The rabbis in Taanit link the name yoreh to the teaching of Torah, which comes from the same root word. They assert that a day of rain is as great as the day that Torah is given (7a). Torah was given from a heavenly God to human beings on earth, just as rain falls from the heavens to nourish the soil. The rabbis invoke the image of a groom meeting a bride to describe how rain falls to meet the earth (Taanit 6b), and they analogize the giving of the Torah to a wedding ceremony between God and Israel (Taanit 26b). When I learned Taanit, the yoreh coincided with the Shabbat on which we read the Torah portion about Noah, and the floodgates of the heavens suddenly and dramatically opened while we were in synagogue chanting the story of the ark and the flood. I was still testing the waters with Omri, uncertain if our relationship was strong enough to weather the storms. Still, when the heavens opened, I was grateful that I had someone to go inside with, two by two.
* * *
It was nearly two years later that Omri and I finally broke up, which is a long time in daf yomi terms. We were together for the rest of Seder Moed (the Order of Festivals) and the entirety of Seder Nashim (the Order of Women). By the start of Seder Nezikin, which deals with the laws of damages, I knew it was time to end things. One evening we were shopping in the shuk, the open-air market, for fruit and vegetables. It was late, and we were tired and irritable, and it probably wasn’t a good time to make a date of our shopping excursion. I went over to a vendor selling apples and started filling a plastic bag. In the Song of Songs, apples symbolize the awakening of young love: “Under the apple tree I roused you” (8:5). But that was not how Omri saw it. “What are you doing,” he rebuked me. “You have to check each one carefully to make sure it’s not bruised.” He poured back my bag of apples into the pile, much to the vendor’s dismay, and began examining each apple painstakingly before adding it to the bag. At some point, I was convinced that I had made a thorough enough examination of Omri, and although he was not perfect—we all have our bruises and scars—I felt that we could make a life together. Omri, even two years later, was still deliberating whether to add me to his bag. And so, not without heavy hearts, we parted ways. The next time the rain fell, I was on my own. But like Nahum Ish Gamzu, I told myself that this, too, was for the best.
MEGILLAH
Who Knows?
Tractate Megillah is about the Purim holiday and the Scroll of Esther, which may have had special significance to the sages because it describes a postrevelatory world in which there is nonetheless faith in God’s manifest presence. In the Scroll of Esther, known commonly as the megillah, the deliverance of the Jews from the evil villain Haman seems to come about entirely by human hands; there is famously no mention of God in the scroll. But the rabbis of the Talmud connect the name of Esther—the story’s celebrated heroine—to the Hebrew word for “hiddenness,” and they identify the world of the megillah as one of hester panim, a world where God pulls all the strings though no one can see His face.
This sense of God’s hiddenness is one that I have long struggled with, particularly during my short-lived marriage. Each morning Paul woke up and prayed to God with supreme powers of concentration, moving his lips fervently in the absolute conviction that he was engaging an interlocutor whose existence was beyond doubt. His God did not seem to be the God of the megillah—the God of hester panim—but rather the God who revealed himself in visions to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; who spoke to Moses through a burning bush; and who stopped the sun in the sky for Joshua, performing miracles in broad daylight.
I would stand beside Paul with my prayer book open and despair. Most days, when I prayed, nothing happened for me. I uttered the words mechanically, out of a sense of obligation, but I rarely felt that my prayers drew me closer to God. Unlike Paul, I knew God—and I continue to know God—primarily in shadows cast by other people. I would see someone reach out to a stranger, or watch a friend marshal reserves of hidden strength, and I would imagine that I was seeing the light of God reflected off human presences. Paul saw God the way some people can look straight up at the sun, and he felt that anyone who could not see the radiance was surely blind. I sought out God the way a traveler through the forest might seek out the moon through the trees; sometimes it was hidden, other days it was just a faint crescent, still other days it was a full orb with mountains and valleys of variegated hues. But it was still just a play of shadows, as all moonlight is.
These different ways of knowing God are discussed by the major twentieth-century American scholar Rav Yizhak Hutner in his writing about Purim and Pesach in the Pahad Yitzhak (Purim, 34). Rav Hutner explains that on Pesach—Passover—we come to know God through the overt and explicit miracles that He performs with His outstretched arm in Egypt, as again and again we are reminded that “this is the finger of God.” Rav Hutner invokes the metaphor of a person stumbling around in the darkness, trying to recognize a face before him. Pesach, says Rav Hutner, is like the person who shines a flashlight in order to identify the shape before him. He holds up the light, and immediately he is able to apprehend the image.
