Purim: The Festival Born in Exile

This is the second lecture on the festival of Purim, the festival of exile — the only one whose events took place outside the borders of Israel, and which prepared the building of the Second Temple. The Sfat Emet says that the building of the Third Temple will in fact be prepared in the very same way — that is, the restoration of the Jewish people on its land, whose first buds we are indeed beginning to see, baruch Hashem. But everything unfolds in an absence of divine revelation. G-d withdraws; He is not present; there is no great revealed miracle. This, in sum, is one of the first meanings of the name Esther, from the verb sater, to hide. Everything indeed takes place in the most natural way, and there is a hidden hand that orchestrates all the events.

Now, in exile the divine Presence is likewise dispersed and hidden within the communities of Israel. Consequently it cannot reveal itself in the dazzling way it does in Eretz Israel, which is its preferred makom, its place. And the story of Esther, which culminates in the festival of Purim, is ultimately the story of many Jewish communities — of the Jewish people as a whole — in exile, and it prepares the future redemption. Just as our history began with a first son, Yitzchak — the smile, the laughter the Jewish people shows throughout the unfolding of its history — so too the messianic vision: “When Hashem returns the captives of Zion… then our mouths will be filled with laughter” — when the Eternal begins His return to Zion.

There are thus several levels of interpretation, and we will look at them concisely; if some passages remain somewhat in the shadows, we will have to explain them. The story takes place under Persian rule, in the fourth century before the common era. The last festival instituted by our Sages is Chanukah, in the second century before the common era; but Chanukah took place in the time of the Second Temple, whereas Purim unfolds within the framework of the first exile. And we know this very well — we all live it in one way or another: exile has meant a loss of identity for the Jewish people throughout its history.

It fosters emancipation, assimilation. There is a price to pay, and whether we like it or not, antisemitism forms a protective wall around Jewish identity, particularly in exile. As long as the Jewish people has not recovered the healthy foundations of its existence, it will always be surrounded by this wall of antisemitism, which at once oppresses it and, of course, protects it, because it contributes to the awakening of its identity and to halting this loss of substance through the various cultures — cultures that are attractive in some of their aspects, which the Jewish people absorbs. We will see how this is expressed in the story of Esther. Another parenthesis worth noting concerns the role of the feminine, which began at the very origin of Avraham’s journey, when G-d said to Avraham: “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice.” The liberation from Egypt was likewise set in motion by resistance — the midwives, to give one example; Miriam was a resister in her own way. And here too the resistance, if you will, is set in motion by the feminine. This scroll is not called Megillat Mordechai, the Scroll of Mordechai. Mordechai is a hero of this story, but the scroll bears only the seal of Esther, because, as I have already emphasized, the completion of every fulfilled cycle is sealed by Malchut — royalty — which is the attribute of the feminine.

That is, even in the tree of the sefirot, as one passes through the various attributes, one reaches the ninth — the limit of the manifestation that can occur at the level of Kudsha Brich Hu, the Holy One, blessed be He, at the level of Providence. But to close the loop of this chain of sefirot, the feminine element is needed; it is what establishes, as it were, the relay between the different stages of the chain. So we will review — always in summary — the first chapter of Esther, which makes no mention of a Jewish community living in Persia, and which speaks of an empire stretching over a hundred and twenty-seven countries or provinces. This is in the time of Achashverosh: after Nevuchadnetzar destroyed the First Temple, his son Belshatzar took over; afterwards came Koresh (Cyrus), who allowed the Jewish people to return to its land and build a new sanctuary. But we know very well that the Jews had put down deep roots in Babylon and did not undertake this return with Ezra and Nechemiah.

