcha Ruzhaner’s life had so affected me only because of its radiant, blindingly beautiful message – or if perhaps some part was played by the fact that he too, had taken on a shortened form of his family name, Shafranowitz, and had named his second child Avrohom Yitzchok, although everyone calls me Avi.

© 2006 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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A chill accompanied my first encounter with that quote.  Because the Jewish religious tradition sees the ever-rejuvenating, shining disk of the moon as a symbol of the Jewish people.  Indeed, the very first commandment we Jews were given as a people, while still awaiting the Exodus in Egypt, was to identify ourselves through our calendar with the moon. The moon Hitler feared.

There is much other oddness about Hitler with connections to ancient Jewish tradition, things like his fondness for ravens, in Jewish lore associated with cruelty; he went so far as to issue special orders protecting the birds.  And like his fascination with the art of Franz von Stuck (the artist who had the “greatest impact” on his life, he once said), whose major themes are snakes and sinister women.  In the Jewish mystical tradition, snakes evoke evil and its embodiment, Amalek; and there are hints of an antithetical relationship between the irredeemable wickedness of Amalek and women.

And then there is the matter of the most loathsome of Hitler’s henchmen, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer, the premier journal of Jew-baiting.

At its peak in 1938, print runs of Streicher’s vile tabloid ran as high as 2,000,000.  A typical offering included a close-up of the face of a deformed Jew above the legend “The Scum of Humanity: This Jew says that he is a member of God’s chosen people.”  Another displayed a cartoon of a vampire bat with a grotesquely exaggerated nose and a Jewish star on its chest.  In yet another, a Jewish butcher was depicted snidely dropping a rat into his meat grinder and, elsewhere in the issue, the punctured necks of handsome German youths were shown bleeding into a bowl held by a Jew more gargoyle than human.

In 1935, speaking to a closed meeting of a Nazi student organization, Streicher, displaying an unarguably Amalekian approach, declared:

“All our struggles are in vain if the battle against the Jews is not fought to the finish.  It is not enough to get the Jews out of Germany. No, they must be destroyed throughout the entire world so that humanity will be free of them.

The suspicion that in Streicher’s blind, baseless, and absolute hatred of the Jews lay the legacy of Amalek makes the story of his capture and death nothing short of chilling.

Purim is the only Jewish holiday that celebrates the defeat of an Amalekite, Haman.  Even a passing familiarity with the Purim story is sufficient to know that the downfall of its villain is saturated with what seem to be chance ironies; he turns up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all that he so carefully plans eventually comes to backfire on him in an almost comical way – a theme The Book of Esther characterizes with the words v’nahafoch hu, “ and it was turned upside down!”

Such “chance” happenings are the very hallmark, of Amalek’s defeat – a fact reflected in the “casting of lots” from which Purim takes its name.  Chance, Esther teaches us, is an illusion; God is in charge.  Amalek may fight with iron but he is defeated with irony.

As was Streicher.  In the days after Germany’s final defeat, an American major, Henry Plitt, received a tip about a high-ranking Nazi living in an Austrian town.  He accosted a short, bearded artist, who he though might be SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, and asked him his name.

“Joseph Sailer,” came the reply from the man, who was painting a canvas on an easel.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’”

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man with the paintbrush responded.  “Yes, that is me.”

When Major Plitt brought his serendipitous catch to Berchtesgaden, he later recounted, a reporter told him that he had “killed the greatest story of the war.”  When he asked how, the reporter responded “Can you imagine if a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be?”

Major Plitt recalled telling the reporter “I’m Jewish” and how “that’s when the microphones came into my face and the cameras started clicking.

Another happy irony in Streicher’s life involved the fate of his considerable estate.  As reported in Stars and Stripes in late 1945, his considerable possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Palestine.  Just as Haman’s riches, as recorded in the Book of Esther, were bestowed upon his nemesis Mordechai.