But Purim, Rav Hutner explains, is like the person who has no flashlight and must therefore use other, less obvious, clues. This night traveler needs to rely on a sort of sixth sense to intuit the identity of the presence before him. In the same way, we sense God’s presence in the Purim story only indirectly. The miracle of Purim is not one of divine intervention—there are no catastrophic plagues or dramatic sea-splittings. Paradoxically, God can be found in the Purim story only in the halo created by the concealment of His glory, like the glow of a total eclipse. It is in the absence of God that we intuit His presence. This requires not just faith but also imagination, a notion that calls to mind a passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
To know God in Purim mode is to give shape to the shadows. But to know God in Pesach mode is to live in a world of absolute black and white, where everything has its reason and everything is clearly part of a larger providential plan. One night Paul and I were sitting at the dinner table when we heard the siren wail of an ambulance passing by, and he began moving his lips in silent, devout prayer. “What are you saying?” I inquired. “I am asking God to make sure that the person in that ambulance will be OK,” he told me, as if he had a direct line to the divine.
Sometimes when I had trouble praying, I read fiction instead. When I was struck by a brilliant turn of phrase or moved by a beautiful passage, I experienced sensations that I hoped prayer would arouse, but which it rarely did. The notion of finding spiritual inspiration in a literary text was not foreign to the rabbis of the Talmud, who based the order of the blessings in the Amidah—the “standing prayer,” the central prayer in Jewish liturgy—on a series of biblical verses. The rabbis in tractate Megillah (17b) ask why certain prayers are included in the Amidah—Why mention the patriarchs? Why mention God’s strength?—and in each case, the answer is based on the Bible. If literary narrative is the source for prayer, I reasoned, then perhaps sometimes it’s all right to read instead of praying.
But this was not a notion that Paul could accept. One evening he asked me if I was ready to recite the evening prayer, and I said, “I’d so much rather finish this chapter of Don Quixote. I’m skipping Maariv.” He became visibly agitated. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I just can’t relate to a person who thinks it is more important to read Don Quixote than to pray to God,” he said. If only I’d had the courage to tell him what I know now—that God, for me, was more likely to be found in the pages of Don Quixote, where the intricate narrative craft reminds
me that the world is about so much more than what we sense at any given moment. My God is the God of hester panim, but He is no less real. Perhaps it is fitting that it was on Purim that I intuitively sensed that our marriage was ending, and it was the day before Pesach that Paul told me in no uncertain terms—as I stood in the kitchen cleaning out the refrigerator for the holiday, holding up a half-rotten apple—that he no longer wanted to be married to me. For him, I imagine that was the end of it. Whereas I, for a while, continued to sense his presence in the shadows.
* * *
Getting over Paul was a process of trying to willfully forget even as I was flooded by memory. This conflict between memory and forgetting is a key theme of the Shabbat before Purim, which is known as Shabbat Zachor—the Shabbat of remembering. Tractate Megillah (29a) explains that each Shabbat in the month of Adar is characterized by special additional readings from the Torah. On Shabbat Zachor, the second of these four weeks, we read Moses’s account of a brazen attack on Israel just after the exodus from Egypt, committed by the infamous nation Amalek, from whom Haman is descended: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary.… Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies … you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” (Deuteronomy 25:17–19).
This commandment seems to contain two contradictory injunctions. On the one hand, the Torah commands us to “remember” and “do not forget.” On the other hand, the Torah charges us to “blot out the memory of Amalek,” which suggests that we should forget Amalek entirely, leaving not even a mental trace. Were we to fulfill the second injunction successfully, the first would make no sense: how can we remember what has already been blotted out? I found my answer not in the Talmud, but in a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who describes how she is afraid to go to so many places lest she find herself overcome by memories of her lover. In an effort to forget him, she seeks out a place where he is blotted out from under heaven. But it is his very absence that brings back a torrent of memories:
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.1
On Purim, the act of remembering is critical. The Talmud teaches that if Purim falls on Shabbat, then the Zachor portion must be read the week before, “so as not to precede doing with remembering” (30a). That is, we are not supposed to “do” the Purim celebration and blot out Haman’s name until we first remember Amalek. On Purim day, when we sound noisemakers upon hearing the name of Haman read in the megillah, we should not be so loud that we drown out the name of the villain completely. As a result of these rabbinic injunctions, Amalek and Haman continue to lurk in the shadows of Jewish experience, never fully erased from collective memory. I think back to those first painful months after Paul and I parted ways, when it seemed as if I would never be happy again. But then, with felicitous inevitability, I was proven wrong—happiness caught up with me after all.
* * *
“When the month of Adar enters, we increase in happiness,” the Talmud teaches in a nod to tractate Megillah at the end of Taanit (29a). Since Adar contains the holiday that celebrates the miraculous deliverance of the Jewish people, we are supposed to be happy from the moment the month begins. When I first moved to Israel I was surprised to discover how seriously this injunction is taken. In the month before Purim, storefronts throughout the city are converted into costume bazaars (kings, queens, pirates, cowboys, fairies, and butterflies) and the vendors in the shuk who sold dried fruit for Tu Bishvat now stock mini chocolate bars and gummy candy for inclusion in mishloach manot, the packages of food distributed to neighbors and friends on the holiday. Even the phrase “When the month of Adar enters, we increase in happiness” becomes a jingle that is played in shops all over the city, as ubiquitous as “Jingle Bells” during American Decembers. Somehow, when the month containing the holiday of Purim arrives, we are supposed to become automatically happy, as if on demand. But is that really possible?
