Purim: The Megillah in the Present

Anyone who follows the lecture closely will always notice a certain parallel between what the text says and what is happening in the world. For in truth, we do not read the Torah with the eyes of the past. The past is simply simanim — traces, let us say, marks left along the road. But we are always foreshadowing the future, and we do so through the text of the past; and that text of the past is always projected onto a future. We are not nostalgic for a bygone past by which we no longer measure ourselves; on the contrary, we look to a past that we want to bring to its fulfillment.

For Amalek attacks us precisely when we are on the road and we stop — when we are tired and can go no further. That’s it: we throw in the towel and tell ourselves that others will carry on. And when we adopt that attitude, leaving it to others, for instance, to take up the relay, that is where Amalek slips in. We see it every time in history: whenever a march began to show signs of weariness and fatigue, Amalek appeared, did he not? Now Amalek is something we ourselves generate. He does not exist in reality unless we generate him. Why? Because this Amalek springs from the signs of an instinct of resignation within the Jewish people; and when the Jewish people fractures into several parts, it grows weak. Ask history: when the First Temple was destroyed, it came in the wake of the factions that had formed within the people and kept up incessant struggles — and the enemy took advantage of it. The same was true of the destruction of the Second Temple. Had the people presented a united front, had the people been truly convinced of its project for the future, the other nations would have had no hold on it. What we must always fear are divisions within the people. For against external enemies we are assured of victory. We have enough strength to resist. Baruch Hashem, we have withstood every persecution and have survived until now. There is, of course, a discreet hand of Providence that takes part, that joins with us along the course of history. What always weakens us are these internal struggles, which we have not managed to silence or to channel toward a worthy goal.

That, unfortunately, is the case today in our country: we have not yet managed to channel these forces toward an ideal of Israel — an ideal that must indeed answer the expectation of the nations. And in times such as these, how important Israel’s voice is! It is not for nothing that a Zelensky addresses his speech to Israel: he knows he shares with it a certain love of freedom. And with that, I turn to the reading of Megillat Esther. Megillat Esther is indeed the unfolding of the secret of the history of the Jewish people among the nations. For when the question is asked, “Where is Esther alluded to in the Torah?”, the answer is: “And I will surely hide My face on that day” — ve’anochi haster astir panai bayom hahu (Devarim 31:18).

Divine Providence will hide itself; it will put on a mask. We will not see it. The name of Hashem does not appear in the Megillah; it is not present — and yet it is not that He is absent: He is constantly present in the Megillah. For every time we read hamelech, “the king” — with the exception of the opening, “And it came to pass in the days of Achashverosh,” the one who reigned from India to Ethiopia, to Kush, over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces — all the other occurrences of “the king” refer to this divine Providence, to the Master of the universe, who is present in this world. But we do not see Him. Why? Because we do not hold the keys to this vision of G-d beyond what the text can reveal to us in its Havayah.

Havayah — you know that there are two ways of perceiving G-d. The first is in the immanent, that is, through creation. And that one is very close to us, because we ourselves can lay claim to the title of Adon, master. Adon — we want to master things. We want sovereignty; we demand it. And if, in short, we claim for ourselves a relative authority, a substantial power — well, that power we cannot appropriate for ourselves, because it would become avodah zarah, idolatry. It must be shared with everyone. But when we share it with everyone, we must regard it as a gift coming from the One who masters everything, who has mastery over all and who governs the world. For there is G-d the Creator and G-d the Revealer: G-d without, in the forces of nature, and G-d within, in human consciousness.