There is a good deal more of interest in the life of Julius Streicher to associate him with Jewish traditions about Amalek.  But one of the most shocking narratives about him is the one concerning his death.  Streicher was of one of the Nazis tried, convicted, and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

During the trial, Streicher remained disgustingly true to form.  When the prosecution showed a film of the concentration camps as they had been found by the Allies, a spotlight was left on the defendants’ box for security reasons. Many present preferred to watch the defendants’ reactions rather than the mounds of bodies, matchstick limbs and common graves.  Few of the defendants could bear to watch the film for long.  Goering seemed calm at first, but eventually began to nervously wipe his sweaty palms.  Schacht turned away; Ribbentrop buried his face in his hands. Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with a handkerchief.  Only Streicher leaned forward throughout, looking anxiously at the film and excitedly nodding his head.

While no proof was found that Streicher had ever killed a Jew by his own hand, the tribunal nevertheless decided that his clear-cut incitement of others to the task constituted the act of a war criminal; and so he was sentenced, along with ten other defendants, to hang

And hang he did.  But not before taking the opportunity to share a few final words with the journalists present at the gallows.  “Heil Hitler. Now I go to God,” he announced.  And then, just before the trap sprang open, he blurted out most clearly: “Purim Feast 1946!” – an odd thing to say in any event, but especially so on an October morning.

The “Amalek-irony” of the Nuremberg executions doesn’t end there, either.  The Book of Esther recounts how Haman’s ten sons were hanged in Shushan. An eleventh child, a daughter, committed suicide earlier, according to an account in the Talmud.  At Nuremberg, while eleven men were condemned to execution by hanging, only ten were actually hanged.  The eleventh, the foppish, effeminate Goering, died in his cell only hours before the execution; he had crushed a hidden cyanide capsule between his teeth.

Something even more striking was noted by the late Belzer Rebbe. In scrolls of the Book of Esther, the names of the ten sons of Haman are unusually prominent; they are written in two parallel columns, a highly unusual configuration.  Odder still is the fact that three letters in the list, following an unexplained halachic tradition, are written very small, and one very large.  The large letter is the Hebrew character for the number six (Hebrew letters all have numeric values); the small letters, added together, yield the number 707.  If the large letter is taken to refer to the millennium and 707 to the year in the millennium, something fascinating emerges.  According to Jewish reckoning, the present year is 5762.  The year 5707 – the 707^th year in the sixth millennium – was the year we know as 1946, when ten sworn enemies of the Jewish people were hanged in Nuremberg, just as ten others had been in Shushan more than two thousand years earlier.

The Book of Esther, (9:13), moreover, refers to the hanging of Haman’s sons in the future tense, after the event had been recounted, presaging, it might seem, some hanging yet to happen.

To believing Jews, the Holocaust was the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of evil, stretching far and deep into the past even as one of its ugly tips punctured the relative peace of the modern world.

And so, as we prepare to celebrate Purim and the downfall of the Amalekite Haman, especially these days, when Jew-hatred has once again made itself manifest in the world, we would do well to ponder that the evil he represents may have been defeated at times throughout history but it has not yet been vanquished.

© 2005 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Avi Shafran serves as public affairs director for Agudath Israel of America]

The post Fighting Iron With Irony appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

On Wednesday, April 25, 1945, the SS guards in Kaufering’s watchtowers suddenly disappeared.

The block supervisors in our camp – a satellite of Dachau – stopped beating and cursing; they knew that the explosives that had grown louder each day signaled the death throes of the Third Reich.  Those of us whose legs could still carry them broke into the camp kitchen and hauled away potatoes, flour, cabbage and pieces of bread.  A day earlier we would have been shot on sight for lesser sins, but now, several days since we had been given any food, our hunger overpowered our fright. We stuffed both our bellies and our pockets.

Suddenly the silence was broken by the familiar murderous voices of our German captors.

“Everyone in a row! Roll call!” In a flash, the thugs were once again running about with clubs and revolvers in hand, mercilessly chasing and dragging everyone out of the barracks. , Having already experienced several years together in the ghetto, our small group of young Gerer Chasidim from Lodz tried to stick together. We discussed the situation. It was quite clear that the Allied forces were close by.  Rumor had it that the SS command had ordered camp commanders to exterminate all inmates, so that no living testimony would be available to the Allied armies. We found it hard to believe in such a diabolical scheme, but six years under Nazi rule had taught us that bleak prophecies had a tendency to materialize.