Most preferred to remain in the diaspora because life was good there. And it is in this slice of history that Achashverosh appears. Was his a truly princely title — was he an heir to the kingdom — or rather someone who had seized power? Everything suggests that Achashverosh himself was not of Nevuchadnetzar’s dynasty, but had seized power. Indeed, in the first verse Achashverosh is not given the title HaMelech, “the king,” whereas throughout the rest of the Megillah of Esther he is. (It is called Megillah because we unroll it as we read, as though reading an open letter to all the communities of Israel, warning them of the seeds of antisemitism that can indeed threaten their existence.) And that is why it says vayehi bimei, “and it came to pass in the days of”: our Sages tell us that whenever we find “and it came to pass,” it is an era that will repeat itself through history; it has not completed its trajectory. […] For the future — yehi, “it will be” — is seen here from the perspective of the past, a past that repeats itself; and when the past repeats itself, it is a catastrophe. So this event of Achashverosh, this upheaval taking place, is of the same kind as the ruler of Egypt, the new king over Egypt who did not know Yosef. Achashverosh is not someone who truly cherishes the Jewish people or holds it in any respect; on the contrary, he would like the Jewish people not to set itself apart by its way of life, and to merge into this attempt to make all cultures uniform under the banner of the universal.

So how does he go about it? Through a policy of openness, a policy of rapprochement — keshevet hamelech Achashverosh, “when King Achashverosh sat” on his throne. He grants concessions, citizens’ rights, to all the minorities of these conquered provinces, and he organizes festivities. Once the provinces were united — at the time an agglomeration of countries making up the vast empire — he institutes a hundred and eighty days of festivities, because after three years he had consolidated his power. He wants to show what economic measures had been taken in everyone’s favor, and what democratic laws had been granted to all the nations. Naturally, the Jewish people — the Jewish communities — were part of this agglomeration of provinces, and they took part in these national celebrations, because they now considered themselves full citizens of the empire. And when our Sages ask what caused a Haman to arise, seeking to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the empire — it was simply because assimilation had not kept within its limits; on the contrary, a movement of secularism was spreading throughout the country. And how did our chachamim (Sages) express this? All the spoils of the Temple vessels — carafes, plates, forks and so on — were used to serve all the guests at the feast, to show them that there was no holiness in these Temple objects, and that they ought to give up, to some degree, any return to those practices in the future. Yet within this movement of secularism, paradoxically, lies the status of woman: woman, whose personality is not recognized in the Persian Empire; woman who is stripped of her title of queen. For he is first HaMelech and only then Achashverosh, whereas it says Vashti HaMalkah, “Vashti the queen”: Vashti is recognized as queen only incidentally, and only so long as she conforms to the will and authority of her king.

As soon as Vashti showed the slightest sign of resistance, she was dethroned. Was she killed or not? The text does not specify; Rashi says that she was indeed beheaded. But this matters little, because the mere fact that she is recognized only through her femininity, through her beauty […], is an affront to the sublime personality of the feminine — and this is what the text holds up as an example. And this Vashti is deposed — she who had nonetheless legitimized Achashverosh’s power, since she was a niece of Nevuchadnetzar. Achashverosh made use of her to ensure the continuity of the dynasty, yet he did not grant her that recognition. And so he demands that she appear, unclothed, before all the assembled ministers, to show that what matters in her is first and foremost her beauty, and the rest is, let us say, secondary. Such is the case, our Sages would say, of all these assembled cultures, about which Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi says: beware, do not yield to this temptation of the beauty that other cultures display, without considering what lies within — depravity, murder, perversion. And Vashti, it must be said to her credit, showed a certain resistance, even displaying contempt for the man who had seized power and who, before, had been nothing more than the keeper of her father’s stables. So the search begins for a new queen. Which would be the favored culture that could be applied to all the united provinces? That is what Achashverosh wants. So there is a contest open to all the nations: let the different cultures present all their assets, and one will see which is best. Today this takes the form of “Miss” such-and-such a country. Paradoxically, it is always the feminine, never the masculine. Why? Because what makes the strength of a culture is the place the feminine occupies within it. The higher the standing of the feminine, the more the culture of that country commands respect. Where there is disdain, contempt, disregard, that already reflects a primitive conception of society. And indeed all the ministers agree that going to the extreme of imposing a feminine authority at the expense of the man’s authority is out of the question; it would undermine the balance desired within the State. Therefore a choice had to be made: this feminine movement had to be prevented from spreading and asserting itself to the point of entirely displacing the man’s authority.