So to bring this consciousness into nature, and to go from the maamar, the creative word, to the revealing word — that is a spiritual path that demands a great deal of energy. For man indeed cannot assert his power, his adnut — today we would say his DNA — on his own. What makes him, what weaves him, what grounds him, comes solely from Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei. That is the other perception of G-d, and this perception of G-d as Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei is an inner perception of the divine within man. That is the demut, the likeness. Now, questions have been asked about Esther, because now we are among the nations. When does this story take place? There are several views, but the most probable, the most accurate, places it at the beginning of the building of the Second Temple — the return of the Jewish people from its exile. But that return is not made en masse. The Zionist movement, at that moment, is very weak: only fifty thousand Jews make their aliyah to the Land of Israel, wanting to restore the country to its former face. And because of rivalries, once again, the Temple that they wanted to rebuild — its construction is halted. And as I said earlier, every time we stop along the way because we are wondering whether we are headed in the right direction, Amalek appears. When Amalek appeared for the first time, it was on the road between the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation of G-d at Mount Sinai.

And there the people asks: is the Eternal really with us? For if the Eternal is with us and present among us, then we should meet with no difficulties on our way; each time we should obtain what we wish for — assistance, help — and be assured of triumph over every obstacle that may arise. But no event in history can come about without messirut nefesh — without an act of total self-denial, of collective devotion, of self-giving. That is what moves HaKadosh Baruch Hu to set in motion His whole future plan for creation. And this is borne out: without Moshe there would have been no Exodus from Egypt; without Esther there would have been no deliverance from Haman’s sworn antisemitism — that is, from the problem of liquidation, from the will to liquidate the Jewish people once and for all.

And that is why — inasmuch as Esther closes the biblical narrative, and it is a woman who does so — when it was asked whether she is written in the Torah, it was the same question that had been asked about Haman: is Haman written in the Torah? And the answer was: Haman is hamin — “Is it from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat [that you have eaten]?” (hamin ha’etz asher tzivitikha levilti achol mimenu, Bereshit 3:11). The tree of knowledge: this will of man to impose himself through his knowledge, as though he could reach everything, understand everything, as though he could subject everything to the mastery of reason, to the power of mighty reason. No — that is not possible.

And the same question was asked about Mordechai: where is Mordechai in the Torah? And it was found that mor dror (Shemot 30:23) is Mordechai. Now what is mor dror? A fragrance of freedom. Dror is freedom — but a fragrance. This is a man capable of facing every situation and affirming forcefully, without equivocation, his convictions — let us not yet speak of Judaism; I will come to that later — his convictions in the face of an oppressive world that exposes him to death. Such a man is indeed the one capable of continuing, of prolonging the history of the Jewish people. For how does the Megillah end? “For Mordechai the Jew…”

Yes, Mordechai the Jew — he is the one who seeks the good of his people; I am reading you the text. Yes, mishneh lamelech Achashverosh: he is the deputy of King Achashverosh. Well then — Eric Zemmour need only scale back his ambitions! One can only be mishneh lamelech Achashverosh; one can only be the deputy. The deputy of King Achashverosh, “great among the Jews and accepted by the multitude of his brethren,” esteemed and approved by all these peoples, “seeking the good of his people and speaking peace to all his seed” (Esther 10:3). That, too, is a mystery. Where is Esther? What became of her? For in the end, who saved the Jewish people? Not Mordechai. Mordechai sounded the alarm for the people, but the one who saved it was the woman, Esther — she who, in the end, sacrificed her life to live with Achashverosh.

She condemned herself to live with Achashverosh, and we hear no more of her. What became of her? Yes, that too is a question. So we defended our values, we were recognized by King Achashverosh — yet we remain court Jews, the subjects of Achashverosh: akhati avdei Achashverosh anan, “we are still the servants of Achashverosh” (Megillah 14a). The question is a weighty one. So we did not attain freedom. We did not take up the pilgrim’s staff to return to our land; we accommodated ourselves to a situation among the nations because they recognized us. And so you will understand the question our sages asked. Since we must celebrate the festival of Purim every year — for that is what is written — one might have thought that Purim was limited to a certain period, or limited to being celebrated only in exile but not in the Land of Israel, once we had returned to the country.