We debated our alternatives. Should we follow orders and evacuate the camp, or risk trying to stay behind and await the Allies? We decided to stay and, one by one, stole into the dysentery block, where only the hopelessly ill lay. We hoped that the guards would choose not to enter the contaminated area.

But our hopes were dashed soon enough when our block door crashed open and an SS officer, his machine gun crackling, shouted “Everyone out! The camp is to be blown up!”  Silence. We didn’t stir, the Nazi left and night fell.

Suddenly the air shook with the wailing of sirens. The Allies were bombing the German defenses! We prayed that the thunderous explosions would go on forever, and eventually fell asleep to the beautiful sound of the bombs.

The next morning we awoke to an ominous silence, broken only by the moans of the dying. We arose cautiously and went outside the block. There was desolation everywhere, and a gaping hole in the barbed wire.  Had it been torn open by the fleeing Germans?  Were we free?

We went to the other barracks, and shared our discover with their frightened inhabitants – mostly “musselmen”, or emaciated “skeletons”.  Soon enough we heard the unmistakable rumble of an approaching convoy.  We sat and waited, our fear leavened with excitement.

The fear proved more prescient, and soon enough melted into acute disappointment, when the all too familiar SS uniforms came once again into view. The Nazis had returned, bringing an entire detachment of prisoners from other camps with them to help them finish their work.  Amid the fiendish din of screams and obscenities, we hurriedly hid in one of the blocks, covered ourselves with straw and rags and lay still, our hearts pounding with terror. Soon we heard footsteps in the block and I felt a hand on my head.  We had been discovered, by non-Jewish inmates of other labor and POW camps.

We pleaded with them to ignore us, and offered them our potatoes but just as the invaders had agreed, an SS officer came stomping in, swinging his club, which he then efficiently and heartlessly used on our heads. A boot on the behind, and we were on our way to the trucks, accompanied by the commandos and the SS.

We were picked up by our arms and legs and thrown onto a wagon piled with barely human-looking bodies; the moaning of the sick was replaced by the silence of the dead.  By a stroke of luck, though, while the guards were busy with another wagon, my friend Yossel Carmel and I managed to roll out of the truck and found refuge in a nearby latrine.  Though our hearts had long since turned to stone, our stomachs were convulsing.

Eventually the wagons left, and we crept back into the very block we had occupied earlier. I tore down the light hanging from the ceiling, and we posed, not unconvincingly, as corpses.  Every so often the door would open, and we would hear a shout of “Everyone out!” but we just lay perfectly still.  Darkness fell, motors rumbled, and then there was quiet.

Friday, April 27, 1945, brought a cold morning.  White clouds chased each other across the bright blue sky as a frigid wind blew through the barracks, chilling our bones. Periodically, the earth trembled with an explosion; we sat quietly, each engrossed in his own thoughts. Suddenly, we heard motorcycles rumbling and dogs barking.  Our hearts fell.  Once again, the Germans were back.

We soon heard footsteps in the block, and then a frenzied voice, “Swine! You are waiting for the Americans? Come with me!” There followed a commotion, the sound of running, the shattering of glass, and then, a burst of machine gun fire. I peeked and saw that those who had been hiding near the window had tried to escape. Yossel and I had not been detected but were paralyzed with fright. Footsteps approached and then we heard the rustling of straw.  When we felt tapping on the piles in which we were hiding, our terrified souls almost departed us.

We held our breath in fear as the footsteps moved away.  Peeking through a hole in the straw that covered me, I felt smoke burning my eyes.  Frantically, we ripped off the straw and rags and saw flames all around us. Hand in hand, Yossel and I fumbled toward the door, suffocating from the smoke, our heads spinning.  In a moment that seemed an eternity, we found ourselves outside.  Just a few yards from us stood the German murderers, fortunately, with their backs to us.

The entire camp was ablaze. We threw ourselves on the first pile of corpses that we saw and lay still; we no doubt resembled our camouflage.  Around us we heard heavy footsteps, screams and the moaning of the fatally wounded.  And what we saw was blood, fire, and clouds of smoke – hell on earth, complete with demons.

