and it is doubled, for his sin is doubled, for he injures this one monetarily

and the other spiritually [because the latter] will possess his fellow's

property illegally. This is the conclusion of the midrash (Eikha Rabbah 1:57): they sinned twice over and were punished twice over,

because they sinned in corrupting judgment, as it is written, in which righteousness would lodge,[ but now murderers]

(Isaiah 1:21), and they sinned with idolatry, for that is also a

double sin, as it is written, They left Me, a source of living waters, to

hew for themselves broken cisterns (Jeremiah

2:13). All of this teaches us the similarity

of corruption of judgement to idolatry; that is why the breastplate was made in

the fashion of the ephod, a zeret long, because corruption of judgment

causes destruction of the world, but when it is reformed, that is as if one has

been made a partner to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the work of Creation,

for regarding these it says, [ Who measured water

with a balance?](Isaiah 40:12).

 (Kli Yakar, Shemot 28: 15)

Purim's Unacceptable

Mask

Mordechai

Beck

The desire for

revenge is compelling yet just as equally circular, endless and invariably

self-defeating. In the Bible, its roots lead us back to Cain's slaughter of

Abel. Although the rabbis offer at least three reasons for this first

fratricide – economic competition, ideology and sexual jealousy (Bereishit Rabbah

22) – in

the final resort, nothing really justified it, the reasons coming as an

afterthought because we – the readers – cannot accept that such an act has no

motivation, let alone justification.

In the Scroll of

Esther, revenge is a powerful theme, but just as clearly one that leads to

confusion and tragedy. At the very outset, King Ahashuerus would have his royal

anger vented on his stubborn wife Vashti for refusing to appear before him and

his merry guests (1:12-22). But no sooner has his will been done – either by divorcing the lady

or, if the rabbis are to be believed, her execution – than the king's anger

subsides and he regrets his earlier decision. Unfortunately for him, he finds

there is no way back. Even God cannot change the past; how much more so a king

of flesh and blood.

Haman's rage at

Mordechai's refusal to bow down to him – the newly appointed Prime Minister – bursts

with such fury that instead of wishing revenge on just one man, he immediately

seeks to destroy the entire people from whom this obdurate protester springs. (Esther 3: 1-7). Interestingly,

Rashi explains here that Haman considered himself as a god; his rage was thus

compounded by being a jealous deity.

However, the text

informs us, that this hatred is not merely a personal whim, but has historical

roots. For Haman is "the son of Hamdata the Agagite" (ibid 3:1) thus linked to the

enemy of Saul and, further back yet, to the vicious Amalek who attacked the

recently released Israelite slaves from Egypt. It is these Amalekites who

provide the halachic basis for the festival of Purim, since the Torah itself

commands the Children of Israel "to remember the Amalekites… and you

shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the skies" (Exodus 17: 8-16;

Deuteronomy 25: 17-19). According to this, the whole basis for recalling

Purim reeks of revenge, if not indeed of genocide.

All these examples

of revenge culminate in the plot by Haman to destroy the Jews, a plot that is uncovered

at the last moment through the dramatic interventions of Mordechai and Esther.

However,

immediately after this, the Jews themselves are caught up in an act of revenge,

unparalleled since their decimation of the Canaanites in the time of Joshua: "And

in the capital city of Shushan, the Jews murdered 500 men." (Esther 9: 6), "and also

the ten sons of Haman" (ibid 12). "And the Jews assembled on the 14^th

of the month of Adar and killed in Shushan 300 men but took no spoil. And the

rest of the Jews who were in the king's dominions assembled and defended

themselves and gained respite from their enemies and slew 75,000 of those that

hated them, but took no spoils." (ibid. 16-17).

Such a response may

be considered natural and possibly inevitable. The rabbis seek solace in the

historical parallel with Amalek. Just as the memory of Amalek had to be wiped

out for its cowardly and unprovoked act so, too, must the Children of Israel

learn to respond appropriately. Indeed, the result of weakening one's resolve

on this issue – as with king Saul, when he refused to kill Agag the descendent

of Amalek (Sam.1: 15: 4-35) – has dire consequences. Martin Buber could never reconcile

himself to this response, opining that Samuel had simply misunderstood God's

word. Contrariwise, a midrashic tradition states that if you show mercy to the

cruel, you will invariably end up being cruel to the kind. (Kohelet Rabbah

7:36)

Another way the

sages responded to the Scroll of Esther was to ignore it. According to Dr

Elhanan Reiner of Alma and Tel Aviv University's Jewish History Department,

rabbinical commentary on Megilat Esther is uncharacteristically sparse,

especially chapter nine, which focuses on the Jews' revenge on their enemies.

"This is a sign," says Dr Reiner, "that the rabbis were

uncomfortable with the subject, and sought to ignore or neutralise it."

Even latter

commentators – including the medieval ones – are almost totally quiet on this

ninth chapter. Was it a question of not wishing to excite their non-Jewish

neighbours in the Diaspora? Was their own silence a parallel to God's

hiddenness in the scroll itself?

