The holiday of Purim was just a while
back, and our celebrations at Yeshivat
Maaleh Gilboa were so naturally and unselfconsciously joyous and fun that I
think that I’m still feeling its reverberations approaching Pesach. But besides all of the shenanigans (and a bit
of schnapps too), I was surprised at
how much Purim has proved relevant to my thoughts about Judaism and limud Torah that I have outlined in my
prior blogs, and I hope the statute of limitations on a Purim Torah hasn’t passed—why should such a great holiday be
limited to its one day of observance? Again,
I found inspiration in the writings of Rav Shagar, this time from his book
about Purim called Chance and Providence. The
Shabbat before Purim is what is known as Shabbat
Zachor, the Shabbat where we read about the Amalekite nation who was the
first to attack Israel on their way out of Egypt (as mentioned in my earlier blog). But with the commandment to remember as it
pertains to Amalek, we are also called on to erase their memory, two seemingly
contradictory tasks. Rav Shagar resolves
the seeming antinomy as follows: “We do not forget Amalek. The goal is not to ignore what was, to
pretend that evil never existed, but rather to place it, to keep it, in a state
of absence.”
The erasure of the memory of Amalek
is really the creation of an absence that is meant to give meaning to what it
present. The commandment to remember
Amalek evokes the other commandment in the Torah I wrote about earlier in this
three part blog involving remembrance: remembering the Exodus. As we’ve discussed, memory is something that
embodies experience, a method by which to preserve past experiences and their
lessons in a perpetual state of relevance, even if those memories did not
necessarily happen to us—or even if they may not have happened at all. Here we see the flipside of this notion—the
remembering of something that we desire strongly to forget, something that
signifies the very opposite of what we aspire to be, precisely in order to
extract from its deletion a deeper understanding of what it negates: we
remember the evil and godlessness of Amalek—or more precisely we delete their
memory, while still preserving it, as nonsensical as that sounds—in order to
understand further the beneficence of God and the moral obligations the Jewish
people have. Just as the story of the
Exodus, through its constant reminding of the experience of slavery is meant to
ground our actions in an empathy with those less fortunate, so too is the
remembrance of Amalek, the forgetting of Amalek, meant to teach us an equally
powerful lesson about evil and a goodness that can overcome it.
In a chabura (learning in a small group) on Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
that I have regularly with one of the “upper-classman” here, Arial Fisher, I
found another idea concerning an absence that impacts what is present
manifested in a different, but not irrelevant form. Rebbe Nachman discusses how the question “Ayeh m’kom kvodo,” “God, where is Your
glory?” something that is often shouted out in moments of extreme despair, when
one is overcome by the feeling of God’s absence, is one of the strongest
declarations of faith that exists. In
those moments of doubt, by the very nature of your cursing God’s absence, you
prove to yourself that you’ve been seeking God, that you pine for Him, that His
hiddenness deeply pains you. The fact
that in your most troubled times you cry out to God proves that you deeply care
about Him.
If I can extract another lesson
from Purim and Chance and Providence that’s
relevant here, it’s about alcohol. There
is an opinion in the Talmud that professes that on the holiday of Purim, you
need to get drunk to the point where you can no longer distinguish between
“cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.”
The notion of a point of reference where dichotomies decompose (even
though it is here represented by heavy drinking), is one that strikes me, here
and elsewhere, as an extraordinarily important idea. Here we see, as in the Megillah itself, which does not mention God at all, whose primary
character’s name is a derivation of the root meaning “to hide,” the
meaninglessness of the distinction between a God who is hidden and a God who
reveals Himself. Just as earlier we
learned an immense lesson from the merger in Parshat Mishpatim of the God of our past and the God of our future,
the fluid fusion of memories with what is demanded of us in the current
reality, it is specifically God’s hiddenness that enables Him to be eternally
present, so long as we are willing to blur the distinction between those two
things. By the very nature of the fact
that He is not bound to a specific, definitive form, He is able to reveal
Himself in virtually every scenario in which one chooses to look for Him.
And so, I return to my initial
anxieties expressed in the first installment of this blog—how do I find answers
to my larger questions within Judaism and relate on a personal level to my
learning? I’ve already demonstrated that
answers aren’t necessarily a reflection of priorities, but doubts, questions,
and challenges all indicate what you value, what is important enough to wrestle
and struggle with. As I explained in
part two of the blog, Rav Bigman pointed out to me that your relationship to Halakha,
and I think to everything in life, changes with time. The closest thing to answering a question
will be to simply live and learn enough that you come to realize that your
opinions—both the questions and the answers—will continue to evolve. I recently came across a quote from
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (while
coincidentally browsing a website that was devoted exclusively to Nietzsche
quotes): “A man has no ears for that to
which experience has given him no access.”
To return to the
earlier notion of this sort of drunken blurring of distinctions, I think that
when the questions, answers, and the path of experience that determines and is
determined by them cease to be separate entities, the passageway to a true, multilateral
learning opens wide.
I’ve been taught a lot about
subtlety and nuance thus far in Yeshiva, both in the intellectual and spiritual
realms, which don’t necessarily have to be that separate. The key to understanding and fulfillment on
both those fronts seems to me to be pluralism, not exclusively in the
post-modern sense that all opinions have some form of validity, but also in the
sense that all opinions are deeply related and enmeshed in one never-ending,
beautifully indistinct intellectual conversation. This is a limitless endeavor: to give and
take knowledge, to attribute sources as well as appropriate lessons, to engage
texts and thinkers in continuum, stacking insight upon insight, rearranging and
evolving not only one’s amassed knowledge, but one’s entire way of
thinking. This is the essence of the
Jewish, Halakhic life, where action, intellect, and meaning all converge to create
a systematic way of living in which you engage all knowledge, and find your own
personal path to fulfillment.
How can you treat a personal quest
for meaning systematically? While I’ll
admit I’m on shakier ground here, something that’s helped me understand this
question has been the very study of Halakha itself, which I’ve come to
understand is constantly trying to find the balance between the divine, the
individual, and the collective. This is
no easy task, but the nature of the problem is exactly what the Halakhic
dialogue is, why people are still learning, struggling with, reassessing,
revering, and reprocessing thousands of years of tradition in a way that
stresses its meaning and relevance in a modern milieu, rather than its
superficial antiquity and archaism. Of
course, having been embedded within this framework for most of my life, I have
a much easier claim to its meaning than an outsider looking in, but that is
really the essence of the thoughts in these last few essays: learning is the
same process as experiencing, and vice versa.
If I continue to live and learn my Judaism, engaging it head on, I think
I can continue to sustain personal meaning.
The moment I cease to put in the effort, the moment I cease both to study
and to do as a single endeavor, in both a religious context and a secular one,
I cripple my ability to sustain a meaningful existence. Questions and their answers are only as good
as the mindset and experiential context surrounding them, just as experience
can only resonate with an individual if it’s filtered through his or her unique
perception of the world. This is all an
experiment in empathy, patience, and openness—the quest to forge on in life, to
grow intellectually, to actively engage your world, to amass lessons from
experience and text while never closing your ears to anyone or anything, while
never being complacent in your comfort zone, while never stopping to live
questions. And maybe, although it’s not a necessity to meaning, you will, as
Rilke put it, “gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the
answer[s].”
Thanks,
Kal
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