Shabbat Zachor 5784
By Andrew Margolis
Tonight is Purim. Of the three festivals with the historical formula ‘they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat’ – Pesach, Chanukah and Purim – Purim has perhaps the clearest heroes and villains. We all know what to do when we hear the name of Haman.
As well as reading the Megillah, on Purim we also add Al Hanisim to our prayers in the Amidah and in bensching after our meals. Nisim are of course miracles, and when we say Al Hanisim on Purim we are thanking God for the miracle of Purim.
But it’s a well-known fact that the Megillah doesn’t mention God once. So what exactly was the miracle of Purim?
Al Hanisim gives us the answer – “You, in Your abundant mercy, annulled Haman’s counsel, frustrated his intention, and brought his evil plan upon his own head.” Many commentators tells us that God is indeed present in the Megillah but is concealed – the concept of “the concealed face of God”, or hester panim, is taken from Devarim 31:18.
You have to read the Megillah really closely to know when this happened. It is perhaps surprising that the annulling of Haman’s counsel, the frustration of his intention and the bringing of his evil plan upon his own head, for which we thank God in Al Hanisim, all happened at the beginning of Pesach.
Esther 3:12 “On the thirteenth day of the first month [Nissan], the king’s scribes were summoned and a decree was issued, as Haman directed … the couriers went out post-haste on the royal mission, and the decree was proclaimed in the fortress Shushan.” As we all know, Mordechai asks Esther to intercede with the king, she agrees, but asks all the Jews to fast for three days. Rashi tells us that as the order went out on 13th Nissan, the fast followed immediately, on 13th 14th and 15th of Nissan, and Mordechai has to cancelled seder that year. So the first wine party would have been on the 15th Nissan, with the second wine party, Haman’s downfall and his hanging taking place on 16th of Nissan.
So, what exactly are we celebrating on 14th Adar if the miracle of Purim happened during Pesach?
The answer is troubling. We read in Esther 8 that in order to mitigate the original decree, Mordechai was given a free hand and that he gave the Jews permission: “to destroy, and to slay, and to cause to perish, all the forces of the people and province that would assault them, their little ones and women”. And we go on to read in Esther 9 how this permission was exercised: “The Jews mustered in their cities to attack those who sought their hurt; and no one could withstand them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all the peoples” … “the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies” … “they disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil. That was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar; and they rested on the fourteenth day and made it a day of feasting and merrymaking.”
So what 14th Adar commemorates isn’t the miracle of Purim at all, but what happened 11 months later and how the Jews celebrated after slaying, destroying, and wreaking their will upon their enemies.
The religious justification for this takes us back to Parshat Zachor, the reading of which we’re told is a Torah mitzvah. It’s unsettling that the only part of the Torah that it’s a mitzvah to hear every year isn’t about loving our neighbours or keeping Shabbat or any of the more comforting parts of our religion. Parshat Zachor contains the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek. The haftarah we just read, about King Saul’s attempt to do just that, makes clear this means killing all Amalekites, and it is specifically invoked by the Megillah. For example, we are told multiple times that Haman was a descendant of Agag, king of the Amalekites, that like King Saul, Mordechai was of the tribe of Benjamin, and that both Saul and Mordechai were descended from people named Kish. And the mistake Saul made in keeping sheep and oxen as spoils of war is specifically recalled in the Megillah, which tells us that when the Jews killed 75,000 of their enemies, this time they did not lay their hands on any of the spoils.
In his commentary to today’s haftarah, Chief Rabbi Hertz writes that the moral difficulty in connection with all this is very real. I think that the same moral difficulties can equally be raised in connection with Purim.
We always see it as a festival with innocent Jews clearly cast as the potential victims and the ultimate heroes, and with Haman as the ultimate villain. But I think there is much more room for nuance on both sides than we have perhaps allowed for. We’ve seen that the Jews killed 75,000 people, who may well have wished them harm, but who also could not withstand them and were afraid of them. The Megillah also tells us how Esther had the dead bodies of the sons of Haman strung up on gallows. It’s not difficult to modify our Purim rapture when reading all this.
But there’s also nuance to be found in the actions of Amalek and of Haman, who may not have been the completely irrational anti-semites we like to think. The Talmud relates in Sanhedrin 99b that Amalek’s hatred of the Jewish people was because of the unjust rejection of his mother’s wish to convert three times, by Abraham, by Isaac and by Jacob. As for Haman, any descendant of Amalek via Agag would certainly have known of the history of murderous conflict between the Jews and his people. Indeed, Josephus writes that Haman was an enemy to the Jews because the Amalekites, of which he was one, had been destroyed by them. In other words, Haman’s plan to destroy the Jews was a mirror image of the obligation of the Jews to destroy him. And this surely give a different meaning to the injunction about not distinguishing between Mordechai and Haman on Purim.
Recognising nuance instead of absolutes doesn’t imply excusing wickedness and evil. But, as Yuval Noah Harari says, it’s possible for people to be both victims and perpetrators at the same time. This year, it might be well for us to consider when reading the Megillah that the Purim story is perhaps not as black and white as we always like to think.