When silence finally fell again, I mumbled to Yossel that we ought to say vidui, the confession of sins a Jew makes periodically but especially when facing death.  He chided me to remember what I had told him when we arrived in Auschwitz, our first concentration camp.  The Sages of the Talmud, he reminded me, had admonished that “Even if the sword is braced on your neck, never despair of Divine mercy.”   Yossel recalled, too, the Sages’ admonition that in times of danger Jews should renew their commitment to their faith.

We crawled to a nearby pit, shivering with cold. Through my smoke-filled eyes and fear-ridden senses, I thought I saw SS guards everywhere, with weapons poised.  Yossel, however, finally managed to convince me that there was no one in sight; for an hour or more we lay in that pit. Every few minutes bombs whistled overhead, followed by fearsome explosions nearby. The earth shook, but each blast pumped new hope into our hearts. Slowly, we crept out of the pit and made our way to the only building still standing – the camp kitchen.  There we found a few more frightened souls.

Together we discovered a sack of flour, mixed it with water, started the ovens and baked flat breads.  I noted the irony; it was Pesach Sheini – the biblical “Second Passover” a month after the first – and we were baking matzohs.

Suddenly, the door flew open and a Jewish inmate came running in breathlessly, crying out: “Yidden! Fellow Jews! The Americans are here!” We were free!

We wanted to cry, sing, dance, but our petrified hearts would not let us.  I wanted to rush outside, but my strength seemed to have left me.

When I finally did manage to move outside, I saw a long convoy of tanks and jeeps roaring through the camp. A handful of American soldiers approached the barracks.  One of them, an officer, looked around him, tears streaming down his face. Only then did I fully grasp the extent of the horror around us. The barracks were nearly completely incinerated.  In front of each block lay a pile of blackened, smoldering skeletons.

And we, the living, were a group of ghouls, walking corpses.  Along with the American soldiers, we wept.

Among the supplies the Americans had brought with them was a bottle of wine.  An inmate picked it up and announced: “For years I have not recited the Kiddush. Today, I feel that I must.” He then recited the words of the blessing on wine aloud.

And then he recited the “Shehecheyanu”, the blessing of gratitude to God for having “kept us alive until this time.”

© 2004 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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The Gemara’s term for divorce is geirushin, and its root is a word used repeatedly in Shmos (as in 6:1, 10:11, 11:1 and 12:39) to describe what Par’oh will be compelled to do to the Jewish people – “divorce” them from the land.  And the Torah’s own word for divorce, shilu’ach – as in vishilchoh mibaiso (Devorim 24:3) – is also used, numerous times in Shmos (examples include 4:23, 5:2, 7:27, 8:25, 9:2, 10:4 and 13:17) to refer to the escape from Mitzrayim.

In fact, the word yetziah, one of the four well-known redemption words and the word employed in the standard phrase for the exodus, Yetzias Mitzrayim, also evokes divorce, as in the phrase “viyatz’a… vihay’sa li’ish acher (Devorim, 24).

The Original Chuppah

More striking still is that the apparent “divorce” of Klal Yisroel from Egypt is followed by a metaphorical marriage.  For that is the pointed imagery of the event that followed Yetzias Mitzrayim by 50 days: ma’amad Har Sinai.

Not only does Rashi relate the Torah’s first description of a betrothal – Rivka’s – to ma’amad Har Sinai (Beraishis 24:22), associating the two bracelets given her by Eliezer on Yitzchok’s behalf as symbols of the two luchos, and their ten geras’ weight to the aseres hadibros.  And not only does the novi Hoshea (2:21) describe Mattan Torah in terms of betrothal (v’airastich li…, familiar to men as the p’sukim customarily recited when wrapping tefillin on our fingers – and to women from studying Novi).  But our own chasunos themselves hearken back to Har Sinai:  The chuppah, say the seforim hakedoshim, recalls the mountain, which Chazal describe as being held over our ancestors’ heads; the candles traditionally borne by the parents of the chosson and kallah are to remind us of the lightning at the revelation; the breaking of the glass, of the breaking of the luchos.

In fact, the birchas eirusin itself, the essential blessing that accompanies a marriage, seems as well to refer almost explicitly to the revelation at Har Sinai.  It can, at least on one level, be read to be saying “Blessed are You, Hashem, … Who betrothed His nation Yisroel through chuppah and kiddushin” – “al yidei” meaning precisely what it always does (“through the means of”) and “mekadesh” meaning “betroth” rather than “made holy”).