But here, in Megillat Esther, the failing into which Achashverosh falls is exposed — namely, arriving at the other extreme, where the man represents the norm in everything. And this is indeed denounced — notice that until now we have not spoken of the Jewish people at all — by the choice Achashverosh makes afterwards. For paradoxically this plan will be thwarted, and by whom? By a young woman, Esther. You will notice that there is no Jewish name in this story; we are dealing with names of Persian divinities — Esther, the star, and Mordechai, Marduk. This shows how far the Jews had opened themselves to the culture of their respective countries, going so far as to adopt foreign names; yet they kept a concern for an inner Jewish identity.

If they allowed themselves to go and eat, to share in the banquets and national celebrations with the local authorities, it was their way of belonging, of showing that they did not keep their community sealed off, and that there were things […]. It must be said that, in the view of our Sages, Achashverosh was even very cunning, in that he allowed everyone “to do according to the wish of each man” — each could eat by whatever standard of kashrut he wished, each could eat what suited him. There was no constraint, either in the food or in the wines that were served. Nevertheless, what happens next is the awakening of this Jewish identity through the rise of a Haman, who is a descendant of Esav — for Amalek is, in sum, a grandson of Esav.

When Yaakov fled from his brother Esav, Esav sent his son Elifaz after him to kill him. But Elifaz did not do so: he reasoned that by stripping Yaakov of all his possessions and leaving him destitute, he was condemning him to die on the road, and so he did not finish him off. But beware: the descendants of Elifaz, of Amalek, reappear immediately after the Exodus from Egypt. The first enemy who dares take up arms against the Jewish people as it makes its way toward the Promised Land is Amalek. And it is this Amalek, in a sense, that we describe through Haman in the reading of the Megillah.

But before the reading of the Megillah comes Shabbat Zachor — which is next Shabbat — on which we read a parashah (Torah portion) recalling what Amalek was for us on our journey toward the Promised Land, a way of recalling the mitzvah both to remember Amalek and to banish him, to erase Amalek. So who is Amalek today? We have said that today the people, the entity of Amalek, does not exist as such. Some will go looking for it in Daesh, in Hamas and so on. But our Rabbis said that the peoples have intermingled, and because of this mixture among the nations it is now very difficult to identify who Amalek is.

One can point to it only through its deeds. In any case, the first Amalek dwells somewhere within ourselves, because the yetzer hara, a person’s evil inclination, is Amalek: it is what rises up on our path, on our road, in our development, in our thirst to grow, and more or less breaks all our momentum. Can we ever overcome it? No, because each time it takes on new guises, new faces. Today anti-Zionism has become the mask of an Amalek — of certain Amaleks. And this anti-Zionism is found somewhere in our own camp, through certain people. But to subdue it, to bring it to take its place in the struggle of the people of Israel for the affirmation of the kingdom of Heaven — that is what is asked of each one of us on the personal level, and of all the nations with regard to the aspiration of the Jewish people.

This, then, is what happens in chapter two of Esther. When young maidens were sought throughout the whole country who might satisfy the will of King Achashverosh, they were examined — a figurative way of saying that a young culture of no interest is put on trial and the next day sent back home. And among the cultures chosen was this Jewish identity, which has neither father nor mother. Yes: it is the fruit of a personal evolution, a personal creation. We have no man who founded Judaism; we know of no such man.

Avraham gave the Jewish people — gave the world — monotheistic faith, but that is not the Jewish way of life. Indeed, there is even a kind of rejection of anyone who would, as it were, embody this Judaism as the perfect expression of his own life. The Jews rejected this in the episode of the Calf: an angel? We do not want one — an angel to accompany the Jewish people? Moshe said to the Holy One, blessed be He: “If Your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.” If it is not You who walk before us, there is no point: delegate no one. For there was indeed a danger in relying on malachim (angels), in embodying Jewish life in a person. Although we say of the prophet Moshe that “there has not arisen another prophet in Israel like Moshe,” Moshe was only the liaison agent of divine revelation to the people of Israel, because the whole people could not raise itself to the level of revelation.