In the academic and literary world, this question has spurred a field of research known as positive psychology. A wave of books published in recent years have raised such issues as whether we can know what makes us happy (Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert), the implications of positive psychology in the political sphere (The Politics of Happiness by Derek Bok), and whether women’s happiness differs from that of men (Bluebird by Ariel Gore). These books posit that happiness is something that can be attained, albeit with a bit of hard work, if we better understand our own mental processes. In response, a countergenre has emerged from those who question whether the pursuit of happiness is really such a good thing after all (Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich and Against Happiness by Eric Wilson).
Several of these books argue that a key to happiness is to cultivate gratitude. The Israeli happiness guru Tal Ben-Shahar writes of the importance of recording five occasions for gratitude each night before falling asleep. I have not made this a daily ritual, but I try to make it at least an annual one. Purim each year reminds me of Purims past, and, when I unfurl the scroll of my life, there is always some reason to rejoice. When I learned tractate Megillah in daf yomi I felt grateful, at least on some level, that I was no longer with a man who had not wanted to be married to me. I felt grateful that I had started dating again. And I felt grateful, too, that I remained in an evolving relationship with God, even if it seemed like we were forever engaged in a game of hide-and-seek, with God lurking in the shadows. I’m not sure if I was happy, but the possibility of happiness began to seem less elusive.
* * *
Each year, the happiness at the end of the Purim story is supposed to come as a surprise. The rabbis teach in tractate Megillah (17a) that one of the laws governing the reading of the Scroll of Esther is that the megillah may not be read backward. The story unfolds in linear progression, moving from “sorrow to joy and from mourning to festivity,” as we learn only in the penultimate chapter (Esther 9:22). Of course, since we read the megillah every Purim, we already know how it will end—with the triumphant hanging of Haman, whose plot to exterminate the Jews was foiled by the beautiful Queen Esther. Even so, we are commanded each year to read the megillah in order, without jumping backward to read into what already happened, and without jumping forward to imagine what is yet to come. In my own life, though, I am forever doing both.
When I first learned tractate Megillah I would never have guessed that six years later, on the eve of Purim, I’d be nine months pregnant with twins. It was a leap year on the Jewish calendar, which meant there was an extra month of Adar, such that my due date coincided with Purim. The Hebrew term for leap year is shana me’uberet, literally a pregnant year. I lay there propped up in bed with my volume of Talmud, as pregnant as the year. In my favorite verse in the megillah, Mordechai instructs his niece Esther to go before the Persian king Ahasuerus and entreat him to save the Jews of his kingdom. Esther has already been crowned queen of Persia, but Ahasuerus is unaware that she is a Jew. Mordechai tells her that she must risk her life by appearing before the king even though she has not been summoned, “because who knows if it was for this moment that you attained a royal position?” (Esther 4:14). Perhaps Esther is destined to save her people.
“Who knows?” Mordechai tells Esther, throwing into question the whole enterprise of looking backward and forward in time. Mordechai implies that none of us can know whether any particular moment of our lives is the reason that we were created. Was my first marriage part of a larger providential plan to bring me to Israel, where I might meet the man with whom I’d share my life? Or was the purpose of remarrying so that I might someday have children who would have unique destinies of their own? Who knows? The point of Mordechai’s question is not that every moment has larger—perhaps even cosmic—significance, but that we can never know for sure which moment does.
The megillah relates that Esther enj
oined the people to come together in fervent prayer that all should proceed smoothly when she risks her life to approach King Ahasuerus. In the first chapter of tractate Megillah the sages interpret the unusual verb that describes Esther’s reaction to hearing of the king’s decree to destroy and massacre all the Jews: “What is va-tithalhal? Rav says: She became a menstruant. Rabbi Yirmiya says: She lost control of her bowels” (15a). The classical rabbinic commentator Rashi explains that the cavities of her body dissolved. All these interpreters are playing with the etymological similarity between va-tithalhal and halal, the Hebrew word for “cavity” or “hole” and the hallmark of the feminine; the Hebrew word nekeva, female, literally means “hole.”
The highly sexualized Esther of the Talmud does indeed seem to fit this epithet: she sleeps with both Mordechai and Ahasuerus, getting up from the lap of one and sitting down in the lap of the other (Megillah 13b). But for all that she is sexualized, the Talmud’s Esther is also exonerated: the sages relate that Esther derived no pleasure from sleeping with Ahasuerus, because she was like “the ground of the earth” (Sanhedrin 74b)—she lay under him unmoving as he went about his business. However, when she heard that Ahasuerus planned to destroy her people, she realized she could not be passive any longer, and the cavities of her body dissolved. I wonder if Esther felt like she was in labor, bearing inside her womb the destiny of the Jewish people.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 7