So what seems to emerge here is the idea that the Jewish people was somehow “divorced” from Egypt, to which, presumably, it had been “married,” a reflection of our descent there to the 49^th level of spiritual squalor.  And that, after our “divorce,” we went on to “marry” the Creator Himself, kivayochol.

On further reflection, the metaphor is, , truly remarkable, because of the sole reference to divorce in the Torah.

You Can Never Go Home Again

It is in Devarim, 24, 2, and mentions divorce only in the context of the prohibition for a [female] divorcee, subsequently remarried, to return to her first husband.

The only other “prohibition of return” in the Torah, of course, is a national one, incumbent on all Jews – the prohibition to return to Mitzrayim (Shmos 14:13, Devorim, 17:16).

Decrees and Deserts

More striking still is the light shed thereby on the Gemara on the first daf of massechta Sotah.  Considering the marriage-symbolism of Mitzrayim and Mattan Torah in that well-known passage reveals a deeper layer than may be at first glance apparent.

The Gemara poses a contradiction. One citation has marriage-matches determined by divine decree, at the conception of each partner; another makes matches dependent on the choices made by each individual – with each person receiving his partner “lifi ma’asov,” according to his merits.

The Gemara’s resolution is that the divine decree is what determined “first marriages” and the merit-based dynamic refers to “second marriages.”

The implications regarding individuals are unclear, to say the least.  But the import of the Gemara’s answer on the level of Klal Yisroel – at least in light of the Mitzrayim/Har Sinai marriage metaphor – afford a startling possibility.

Because Klal Yisroel’s first “marriage”, to Egypt, was indeed divinely decreed.  It was foretold to Avrohom Avinu at the Bris Bein Habesorim (Bereishis 15:13): “For strangers will your children be in a land not theirs, and [its people] will work and afflict them for four hundred years.”

And Klal Yisroel’s “second marriage,” its true and final one, was the result of the choice our ancestors made by refusing to change their clothing, language and names even when still in the grasp of Egyptian society and culture.  When they took that merit to its fruition, by saying “Na’aseh vinishma,” they received their priceless wedding ring under the mountain-chuppah of Sinai.

© 2004 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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I don’t mean the spilling this time of year of Jewish blood, of which there was indeed much over centuries in Christian Europe (another echo of Christian blood-fixation – Jews drinking Christian blood was a common slander in the Middle Ages, so much so that halachic sources actually suggest using white, not red, wine for the “four cups” in places where such libels are common).   No, not human blood but rather animal.

Specifically, the blood of the Pesach-sacrifice, which, in the times of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, was slaughtered the on afternoon before the onset of the holiday.  The meat of the lamb or goat comprised the final course of the Seder (the original “afikoman”), and some of its blood was placed on the Temple altar.

We don’t have a clear comprehension of the Jewish laws of sacrifices; somehow, the ritual dispatching of animals results in our own greater closeness to G-d (“korban,” the Hebrew word for sacrifice, means “that which makes close”).  But the spiritual mechanics, as is the case with so many of the Torah’s commandments, are ultimately beyond mortal minds.

The Pesach sacrifice, though, seems clearly to hearken back to the first Pesach, when the blood of the sheep or goat our ancestors were commanded to slaughter in Egypt, in preparation for their exodus from that land, was placed on “the doorposts and lintel” of each Jewish home.

In rabbinic literature, houses are symbols of the feminine, and so it has been suggested that the blood on the doors of the Jewish homes in ancient Egypt may represent the blood of birth.  From those homes in ancient Egypt, in other words, a new collective entity came forth into the world.  A Jewish nation was born.

As the Shem MiShmuel, a classic Chassidic text, explains, before the exodus the Jews were all related to one another (as descendants of Jacob) but they were not a nation.  Any individual was still able to reject his or her connection to the others and the rejection had an effect.  Indeed, our tradition teaches that many in fact did so, and did not merit to leave Egypt at all, dying instead during the plague of darkness.

