Why Don't We Just Tell the Story?

For years now, I've been wondering why we don't actually read over the Exodus story at the Seder, considering that this is the essential act of the night?

Why instead do we get the story piecemeal throughout the first part of the Haggada, in fragments, interspersed with all kinds of other random paragraphs containing other things (rabbis sitting in Bnei Brak, four children, ma nishtana etc) which, though interesting, are not the actual story? It's true that the Hagaddah may well be "the story about the story",  or "instructions to tell the story" which is very nice - but what happened to the story itself?

Good questions are like fine wine, they improve with age, they sit and stew until something emerges. 

This year I did my Seder alone due to the coronavirus, so I had the time and possibility to insert whatever I liked into the Seder ritual.  I told myself aloud the story of the Exodus, to see how it felt to do so (it felt ok, but a bit bare). Afterwards, as I was reading the Haggada, I noticed with greater clarity the pieces of the story that do appear, scattered throughout. 

And a sudden insight arose for me. Our life stories do not come linearly and clearly, with each day building upon the previous one in a way where we see how it fits in. Instead, our narratives develop in a windy and unclear way, with detours, seemingly irrelevant passages, obscure incidents. It is only when we look back from much further down the line that we can actually make our story coherent, and tell it in a way that it has a start and a middle (and perhaps an end.)

Right now, for example, we are in the middle of the coronavirus story. We are able to tell the beginning, but as we are still very much in the middle, we only have access to fragments of the ongoing plot, and certainly no clue about the end.

The Haggada is a reflection of the messiness of how our stories develop. As such, it holds a more profound message than a straight up story told directly would.

So I FINALLY have an answer that speaks to me. Ahh, that feels good.

The Essence of the Megillah - Achashverosh?!

There is an interesting Mishnah that says:

Mishnah Megillah 2:3: …From where does one read the megillah and fulfill the obligation? R’ Meir says, Read all of it. R’ Judah says, from “There was a certain Jew” (2:5). R’ Yossi says, from “After these things” (3:1).

This is rather odd. How could we start reading the megillah from anywhere but the beginning, and understand its plot? What is the meaning of "fulfilling the obligation" from points other than at the beginning?


The gemara adds a fourth position, and an explanation:

B. Talmud Megillah 19a: "R' Simeon bar Yohai says, from “On that night" (6:1). R’Yohanan says, All derive their interpretation from the same verse: “Then Esther the queen, the daughter of Abihail and of Mordecai the Jew, wrote down all the acts of power ['kol tokef,' or all the power or essence]" (9:29). For those who say read the entire Megillah, the essence is Ahasuerus. For those who say read from “There was a certain Jew” the essence is Mordecai. For those who say read from "After these things," the essence is Haman. For those who say read from "On that night," the essence is the miracle of Purim.'"

So the question is what the essence of the megillah?
I took a vote amongst a group of Jewish friends, and none of them voted that the essence of the megillah is Achashverosh. And yet that is how we pasken, as Rabbi Meir - that you have to start from the very beginning.

So how is the essence of the megillah Achashverosh? I think this is one of those questions which is stronger than the answers, but here are some possibilities:

My cousin's husband, Rabbi Da'vid Sperling, had the folllowing insight while discussing this question at the Purim seuda, 5780: Those who think the essence of the megillah is Mordechai (or indeed the Purim miracle) see God's hand behind the good things that occur to us. That is one level. A higher level is to see God's hand behind the evil things that happen to us - represented here by Haman. But the highest level of all, the essence of life, is to see God behind events that do not seem to have anything to do with us at all - in this case Achashverosh, his parties and his problems with his queen. At the highest level, God is orchestrating everything, and everything affects everything else. This is why the essence of the megillah is Achashverosh.


Another answer: while doing a bibliodrama on Esther Chapter 1 with the women's shiur of Bet Yosef, Jerusalem. Miriam Pomeranz noted that this king showed much flexibility, throughout the development of events, and managed to hold on to his position till the end. That made me think about the profound truth of this statement: while everyone else is either elevated (Mordechai. Esther, the Jews) or brought low/eliminated (Vashti, Haman, his sons, his wife), Achashverosh remains in the same basic position througout. That is no small thing.

We know that Achashverosh is compared in the megillah symbolically to the King of Kings, God. So a lesson that emerges from this is: when everything in the world is disrupted, and some are brought low while others suddenly find themselves unexpectedly powerful - and this is inevitably the case in the bigger picture, no one remains on top forever - God alone remains on an even keel - always God, always king.

