Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
March 25, 2005
The Rest of the (Purim) Story
As you know, there are five fairly short biblical books written in scroll form. The Hebrew word for such a small scroll is megillah. There is the Song of Psalms, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Each is written on its own separate scroll, and each megillah is attached to a holiday. Song of Psalms is read on Pesach; Ruth on Shavuot; Lamentations on Tisha B'av; Ecclesiastes at Sukkot; and, of course, Esther provides the background and directions for the Purim Festival.
Esther is the second longest megillah. Since it is read during the midst of our Mardi Gras Festival, with a lot of carnival-like celebrating, maybe it spawned the Yiddish expression gantse megillah – the whole megillah – implying a long megillah. When somebody in Yiddish would say: Oy, you're making it a gantse megillah – then what they are implying is "get to the point, don't tell me all the details."
Tonight I would like to suggest that this expression gantse megillah is based on the fact that most Jews do not want to deal with the whole of Megillat Esther. We usually do not pay much attention to the last two chapters. We are perfectly happy to end with King Ahasuerus having appointed Mordecai the new Prime Minister, and an edict issued for the Jews to be allowed to defend themselves on the 13th of Adar, the day previously set by Haman for our People's extermination. Chapter 8 of the Book of Esther says: "Mordecai left the king's presence in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool. And the city of Shushan rang with joyous cries. The Jews enjoyed light and gladness, happiness and honor. And in every province and in every city, when the king's command and decree arrived, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them." Enough. We can celebrate. No need to read further.
But friends, there are 35 more verses, 32 of them in chapter nine. Furthermore, if you are a morally sensitive person, then you may well be troubled by what is related in Esther, Chapter 9. To see if we can find some meaning in this chapter, I am going to study it with you this evening with the help of two scholars, whom I shall introduce shortly.
Chapter 9 says that on the 13th day of the 12th month, the month of Adar, on the very day when the king's command "kill all the Jews" was to be carried out, the opposite happened and the Jews got their enemies in their power. Throughout the provinces, the Jews assembled and attacked those who sought their harm, and no one could withstand them. In the capital city of Shushan alone, the Jews killed 500 people.
Then the king said to Esther: "What is your wish now?" And his Queen replied: "Let the Jews of Shushan be permitted to do tomorrow as they did today." In other words, Esther was asking permission for the Jews to continue killing for one more day. The king granted her request, and the Jews in Shushan killed 300 more people on the 14th of Adar. So the Jews killed 800 Persians in the capital city alone, but the text is very clear that they did not touch the spoil. Unlike most victorious armies, the Jews did not pillage. The megillah goes on to say that in the provinces beyond the capital city, the Jews killed 75,000 of their enemies. "And now you know the rest of the Purim Story."
How do you feel when you hear this passage in which the Jews killed so many Persians? Killing Haman was understandable. Self-defense is a religious obligation in Judaism. We can understand Jews wanting to defend themselves. But to kill 800 Shushanites and 75,000 more Persians in the provinces – how are we to understand this? Down through the centuries, many Jews and many Christians have been troubled by this passage. Martin Luther, who was a virulant anti-Semite, cited this incident as proof that the Jews are vicious and blood-thirsty. Luther asked: "How are these Jews, who killed so many Persians, any different from the Persians who wanted to kill the Jews?"
It is not surprising then that many of us end our Purim megillah reading with chapter 8. What we want to remember has been recounted; there is no need to deal with these additional verses.
Besides, how do we justify this passage? Did God tell the Jews to kill all these people? No, God is not mentioned in the Book of Esther. Did they do it on their own and, if so, was it right to do it? How do we reconcile this passage in which the Jews killed so many Persians with the passage that we are so proud to read on Pesach? You remember the Midrash about how when the Egyptians drowned in the Reed Sea the angels in Heaven wanted to cheer, but God stopped them. God said: "My children (meaning the Egyptians) are drowning in the sea. How can you sing and celebrate?"