Once the people were forged into a nation-entity, though, on their very last night in Egypt, things changed radically.  With blood on their doorways and satchels filled with matzoh, they readily followed Moses into the frightening desert on G-d’s orders, knowing not what awaited them.  As the prophet Jeremiah described it, in G-d’s words: “I remember for you the kindness of your youth… your following Me in the desert, a land where nothing is planted.”  And thus the Jews became a living nation, an entity whose members, and descendants throughout history, are part of an organic whole, no matter what any of them may choose to do.

Which is why, in the words of the Talmud, “A Jew who sins is still a Jew,” in every way.  There is no longer any option of “opting out.”

And so, blood in Judaism is a symbol not of suffering, not of torture, not even of death, but of its very opposites: birth, life, meaning.

The words of another Jewish prophet, Ezekiel – words recited in the Haggadah and traditionally understood as a reference to the Pesach sacrifice – well reflect that fact.

Referring to “the day you were born,” G-d tells His people: “And I passed by you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, ‘in your blood, live.’  And I said to you, ‘in your blood, live’.”

© 2004 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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I always enjoy the conferences for the opportunities they afford me – not only the professional ones but also the personal ones, the chances to meet other Jews, in particular those who are not like me.  The opportunity to get to know them and to speak with them – to share my life and views and to learn about theirs – is, to me, invaluable.

But I was happy, too, to see another Orthodox rabbi in attendance, the only other one present over the three-day gathering.  His name is Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, and he was there in his capacity as the editor of the Intermountain Jewish News, a Denver-area Jewish weekly.  At the awards ceremony that highlighted the conference, he and his paper won more awards than I could count.  A modest and scholarly man, he seemed almost pained when his paper’s name was repeatedly called out and he had to make his way to the podium.

But the highlight of his trip, I know, was something else entirely.

A message from him had been waiting for me when I arrived back in my hotel room late the first night of the conference after a speaking engagement.  He wanted to know where I would be attending services the next morning, and if he could come with me.  I returned the call and told him what time a local rabbi had offered to pick me up

After services the next morning, Rabbi Goldberg told me about a “special project” he was working on: an elucidation of a difficult 18^th century commentary (that of the Vilna Gaon) to a complicated Jewish legal text (the Shulchan Aruch on the laws of mikveh).  Though the subject matter was rather beyond my own proficiency-level, I allowed him to show me a particular passage he was having difficulty with, and, when he puzzled at an abstruse word, I suggested a cognate.

Although I spent most of my time with other conference attendees, the following night found me walking alongside Rabbi Goldberg in Universal Studios’ lot.  The group had just heard a presentation from an official of the Shoah Foundation – the Foundation is temporarily located at Universal Studios – followed by an interesting panel discussion about teaching the Holocaust in public schools.

We were walking to a dining hall on the premises where the awards dinner would take place.  Around us were actors’ personal trailers (the more successful the actor, we were told, the larger the trailer); on the drive onto the site we had seen elaborate facades of period-piece buildings with nothing behind them, props for movies or television shows.

Rabbi Goldberg was excited, but not by the trailers or props.  He had, he said, cracked the textual problem, and even claimed (probably overly generously) that my suggestion about the obscure word had played a part in his comprehension of the commentary.  I listened as he explained the passage, and it did indeed seem to make new sense.  As we spoke about the passage, there was no doubt in my mind that its resolution was the high point of my friend’s day, and of mine.

An uninitiated eavesdropper, no doubt, would have considered our conversation – about bends in pipes carrying rainwater to a basin for immersion to remove an invisible spiritual contamination – bizarre, to say the least.  But to believing Jews, Torah is nothing less than truth, the “mind,” so to speak, of G-d Himself.   The deep truths we are able to perceive in the workings of the physical universe have turned out, in our quantum physics-aware world, to live on an entirely different dimension from what was assumed for millennia.  According to traditional Jewish belief, the study of our tradition’s holy texts similarly afford us a glimpse of a world that is conceptual light-years beyond the mundane.

And then an immense irony materialized in my mind.  Here we were, Rabbi Goldberg and I, two Jews walking between trailers in a Hollywood studio lot, arguably the epicenter of all that is fake and phony in the world, a place where deception is the local currency and tinsel the stand-in for precious metals – having a discussion about Truth itself.

I wondered if anyone had ever studied Torah in that spot.  The idea that perhaps we had been the first filled me with a curious mix of pride and trepidation.