No. We are told: lekayem et yemei haPurim ha’eleh bizmanehem, “to establish these days of Purim in their times” (Esther 9:31) — we must fulfil the celebration, the festival of Purim, the remembrance of Purim, in their time, in every generation, every family. “These days of Purim shall not pass away from among the Jews, and their remembrance shall not cease from their descendants” (Esther 9:28). But wait — are “their descendants” and “the Jews” one and the same? Of course, when you tell me lo ya’avru mitoch haYehudim, “they shall not pass away from among the Jews,” I understand. No: Yehudi is an attribute of the Jewish people in exile. We are Judeans in exile. Where does the name come from? From the tribe of Yehudah. Very well — because it was the kingdom of Judea that was the last to be exiled. The tribes of Israel were scattered, and we lost all knowledge of their traces, which we barely manage to find today. But we have another title. When we return to the land, we are no longer Yehudim; we are Israel, we are Israelim.

And Israel is something else. For Israel is Sar-El — the one who fights for G-d. Now this fight for G-d we cannot wage openly among the nations; we can wage it only once we have recovered our national identity. And yet, even once we have recovered our national identity, we must celebrate, we must go on celebrating the festival of Purim — so much so that our sages affirm that were all the festivals to disappear, Purim would not disappear. And if Purim will not disappear, it must be far more important than Pesach. Yet Pesach is the starting point of the birth of the Jewish people, of the history of the Jewish people, and it is the gateway to freedom — whereas at Purim we remained the servants of an emperor, Achashverosh.

No — but there is something we attained at Purim that we had not achieved at Pesach. There, it was a matter of sacrificing the Egyptian idol; that is, we came out of avodah zarah, we came out of foreign cults. Now you know there is a definition: whoever repudiates idolatry is by definition a Jew (kol hakofer ba’avodah zarah nikra Yehudi, Megillah 13a). This holds for the Jews of the Diaspora; it does not hold for the Jews of Israel. For the Jews of Israel, renouncing the worship of avodah zarah is not enough to be a Jew — perhaps we should remind our minister of religious affairs of that. Here there is something else to do, something else to accomplish through oneself.

Well then, what is the particularity of Purim? The particularity of Purim is that we have gone beyond the stage of knowledge, and we are in a state beyond knowledge. And beyond knowledge there is no difference between good and evil. There, the divine presence is present as much in the good as in the evil, as much in the impure as in the pure, as much in the forbidden as in the permitted. But if the divine presence is there, in the impure as in evil, that means that ultimately Haman, too, is an actor placed on the stage by the One who directs this whole international play of humanity.

It means that the great tyrants of this world are also actors moved by this divine presence within the nations. And this state beyond knowledge, to which the Jewish people gains access through Purim — how do we celebrate it? Through a state of intoxication. In a state of intoxication, we have indeed set reason aside. We are no longer drawing distinctions of thought, making analyses; we are no longer dissecting things. We know that we live with a mask, that we live in a half-light. And why is it that every time we must proclaim the unity of G-d, we place our hand over our face and close our eyes? Because this unity that we take upon ourselves, we are not capable of reaching it, of understanding it. It lies beyond that knowledge.

And access to this knowledge comes by way of Esther. For note: in the Midrash of Zerubavel there is an interesting passage, namely that at the end of days a woman would stand at the head of the Jewish people and would manage everything. Why a woman? Because she is the one who integrates all the elements of culture, all the currents of thought — and these currents of thought are indeed spread across the nations — through the feminine. Let us remember that this was Pharaoh’s plan: to make the men disappear and keep only the women, quite simply in order to pass the entire Jewish genius through the Egyptian womb, and to call this divine presence to be constant, permanent among the nations — whereas until now it is only mikreh, chance: it is merely accidental, fortuitous; it is dictated by events and then undergoes displacements, massa’ot (journeys), from age to age, but it is not permanent. That is the difference between a prophet of Israel and a prophet of the nations. A prophet of the nations prophesies intermittently; a prophet of Israel is someone settled in the permanence of the revelation of the divine voice.