How can the same tradition contain both these passages? One in which God forbids the angels from celebrating when the Egyptians drown, the one in which to this day we spill ten drops of wine on the seder night when we recall the ten plagues that the Egyptians suffered; and this passage in which Jews kill so many Persians.
Many commentators – Medieval and modern, Jewish and Christian – have tried to explain this passage. Rashi gives one explanation, Ramban gives another, and the Rambam gives a third. I would like to offer an explanation this evening which comes not from a Jew, but from an American of Italian descent – Bart Giamatti.
Both scholars and baseball fans will recognize that name. Bart Giamatti was a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature who rose through the ranks of academia to become the President of Yale University. He then shocked the academic world by resigning to become the Commissioner of Baseball. Would you give up the presidency of one of the greatest universities in the world to become Baseball Commissioner? Giamatti did because baseball was the great love of his life. But when he became Baseball Commissioner he found out that it was not the simple job that he might have thought it would be.
First, he had to deal with the Pete Rose case. Pete Rose was one of Giamatti's heroes. The Commissioner admired Rose's ability and hustle on the field tremendously. Rose was one of the greatest hitters the game of baseball has ever known. But Giamatti was the one who had to bar Pete Rose from the game for life, because Rose bet on games in which he played. The Commissioner had no choice. The rule is clear; you are not allowed to do that, and if you do – and you get caught – you have to be expelled. To this day, Rose is ineligible for Baseball's Hall of Fame and every year when voting time comes around, Pete's name comes up again. There are those who believe he should be allowed in the Hall of Fame, and there are those who believe he should not; but Giamatti is always remembered as the Commissioner who banned Pete Rose.
Giamatti also had to deal with a less publicized, but also very interesting, case. Kevin Gross was a baseball pitcher. Gross was caught with a piece of sandpaper attached to his glove. What's the big deal? Well, if you rub a baseball against sandpaper, you can make it spin in strange and unpredictable ways. It is like throwing a "spit ball", which is forbidden in baseball. Gross was also caught with glue on his glove, which is clearly outlawed. The purpose of the glue was to make sure that if a ball was hit to him, it would not fall out of his glove. Obviously, also against the rules. So Commissioner Giamatti fined Kevin Gross and suspended him from baseball for the rest of the season.
Mr. Gross' attorney sued, and he made an interesting argument. He said: "If players get into a fist fight in the middle of a game, what do you do? You fine them or you suspend them for a day or two, maybe even for a week – but you do not suspend them for a whole season like you did with my client. Why is what he did worse than what they did? You have a dual standard, Commissioner. You treat my man differently than you treat players who get into a fight. So I am appealing your decision."
It is a fairly cogent argument. Giamatti took it seriously, and he wrote a response explaining the difference. In Jewish law it would have been called a teshuvah; it reads like the response of a posek, a deciser who is explaining a halachic ruling. This is what Giamatti said: "I do not approve of physical violence, of course not. But physical violence is never planned. It is a spontaneous reaction to what is perceived to be an injustice, and it is understandable for men who are by nature physical, to give way to the impulse to use violence when they are provoked by what they see as injustice.
But cheating is different, and not only because cheating corrodes the integrity of the game and destroys public confidence in the game. Cheating is worse than physical violence because it is planned. It is not spontaneous as physical violence usually is. Cheating requires foresight." In other words, friends, Kevin Gross carefully planned where to put the glue and the sandpaper in his glove. It was not something that, on the spur of the moment, he decided to do.
Now I am sure that Bart Giamatti knew the Book of Esther, for he was a very literate man. And I think that if he had been asked, he would have made the same distinction that he made in the Kevin Gross case in the case of chapter 9 of the Book of Esther. He would have said that Haman and his cohorts were like Kevin Gross – they planned their attack upon the Jews for many months. They thought it out carefully in advance; therefore, it was wicked. Whereas the Jews, who responded by killing their enemies, never planned it. The messengers arrived with the incredible news that at the last minute they were saved. Not only were they saved, they were given permission by the king to defend themselves. So with a spontaneous, unplanned, understandable, human reaction, the Jews responded by doing to the others what the others had planned to do to them.