In Chassidic thought, physical things, and places, can be “elevated” by what is done with, or in, them.  When, later that night, a cab spirited me away to the airport for my flight back to New York to be with my family for Shabbat, I smiled and shivered at the thought that we might have played a small but sublime role in a unique sort of spiritual rehabilitation.

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To be sure, the images evoked when we think of servitude tend to be of economically or racially oppressed classes, of men and women being treated as if they were something less than fully human.

There are other types of servitude as well that have little or nothing to do with class.  For example, whether we choose to confront it or not, we are all servants – indeed slaves – to a considerable host of masters.  Most of us are indentured to one or another degree to any of a number of physical and psychological desires.  Some are relatively innocuous, like the craving for a particular food – or for food in general – or the yearning to be entertained or pampered or allowed to sleep late.  Other desires are more sinister, like the compulsion to ingest some addictive chemical, or the lust to lord oneself over other people, or the coveting of property or persons.

In contemporary times, many of us are enslaved virtually without even knowing it – chained to our work, taking orders from advertisers, moving to the dictates of the arbiters of style, addicted to the media or to the Internet.  Oddly, every modern opportunity seems to morph into a new master; new options pull us even further from true freedom.

It seems almost as if it is a hard-wired part of human nature that we serve.  Indeed, Judaism maintains, it is, and for good reason: Because we are meant to be servants.

We just have to choose the right master.

Most people are aware that Passover is the Jewish holiday of freedom, commemorating how the distant ancestors of today’s Jews, embraced by God and led by Moses, threw off the yoke of Pharaoh’s enslavement.  But there is something very essential to the Passover account that many don’t realize: Though Egypt was rejected, servitude was not.

“Let My people go!” G-d ordered Pharaoh.  But the command doesn’t end there.  It continues: “… so that they may serve Me.”

The Jewish concept of freedom, or cherut, does not mean being unfettered, but rather fettered to what is meaningful; it does not mean independence but rather subservience – not to the mundane but to the divine.

Which is why Passover, in a sense, doesn’t end after its seven (or, outside of the Holy Land, eight) days.  On the second day of the holiday, following the Biblical command, observant Jews begin counting, marking each of the following forty-nine days by pronouncing a blessing and assigning the day a number.  The fiftieth day, the day after the counting, or Sefirat Ha’Omer, is completed, is the holiday of Shevuot (“Weeks”); it is in a very real sense the culmination of Passover.

For according to Jewish tradition, Shevuot is the anniversary of the revelation at Sinai, of the day the Torah was given to the Jewish people.  And therein lies the deep secret of Jewish freedom.

The life of a libertine is not freedom but quite its opposite, enslavement to transient pleasures, to substances and possessions, to the dictates of society.  Meaningful freedom, paradoxically, is being indentured – but to the ultimate master, the Master of all.  And so as we count the days – quite literally – from the holiday of freedom to the holiday of Torah, we express (and, hopefully impress on ourselves) just how inextricably the theme of Passover is linked to that of Shevuot, how the ultimate expression of true freedom is having the courage and mettle to throw off the yoke of temporal masters and commit ourselves to what is meaningful in an ultimate sense: the will and law of G-d.

The rabbis of the Talmud put it pithily, punning on the Hebrew word for “etched,” used about the words carved on the Tablets of the Law.  The word is “charut,” which the Rabbis compare to cherut, freedom.

“The only free person,” they inform us, “is the one immersed in Torah.”

© 2001 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

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“They established [at Purim] what they had already received [at Har Sinai].”

Somehow, through the Jews’ actions in Persia at the time of Mordechai and Esther, Klal Yisroel’s acceptance of the Torah that occurred hundreds of years earlier became fully realized.

Purim’s Passive Voice

 “Receiving” – or submission – is certainly an important Purim motif.  Esther, for her part, does not actively seek, but rather “passively” accepts, the position foisted on her by Achashveirosh, as she does his attentions (see Sanhedrin 74b).  The Purim miracle itself, for that matter, is anything but a forceful one, nothing like the splitting of the Yam Suf or the earth’s opening up to swallow Korach’s men; it, too, is pointedly subtle, an almost quiescent demonstration of Hashem’s power, which is only delicately evident in the turns of events.