So an intermediary was indeed needed, and this liaison agent was Moshe par excellence. But the phenomenon of the malach must be malach panav, “the angel of His presence.” As the Holy One, blessed be He, says: “My presence will go” — it is My face that will light your way. That is, we refer directly to the Holy One, blessed be He; it is to Him that we turn first and foremost, and not to subordinates. The malach is merely the one who, let us say, facilitates our understanding of the message that is given. This, incidentally, is the difference between avodah and melachah: avodah is labor, whereas melachah is a pedagogy — an art of making, an art of acting, an art of learning.

That is why it is said that in exile there are malachim of a second rank compared with the malachim in Eretz Israel. There are degrees among malachim, just as there are degrees in professional training for different functions. To return to our text, then: Esther is presented to us — in other words, the very principle of this so greatly desired Jewish culture. Note: we are not told that Esther was beautiful. According to some she was already forty years old, but… — Rav Benizri, excuse me, your camera has turned off. And also, several people in the audience are asking: wasn’t Esther Mordechai’s wife?

— Yes, I’m coming to that. I’ve turned the camera back on. — Yes, it’s working. — So, she is taken against her will. For, note, there are many cultures — as there are many young women — who present themselves of their own accord for this title of queen of the empire, the Persian Empire; why not? But Esther… The principle of Judaism is not to impose itself in the public square, not to go out actively seeking converts among other peoples, is it not? Judaism asserts itself through its own life. Whoever wishes to take it up — the doors are open. He may come, knock at the door, and find his place among the Jewish people.

So she is hidden; she must be torn away from her guardian. Her guardian is Mordechai; Mordechai is the guardian of this poor orphan, bereft of father and mother. Was she his niece, or was she his wife? There are two, even three opinions on this. He regarded her as a daughter, he adopted her — but one should not read bat, “daughter,” but bayit, “house”: he made her the pillar of his home, of his household. There are, indeed, different ways of seeing the matter. Mordechai was a high official of the time. He had even been a member of the Knesset HaGedolah, the Great Assembly. I tell you, at eighty years old he was in the service of Achashverosh.

And Esther, according to some, was seventy-five. What emanated from this representative of Judaism, of a Jewish culture, was first and foremost grace. All her beauty, both outer and inner, resided in this grace. When the king preferred her to all the others, this means in reality that what counted among all these candidates was not outward beauty but rather inner beauty — as we said concerning the malach: “the angel of His presence saved them.” Which angel do we trust, give credence to? The one who expresses everything through his inwardness, through his will to serve, his will to give. That is malach panav. “Saved them” — he is the one who brings salvation; and “He lifted them and carried them all the days of old” — he is the one who indeed carries the people to the heights.

Let me point out that the word dat, religion, appears only in Esther; the word Yehudi is likewise specific to the Megillah of Esther. What we translate as “Jew” is the Jew of exile. The Jew of Eretz Israel is called Ben Israel, not Yehudi. Outside Israel one tends to define oneself by religion, because we have no country, we are not recognized, we depend on foreign rulers who may choose to recognize us or to restrict our rights. Within the borders of Israel, on the other hand, we are not Yehudi; we have no need to say “we are Yehudim” — we are Benei Israel, and Ben Israel is a far broader notion, essentially superior to that of Yehudi, which is limiting. You know very well that the word Yehudi comes from Yehudah — from the tribe of Yehudah, from the remnants of the kingdom of Yehudah, which was the last to be destroyed.

That is why here, in Megillat Esther, this Jewish identity is defined by belonging to Yehudi, since Yehudah was the tribe within whose territory the sanctuary stood. And we are told why this Yehudi asserted himself. Of course — note — I am staying here with a first-level interpretation; I am not entering the maze of the commentators who draw on kabbalistic considerations and the like. That is why I am not presenting Mordechai to you as a great […]. He certainly was one, but for now that is not how the plain text presents him: he is first of all someone who kept his roots alive in the way he defined himself, in the way he defined his Judaism.