So we cannot approach the text of the Megillah without first making clear the objective: to recover this divine presence that Esther left among the nations, in an enclosure, as a pledge — but which has not been put to sufficiently good use — to recover it and bring it back to us; to give it its trajectory and to assure its permanence. For the nations have […] and the Jewish people, when it lives among the nations, carries out a vocation, fulfils a role — a role of education, or at least of revealing values through what it innovates every day. For the passage I spoke of, from a word that is transformed into dibbur — that is, from science which flows into the spiritual and which, in short, brings all the elements of creation back to their spiritual source — that is what we do through the korban (offering). What is a sacrifice? A sacrifice is the act of bringing back all the elements: the inert, the domem; the tzomeach, the vegetal; the chai, the living, the animal; and man — bringing them back, raising them up in an elevation of purifying fires.

That is the fire we spoke of then — ascending, rising upward: returning it to its source, to the word that created it, to the breath that gave it life. Well, that is, in short, what man is called to do among the nations. But this must be accomplished at all costs, whatever the price. That is what Mordechai says to Esther. Esther has a moment of hesitation: “I cannot present myself before the king of the nations unless I am summoned.” So Mordechai tells her: take care — if you do not present yourself of your own accord, if you do not do the work yourself, know that the salvation of the Jewish people will come from another place.

What does that mean? It means that it will come from the nations, from the sitra achra, the other side. But from the other side — how will it come about? Through a Shoah. A Shoah is then a threat that prunes away the greater part of the people and leaves only a few alive. And it is then that Esther overcomes her reservations, her doubts, her fears, and says: ka’asher avadeti avadeti, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). Since one must sacrifice oneself for this people, then, as Moshe did — “if I perish, I perish” — I shall vanish from this world, olam hazeh; I shall sacrifice my olam haba, my World to Come, to save the Jewish people. For indeed, Esther has not yet said her last word.

The Megillah remains open; it remains unrolled, spread out throughout its reading, because it will bring another way of reading events, of interpreting them and of transcending them — for the intuition that dwells in a woman is greater. That is a prophetic dimension in the feminine, which enables her to grasp, through her intuition, what lies beyond logic. That is why Esther’s work is not yet complete; it extends to the end of days. She will return — she will return to complete what she undertook. It is of Esther that we speak, she who will lead the people before the coming of the Messiah. That is what emerges when one surveys the Megillah as a whole — for this Megillah could indeed have been reduced, as the biblical critics do, to a love intrigue of the kind common in the palaces of the time, in the royal courts, among the ladies of the court, isn’t that so?

But take note: there are, of course, the complicities of one and another, the suspicions of one and another. Haman takes his revenge; Achashverosh takes revenge on his wife, who refuses to obey him. He takes another wife who, on the contrary, goes before him without being summoned. And people have somewhat exploited the Persian names — Mordechai, Marduk; Esther, Ishtar — to say that ultimately these are assimilated Jews, court Jews who have renounced, who have somewhat renounced their Jewish names, who live in the palace and have attained positions they want to keep at all costs.

And this arouses the jealousy of a Haman who wants to be rid of them at any cost. And Mordechai plays the Mossad agent, exposing the complicity of certain people, or the assassination plot being prepared by Bigtan and Teresh, two servants of the king. They are directed by Haman, and Haman wants to take Mordechai’s post as second to the king — for that he must eliminate Mordechai at all costs. And Mordechai, lo yichra velo yishtachaveh, “would not bow nor prostrate himself” (Esther 3:2): Mordechai refuses to bend his back. And Esther, who despite everything is ready to submit to Achashverosh — for her it is a royal promotion. I will not dwell on it, but you will realize that no festival would have been instituted for a love intrigue of that kind, and it would not have been given the importance it has today — namely, to close the history of the people.