Among the hassidic

masters, most rely on the well worn Amalek-Haman nexus. Yet, occasionally,

there is a comment that addresses the specific issue of revenge. In his book Tiferet

Shlomo, Rabbi Dov Zvi HaCohen makes a distinction between simple evil and

that of Amalek. The former, whatever its appearance, always contains some 'holy

spark' – usually a reference to the sparks of holiness that fell from the

cosmic 'breaking of the vessels' at the beginning of time. Whatever alien body

they fell into, these sparks always yearn to attach themselves to something

holy. By contrast, Amalek possesses no such sparks. They are pure evil,

exhibiting no desire whatsoever to connect themselves to the sacred. The Jews

of Shushan thus not only wiped them out but also refused to touch their

possessions or take spoils, which would surely contain spiritually contagious

material.

This theory of

radical evil is highly provocative. There is even a certain attraction in

knowing that absolute evil exists, totally devoid of human feeling, and that it

is incumbent on the rest of humanity to uproot and destroy it. Moreover,

something so obvious is presumably easy to recognise. Reality, however, is

often far more complex than such black and white assumptions. It is easier to

speak of evil in the abstract than to know how to react to it in real life. For

response to evil reflects not only on the carrier of the evil but also on those

who would extinguish it, on whatever grounds.

Closer to our own

day, Michael Elkins in his book "Forged in Fury" describes the

activities of the acronymous group DIN which carried out acts of revenge

against known Nazis and their collaborators in the debris of post-Holocaust

Europe. However, their most daring plan – to poison the water of a major German

city containing 1,380,000 men, women and children (with the tacit help of the

then retired chemist Chaim Weizmann) was scratched at the last minute,

apparently by the Haganah.

If this story is

true – and there is much evidence to suggest that it is – then it shows that

some Jews at least learnt the lesson of their own history, and were more

concerned for their own integrity than teaching their mortal enemies a lesson.

Interestingly, in

the story of Esther each instance where a decision about revenge is to made the

individual making it – Ahasueras, Haman or Mordechai (1:16-22; 3:9; 5:14; 9:14) seek confirmation

from some outside source – the king's adviser's, Haman's wife or Ahasueras

himself. Even the most devious of politicians seek some outside authority – some

wise man or adviser – to justify their deeds.

If all this were

confined to a Biblical story, this would be a mere abstract discussion. But the

fact that it is Biblical ensures that its impact reaches across the

generations, with different people learning different lessons from it. In his

book Jewish Renewal for example, the contemporary thinker, Michael

Lerner observes that since 1994, Purim has taken on a far more ominous meaning.

On that Purim, Dr Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque inside the cave of

Machpela and gunned down 29 praying Moslems. Noting that the extremists who

supported this act quoted precisely the passages about Amalek and chapter 9 of

the scroll of Esther, he observes that the Biblical passage "does not

order the blotting out of Amalek but only the memory of Amalek. And

where does that memory live? Precisely in our tendency to act out on others

what was done to us… Torah seeks to make the unconscious conscious by

instructing us to remember what happened to us so we don't act it out

unconsciously. The point of remembering is to disentangle us from the pain and

thus to ‘blot out the memory.' The memory remains with us as long as it is

unconsciously shaping our actions."

Professor Lerner's

psychological analysis of revenge powerfully echoes those of Rambam (Sefer HaMitzvot) who emphasizes that

the "remembering" is to be expressed in words, and the "not

forgetting" in the heart. Rabbi Shimson Raphael Hirsch, too, in his

comments on the Amalek passages in the Bible, interprets the remembering of

Amalek as meaning never repeating his cruelty.

The tension between

these interpretations and day-to-day realities, especially in Israel, help

explain why the late Professor Nehama Leibowitz, the great Bible pedagogue, was

able to say of Amalek, that it was "the most difficult passage in the

Bible. And woe to the teacher whose students do not read this passage in

trepidation!"

The Megilah appears

to show a sharp distinction between fate and eternal recurrence and free will.

While much of our lives are determined by forces outside our control, it

suggests that we are just as capable of exercising free choice, if we wish to

do so.

The Mei Marom

(Rabbi

Yaacov Moshe Harlap) observes that the Megilah demonstrates that ultimately there is no

difference between these forces, and that what appears to be fate and chance is

in fact divine providence, even if its roots are as hidden and inscrutable as

the laws that govern human love and hatred.

Mordechai

Beck, an artist and writer, lives in Jerusalem

The Indwelling of the Divine Presence Reflects Human Attitudes

Towards God

One man used to say: When our love was strong, we could lie together on

the edge of a sword; now that the love between us has weakened, a bed 60 cubits

wide is insufficient for us. Rav Huna said: This idea is found in Scripture. In

the beginning it is written, I will arrange My

meetings with you there, and I will speak with you from atop the ark cover

(Shemot 25), and we learned that the Ark

was nine handbreadths, and the cover one handbreadth, making a total of ten,

but [later] it is written, And the house which king

breadth thereof twenty cubits, and the height thereof thirty cubits (I Kings 6). And in the

end it is written, So says the Lord, "The heavens are My throne, and

etc.? (Isaiah

66).

(Sanhedrin

7a)

To raise up an eternal lamp

This terminology for the lighting of the lamp appears in the Bible only

in reference to the service of the menorah. The language is precise, for

the mitzva is to light the wick "until

the fire burns on its own" (Shabbat 21),

meaning: The task of the Torah teacher is to make himself superfluous! The

priest should not place the laity in a status of perpetual dependency upon him.

From this we hear a warning to teachers and student to practice mutual patience

and forbearance.

(Rabbi S. R. Hirsch on Shemot 27:21)

Or