He did not cut his moorings to his ancestors. “There was a Jewish man in Shushan the capital, whose name was Mordechai” — he bears, of course, the name of a Persian divinity, but he remained “the son of Yair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish,” the father of Shaul. Shaul’s name is not mentioned here. Why? Because Shaul was moved to compassion for Agag, the king of Amalek — and Haman is “the Agagite,” of the descendants of Amalek. When we insist on nurturing compassion for an enemy, that compassion ends up turning against us, and we then suffer the forceful return of the antisemitism we left in a latent state, because we judged that this king should not be condemned to death and should be given a further chance to survive. That is why here we have this man who comes from the tribe of Binyamin. At first it says he is a Yehudi, from Yehudah; then it says ish Yemini, of the tribe of Binyamin.

Our Sages say: note that the Mishkan stood on the border of both Binyamin and Yehudah; these two tribes were adjacent, and his father was from Yehudah, his mother from Binyamin. Be that as it may, the text means that his was a Jewish identity combining within itself both the kingdom of Israel, which was open to all cultures — even, unfortunately, to the point of setting up an idolatrous center, two idolatrous centers, one in the middle of the country and one in the north; because it asserted itself more through its will to secularism, it was destroyed first — and the kingdom of Yehudah, which remained faithful to this teaching centered on the Mishkan and so preserved a Jewish identity steeped in spirituality and holiness. It was being both at once — Yehudah on the one hand and Binyamin on the other — that made the strength of this man, Mordechai.

What was he, what was his worth? He was a man who had himself been carried off in the exile from Jerusalem — “who had been exiled from Jerusalem with the exile that was exiled” — a man who had endured several exiles; and “he raised Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle’s daughter.” And what also saved this Jewish identity was this: his devotion to Hadassah. Hadassah is Esther’s Jewish name, while her [Persian] name is Esther — the star, as we said. “For she had neither father nor mother” — she was left to herself; “and when her father and mother died…” Do we need to be told “when her father and mother died,” when we have already been told “she had neither father nor mother”? Obviously, if the father and mother had died, there is no need to point it out a second time; it should rather have said […]. This leads us to think that this mention of the absence of father and mother must be placed on another level — the one given in the book of Bereshit: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife.” Yet the first man had neither father nor mother.

Which father and mother was he to leave? But this notion of father and mother is both the sechel (intellect) he had at birth and the middot that were innate in him, which need to be shaped, formed, mastered — and that is what we do throughout our lives. We possess an innate intellectual quotient; we also possess an inheritance of middot, of virtues, of capacities within us. But we give them a tzurah, a form. And this is what the text means: when he took her, and she was left to herself, without the means to give form to the intellectual potential and the potential for virtue within her, he took charge of them and made of them a bayit, a house.

It became his dwelling. At first it was “the daughter,” that is, foreign elements; but once he integrated them, it became his home, his dwelling. I will stop here, because I see it is 9:05 p.m., and I will complete this overview of Esther next week, be’ezrat Hashem (with G-d’s help), and then move on to the meaning of Purim in our day. So if you have questions, with pleasure. — Rav Benizri, I don’t know, we may be going a little outside the scope of this evening’s lecture, but it’s been burning in me to speak to you about it. In a batch of books someone brought me, I came across a sefer, Ketuvim Acharonim — the later writings that are not in the biblical canon.

And in it, to my great surprise, I found the book “The Dream of Mordechai and the Stories of Achashverosh.” I had the chance to read it and was struck by two things. On the one hand, I found the narrative more marked, I would say, by the political side of the story. On the other hand — and this surprised me even more — in this text the name of the Eternal appears, whereas in Megillat Esther the name of the Eternal does not appear. Can you confirm what I’m saying? — There are indeed different versions, because, I tell you once again, the only book that was written outside the borders of Eretz Israel is the Megillah of Esther, which was integrated [into the canon] only later.

And of course it was given a definitive form, because there were different approaches, different assessments, different writings — and that is what we must know. The critics who today base themselves on the variants between texts to claim that the texts are not revealed, that they are writings composed at different dates — this is a way of stripping the Bible of its holiness. Nonetheless, textual variants did exist, since within the Bible itself you have the kri and the ktiv, that is, the text as it is written and as it must be read; and sometimes a word is written and one must not read that word, but read something else in its place.