To close the history of the Jewish people. For when Rabbi Akiva wanted to wake his students — who had been engaged in their pilpulim (dialectical debates), who were tired and were beginning to doze off — he put the question to them: what did she have? What was it about Esther that allowed her to reign over her hundred and twenty-seven provinces? One must establish the connection between Esther and Sarah. Sarah — her name means princess. Sarah is the one who defended the identity of the Jewish people at all costs and made no compromise whatsoever with Yishmael. She could have accommodated herself to it, but no. Esther is of the same mettle. How many years did Sarah live? A hundred and twenty-seven. And there is a link between her years of childhood, her twenty years of youth, and her hundred years: she always remained faithful to what grounded her, Sarah, in the direction she had taken with Avraham.

It is the same spirit that Esther shares with Mordechai. Only, HaKadosh Baruch Hu stopped Avraham’s hand when he was about to sacrifice his son on the altar he had prepared for him, in order to conform to the will of G-d out of his zeal — and HaKadosh Baruch Hu does not want it, does not want it at all. If you must sacrifice something, sacrifice your animality, sacrifice your beast, your lamb, your ox — do not sacrifice your person. But with Esther there is an element of sacrifice that was realized in the fact that she remained in the palace of King Achashverosh as a hostage. The hostage of the peoples, of the nations of the world: there is a Jewish woman held hostage, a Jewish personality.

And why a woman? Because she is the one who, as I said earlier, can welcome all the elements of the other nations, all the cultures, filter them and bring them back to their sources, as we do with the korban. And at the coming of the end of days, it is indeed a matter of gathering all the elements of culture, ridding them of their dross and bringing them back to the fold. That is the essential theme of Megillat Esther. For the moment it remains secret, because we ourselves do not understand. We ourselves do not know. But we do it with a conviction that surpasses our logic, that surpasses our reason. We have done nothing but suffer among these nations precisely because they hold this divine presence within them, through Esther. They hold it; they have values, whether we like it or not. Esther sowed these values within the Jewish people through woman after woman. It was women who established the relay, the passage, between Egypt and Babylon, and the Persians, and the Greeks, and Rome — and we are to seek out this Messiah who sits at the gates of Rome, binding his wounds. When he has indeed healed and can once again walk as he should, then we will complete the road, we will complete history. Now, when our sages asked themselves — when there are two months of Adar — in which month shall we celebrate the festival of Purim: Adar Aleph or Adar Bet?

One might have thought that it should rather be attached to the first, because that follows the natural, normal movement of the calendar, and it is the one closest to the date of Moshe, the liberator of the Jewish people. For remember that Moshe was born on the seventh of Adar and died on the seventh of Adar — which means that had Moshe not been born circumcised, he would have had his brit milah on the fifteenth of Adar, that is, on the day of Purim. So, given the identity of mission and approach between Esther and Moshe, it would have been entirely natural to celebrate it in Adar Rishon. But our sages preferred otherwise: to bring it closer to Pesach, to graft it onto Pesach. For at Pesach, as I said earlier, we were born with the notion of freedom — whereas we did not close the story of Esther with that notion of freedom. Rather, we gave, in a way, an awareness of a divine presence to the other nations — principally to the Muslim world, the world of Yishmael, and to the world of Esav — because for most of the time, the greater part of the exiled Jewish population found itself there, and not in the far reaches of other religions, other cults.

But there, in a way, there are values that we share, that are common to us — and that is because we left them in deposit with them. For, says the Talmud, wherever six hundred thousand Jews are gathered, the divine presence chooses its dwelling, takes up its abode there. That is, it is we who draw this divine presence and share it with the other nations; and the other nations take advantage of it when they persecute us — so as to be able to take our place and graft themselves onto our history, or to appropriate our history. That is how it happens. Look how today Ukraine is claiming, or crying out, the Jewish values of freedom and so on — the whole history of the Jewish people, all the solidarity of the Jewish people, everything the Jewish people has lived through and that the Ukrainian people is, in some way, now suffering.

So our chachamim (sages) said that it should be Pesach — that it is Pesach that should close the history of the Jewish people, through the phenomenon of freedom regained within humanity. I see that it is already 8:58 pm, and I assure you that I have not yet begun my lecture on Megillat Esther. Well — if you have questions, go ahead.