The Jews were not like Kevin Gross and not like the followers of Haman who planned and plotted what they were going to do for a long time. They were people who breathed a sigh of relief at their last minute, unexpected rescue, and then gave in to their emotions of pent up anger – and who can blame them?
There is a difference between thought out, planned, deliberate acts of violence, and acts of vengeance which are done spontaneously in the heat of the moment, without planning and without preparation. At least that is the response that Bart Giamatti made in the Kevin Gross case, and I think he would have made it in the Megillah case if it had been brought to him for trial.
Now let's move from the realm of theory to the realm of real life. Let me tell you about a man who faced the same question in our time that the Jews of Persia faced in their time. This is a fascinating case which never came to trial.
The man's name was Abba Kovner, one of the great poets of his generation, first in Yiddish and then in Hebrew, first in Vilna and then in Israel. One of the leaders of the Vilna Ghetto Uprising, Kovner subsequently made his way through the sewers of Vilna into the forests where he joined the partisans. After the war, he found his way to Israel where he became a kibbutz member, one of the designers of the Museum of the Diaspora, and the author of Givilot Ha-esh – which is one of the most powerful efforts to memorialize the Holocaust in words that we have. Abba Kovner is known for these things, but there is one thing that he did which is much less known. Recently a book by Richard Cohen entitled The Avengers was published, which tells the story of what Abba Kovner did after the war.
When Kovner came out of the woods, he found that the Nazis had killed his whole family and all of his friends. He yearned for what I think any human being would desire at such a time; Kovner wanted revenge. And so this is what he and a small group did. They found that several thousand Nazis were being held in a prison camp run by the American Army. One night Kovner and his fellow forest survivors broke into the bakery on that base. The Military Police discovered that several loaves of bread were missing, so they thought it was an ordinary robbery – but it was not.
What the Army did not know was that the people who broke into that bakery were not there to steal bread, but to replace bread. They knew that the American soldiers liked to eat white bread and that the Nazis liked to eat black bread. So they replaced the black bread in the bakery with new loaves spiced with arsenic. As a result, a number of Nazis died that day of food poisoning. Nobody knows exactly how many, because the American Army immediately clamped down on the story and gave out no information. The one thing about this little known story which I find particularly interesting is that Kovner and company did it only once; they never did it again.
Years later, Abba Kovner was asked why they did it and why they never did it again. His answer was: "We did it to make the point that Jewish blood is not cheap, and that those who harm us deserve punishment – and if the courts will not punish them properly, then we will. We did it only once because we are Jews."
They were Jews and so they understood that once makes the point; but if you do it again and again, eventually you get used to doing it – you get callous to killing – and eventually you become like those whom you hate.
That almost unknown story about Abba Kovner and his cronies has only been told in detail for the first time in a fairly new book. As I consider that story, I can't help but wonder how Abba Kovner celebrated Purim and what he thought of chapter nine of Megillat Esther. It is too late to ask; Abba Kovner died a few years ago.
It is too late to ask Bart Giamatti now also. But I think he would have agreed with Abba Kovner, not just because they were fellow literateurs. I believe that Giamatti would have agreed that there is no comparison whatsoever between what Abba Kovner did and what the Nazis did, just as there is no comparison between what the Persians were going to do to the Jews with foresight, deliberate planning and intention, and what the Jews did to the Persians in the heat of the moment, spontaneously, in relief at having their lives saved at the very last moment, in an unplanned vengeance for what was almost done to them.
So, friends, if next year you want to listen to the gantse megillah, the whole megillah, let's learn a lesson from the last two chapters. Let's learn the difference between deliberate planned, premeditated violence, violence that comes from vicious hatred; and spontaneous violence, violence which results from relief and from the understandable human desire for retribution. As long as we can keep that distinction clear, as Abba Kovner and his friends did, we are still Jews. Amen
I learned this lesson from Rabbi Jack Riemer and am happy to be able to share it with our congregation.