Techorim, for example, in the Torah, is such a correction, but it does not appear in the original text when one writes a Sefer Torah; it is up to the reader to know that at that spot the text is to be read differently from how it is written. Now, the story of the Ark — the story of the Flood, for example — is a story that also exists in different cultures, just as there are laws somewhat close to the Decalogue and to Mishpatim — all the laws we read yesterday in the Sefer Torah — laws that were applied, more or less, in another context, by other peoples. What did the text do? It sifted them — sifted them of everything. And revelation — what is it?

The unveiling of G-d — how do we imagine it? Is He speaking to us? Is it a voice, a face, what is it? We must realize that the unveiling of G-d is proportional to the momentum we bring to our spiritual perception of the text. That is, you can translate this very text of the Torah in an utterly vulgar way; you can make an Asterix comic of it; you can reduce it to a mere news item. But if there is a will to elevate one’s thinking about the text — to recognize that there is an unveiling, a revelation that comes to a person… It is as in scientific research: as a person applies its rigorous demands, as he delves ever deeper into it, he will discover other things that were not open to him until then; through toil — he believes in what he is doing — through toil he will discover things.

The same holds for the approach to the exegesis of the text: everything depends on the spiritual quotient one brings to its interpretation. That allows an unveiling — and that is the spirit of holiness, which leads a person to hear a word of G-d that not everyone hears, that not everyone perceives. It escapes, it escapes us; but a person who has forged his mind in the study of Torah will discover in the text what we cannot manage to read — and that is revelation. So the existence, here and there, of apocryphal books that take up roughly the same stories, or the same laws, or the same instructions, is a fact; since, after all, when the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks, He speaks to the entire universe, and whoever wants to hear hears. But there are basic elements that everyone hears, that everyone reaches on his own; and that is why there are indeed Noahide laws that impose themselves on man, which need no legislating — conscience itself, let us say, adheres to these basic laws. But what did we do? We integrated them into another context. Lo tirtzach, “you shall not murder”: I believe the moral codes of every country have admitted into their constitutions, their laws, their ethics, the prohibition against killing and stealing — but at different levels. They did not make of it […]. With them it stops there; but here: do not humiliate your fellow — do not shed his inner blood. So it all depends. There — another question? — Thank you very much. — That’s all; I’ll leave you now.

— Thank you, Mr. Benizri, for this definition of ruach hakodesh (the holy spirit). It was worth coming just for that […]. He did well to ask his question. Thank you very much. — In any case, personally, historical criticism, biblical criticism and scientific discoveries have so far only strengthened my faith, so I’m not very afraid of them. Sometimes I even enjoy listening to them, because when one can keep the necessary distance from what they say, I find it isn’t dangerous for us. — I humbly admit that I read it out of curiosity. — Then, Luc, you are on the right path. Thank you. But you need good moorings.

— Yes, I think so too. It’s true that I regularly meet very simple minds who serve this up to me so superficially that it would make you cry with laughter — and it is also enough to make you weep. Today I believe people don’t understand that G-d has not stopped speaking — “a great voice that did not cease” — He continues to speak; it is we who are deaf to certain frequencies of thought. — As you have always taught us, it is well described: kol kore bamidbar, “a voice calling in the wilderness.” — Good evening; would this also be connected with the voices at Har Sinai? — Absolutely, absolutely. We are told that at Har Sinai the Jewish people heard only the first two commandments, and then, for the other commandments, they said: this is impossible, we cannot, we don’t hear, we don’t understand. “You speak with us and we will listen, but let not G-d speak with us, lest we die.” So you, Moshe, be our interpreter. And so Moshe, in a sense, scaled down the word of G-d that was beyond the people’s reach, because the people stood at the foot of the mountain and could not climb it.