Even the Mesechta dedicated to Purim begins in the passive voice: “The Megilla is read;” it reads, rather than the more usual, expected, active-voice introduction, “We read…”

But, aside from the vague notion of Purim – “passivity,” symbolizing “acceptance” of the Torah or “submission” to Hashem, what – to paraphrase Rashi’s famous comment regarding Shmitta – has Purim to do with Har Sinai?

Coercion or Conviction?

 The answer to the question likely lies on a path that unfolds from an even more fundamental query: What exactly was missing in the first place when our ancestors received the Torah?  How, in other words, was that seminal event – at which the Jewish nation was charged with the mission that justifies Creation itself, and said “Na’aseh v’nishma” in unison – somehow incomplete?

 As it happens, the Gemora itself asks and answers that very question, pointing to the fact that “Hashem held the mountain over the Jews’ heads like a barrel,” forcing them, in effect, to accept the Torah.  The Maharal explains that the “forcing” can be understood as referring to the powerful, overwhelming nature of the experience… the fearful thunder, lighting, the terrifying interaction of human and divine.

The sheer awe and trauma of Mattan Torah, the Gemora teaches us, is itself a “flaw” of sorts in the experience, for it gives the rest of the world a “remonstration” against the Jews, the claim that it was the duress born of the forceful, overpowering nature of the event that caused our ancestors to accept Hashem and His Torah, not true conviction and will.

Choosing to See

 Enter Purim.  That the Jews chose – sans thunder and lighting, sans Hashem’s undeniable, overpowering words – to respond to Haman’s threat with prayer, fasting and teshuva, and then to see Hashem’s hand in the individually unremarkable events that led to their salvation from Haman’s plan…that was true proof of their utter acceptance of Hashem and His will, the conclusive refutation of the world’s claim that our acceptance of His Torah was somehow lacking.

So it was by their having accepted Hashem where one could so easily have “missed” Him, their choosing to see His hand and to submit themselves to Him, that the Jews of Shushan – and by extension all Jews – confirmed that the Jewish acceptance of the Torah was – and is – wholehearted, sincere and pure.

 “They established [at Purim] what they had already received [at Har Sinai]

Intoxication and Revelation

Interesting enough, one of the ways that Chazal say a person’s true nature is revealed is “b’koso” – “in his cup” – in his behavior when his inhibitions are diluted by strong drink.

And on Purim, in such striking contrast to the rest of the Jewish year, there is a mitzvah to drink wine to excess.  Needless to say, if such drinking is likely to cause improper behavior, it is forbidden, and so the mitzvah d’Rabbanan (part of that of seudas Purim) could only have been enacted on the assumption that only the essential good of the Jew will be revealed by his drunkenness.

And, indeed, among true b’nei Torah who endeavor to fulfill Purim’s requirement “libesumi” in its most straightforward sense, what emerges is not the anger and licentiousness that the larger world, for good reason, has come to associate with inebriation, but rather a holy, if uninhibited, “teshuva-mode” of mind; mechillos (forgiveness for transgression, real and imagined) are sought, deep feelings expressed.

Thus the revelation of our true nature that the Purim-mitzva provides is most pointedly and perfectly reminiscent of the revelation of Jews’ wholehearted acceptance of Hashem that took place at the time of the Purim miracle!  With our masks (another Purim motif) removed, we show our true selves, and, hopefully, they are selves that are in consonance with true, uncompromised Kabbolos HaTorah.

Peering into the Barrel

What is poignantly noteworthy is that even the language the Gemora uses to describe how we were “forced” to accept the Torah at Har Sinai might subtly allude to that astonishing mitzvah of Purim, and to its deeper significance.

For “holding the mountain over their heads” would have surely been quite sufficient to convey the idea of coercion, would it not?  Why add the worlds “like a barrel”?

In Pirkei Avos, though, we are taught not “to look at the container, but at what it holds”.

 And a gigis (“barrel”), throughout the Gemora, is something that holds an intoxicating beverage.

Because of Purim, our Creator looks, in other words, not at the “coercion” of the barrel held over our ancestors’ heads, but at the deeper truth revealed by what such barrels contain – at the truth about our essence revealed by Purim’s wine.

© 1996 The Jewish Observer

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