Let us speak of the mountain of thought — of spiritual thought at a high level. The people stood only at the lower level of perceiving the word of G-d; it needed a liaison agent, as I said — like Moshe. But it heard only the first two commandments: “I am Hashem your G-d” and “You shall have no…” Why? Because “I am Hashem your G-d” is not a commandment; it is a fact. I am the Eternal your G-d, whether you like it or not. Who would say to his parents, “No, you are not my parents”? Whether you like it or not, this is your father, this is your mother. So: “I am Hashem your G-d,” whether you like it or not. Now, you may give this “Hashem your G-d” various resonances and interpretations; so you are told: beware — “I am Hashem your G-d… You shall have no other gods before Me” — do not make derivatives of it.

That we do not want. If you consider the derivatives essential, you will choose for yourself a god of music, or an artistic god, or a scientific god, and so on. Know that this is already a diminishing of the perception of “Hashem your G-d who brought you out of the land of Egypt” — the One who brought you out, who tore you away from every constraint. I, the Eternal, who tear you away from every constraint: that is the basic faith, that is, this primal freedom which one cannot renounce. If one renounces this notion of primal freedom, everything else is corrupted; one is already on the gentle slope toward idolatry. — That is what protected us when we were very young. We listened to music and to singers — they were called “teen idols” — but for us they weren’t idols; we just listened to the music.

— That said, I still think music can bring us to extremely high degrees of elevation. Certain composers were imbued with such spirituality — people often say, when listening to Bach or Mozart, that G-d comes down to earth, because their music bears such elevation of soul, such spirituality, such grandeur that… — […] But notice that song preceded the giving of the Torah. Music, you see? And whoever studies Torah without melody has lost the sublime meaning of Torah. That is why one must sing one’s study. — Of course. For example, in music there are no words. — Yes, well, that is shirah; we will have occasion to speak about shirah. — That music expresses everything that words […]. — The sublime expression of speech is song, it is shir. When one reaches shir — shir is a loop. Song is a loop. One has closed the circle of language.

— May I ask: is it a shir or a niggun? — Ah, the niggun — who is speaking? — My name is Elona, I was your student. — Well, niggun is a word foreign to the Hebrew language. You will not find the verb nagen in the Torah. Not even… With David, in the Prophets — there, yes, you find the verb nagen. But in the Torah you do not have the verb nagen; you have shir, you have zemer, but not nagen. You have “For the conductor, with neginot” — but that comes later. So song is also speech. That is why music is the sung word — a sung word, that is music. That is the primal music, the foundation; it is not abstract music. Because in the same way that the ideas in the Torah cannot be ideas in the absolute, unattached to the reality of life — there is no Jewish thought, no notion of thought, that is not bound up with a commitment to Jewish life. That holds no interest; there is no philosophy — it does not exist.

It is a late phenomenon, isn’t it? — Sir, if you have finished, I would like to share this saying of Plato — Plato, after all, fourth or fifth century before the common era: “Music gives a soul to our hearts and wings to thought.” I think that says everything about music’s power to elevate. Nietzsche himself said: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” And it has been said that music is the language of the emotions. It’s wonderful. — But then I’ll give you quotations of my own. — Yes. — Quotations from Tehillim (Psalms). — Of course. — Or from the Prophets. — Of course. — We listen only to music. And the zemirot — those are the melodies, the tunes; but there are many quotations. And you know that Shir HaShirim — Shir HaShirim is kodesh kodashim, the holy of holies; in the realm of speech, it is the Song of Songs.

Thank you very much, goodbye, until next week, be’ezrat Hashem. — Goodbye everyone; I’ll take this opportunity to share the bank details of the Maison de la Culture Juive. Thank you all very much, goodbye. — Thank you very much, goodbye. — I’ll quickly take a photo, Luc, I’ll quickly take a photo of… — No problem, go ahead. — There, done. I’d like to put it on WhatsApp, maybe. — I can put it on WhatsApp, yes, I’ll post it in the group, no problem. — Thank you very much, Mr. Benizri, thank you once again for this extraordinary lecture, thank you infinitely. Goodbye! — Good evening […]. Good evening everyone, good evening Jean-Julien.

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