And a final thought, relating to the human Achashverosh, is that unlike Haman who is cold, ruthless, angry to the point of becoming completely unhinged, Achashverosh always remains very human. He is drunk, he is angry and humiliated, but he also has a soft heart when it comes to Esther and wants to give to her and love her. Therefore, though he agrees to Haman's desire to kill the Jews, he is ultimately not our enemy, even if he is a bit morally spineless. Having a soft heart is a praiseworthy thing in Jewish thought (apart from when going to war). So this too might be a reason why we must begin with Achashverosh. And this humanness might be also why God can use him as his emissary שליח for his divine plan - why he merits to have that happen, despite all of his flaws.


Along these lines, this year, I wrote this piece [1]:

Well my name’s Achashverosh, yes you like to put me down

But in Megillat Esther it is I who bestow the crown,

My hands are God’s hands, my eyes God’s eyes,

My self the throne of glory, all thinly disguised.

Can YOU call yourself the vessel of the divine?

Or do you see with small brains, drawing a thick line

between finite and infinite, human and transcendent

never realizing it’s all interdependant

Throughout the megilla, my face is a mask

And G-d looks through it as I do His task,

Fool I might be, but my soft heart’s circumcised,

While Haman, clever, ruthless – is, I believe, demised.

He’s pushing up the daisies, he's completely expired

He’s ceased to be, he’s definitely retired

He's a stiff, kicked the bucket! Admit it, come on!

He’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil!! THIS IS AN EX-HAMAN!


[1] The idea of our eyes being as God's eyes in this world comes from Recanati's interpretation of the verse "an eye for an eye", which I heard quoted by Yitzhak Attias. The final lines of the verse are a reference to the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. I find it amusing to imagine Achashverosh pining for the fjords.

Right to the Edge

In the narrative of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, we see that God lets Abraham arrive at the very moment when he is about to cut his son's throat, before sending an angel to command him to stop:

10. And Abraham stretched out his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
11. And the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham; and he said, Here am I.
12. And he said, Lay not your hand upon the lad, nor do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you did not withheld your son, your only son from me.

Why wait until the very last moment? A couple of possible reasons present themselves.
1) In order to verify that he actually meant to go through with it, so it would be as if he had done it, and shown the dedication and obedience G-d wanted.
Or
2) In order to have Abraham and Isaac undergo the most powerful and transformative experience possible, without actually going through the act of father sacrificing son.

Which one of the above is true would depend on the divine purpose of the Akeda. Perhaps both are true.

But what strikes me most, right now, is the demand from Abraham to pull back at the very last second. It is not at all easy to stop an action when the momentum is already in place. Yet Judaism sometimes demands precisely that.

A vivid example is on the wedding night. After merely one conjugal act, in the passionate heart of their first night together as a couple, the groom and his bride must part because she has become impure (this is assuming she was a virgin):

"Following the expenditures [of the wedding], he immediately goes in and has relations with her. But when she says to him, 'I saw [blood] like a red lily,' he immediately withdraws from her. Who prevents him from drawing close to her? What iron wall or pillar stands between them? What snake bit him, what scorpion stung him so that he does not approach her? [It is] the words of the Torah, which are as soft as a lily, as the verse states: 'You shall not approach a woman in the impurity of her menstrual flow.'" (Shir Ha-shirim Rabba 7:3)

As in the Akeda, Judaism sometimes has a way of bringing you to the very edge of something and then requiring you not to cross the line.
People have a tendency to keep away from cliff edges and from edges of all sorts, just in case one might fall off them. This is the reason why in keeping halacha, many are stringent and keep the law more strictly than necessary, fearing that if they walk along the very edge of what is allowed, they will slip over it.  

And yet, Judaism will not allow wholesale stringency and keeping far away from those liminalities, those risky boundaries. It challenges its adherents to come close, very close, yet not cross. "You can do this," it admonishes. "Be mature, be self-disciplined, do it."

A prime example is matzah, unleavened bread. Matzah, once it passes 18 minutes of exposure to moisture becomes bread, the food absolutely forbidden on Pesach. Were matzah not commanded, no one would eat it, for it is too risky that it might pass the forbidden 18 minute boundary. Yet the Torah demands that it is matzah of all foods that we eat on Pesach.

The Torah wants us to walk on the (right side of the) wild side, to stand in the risky zone, and to do it successfully.


I also think of how the rabbis commanded us to light two candles before Shabbat came in. This is also a risky custom, for lighting of fire is completley prohibited on Shabbat, from the Torah. If the person lights a minute after Shabbat comes in, instead of doing an admirable act, they have committed a prohibition. So the rabbis did their best to put a fence around this halacha, by adding "tosefet Shabbat", 20 or 40 minutes.

In the olden days,  the candles would have to be lit anyway to create llight in the house, so the custom caused them to be lit before Shabbat, which was good. But today, we light these flames solely because of the rabbinically instigated action.

And in fact I know people do light late, including people who aren't Shabbat observant but like the custom. So it really IS a risky proposition. That is why the calendar left by the Jerusalem municipality's religious department in my mailbox says in huge bold letters beneath lighting times: REMEMBER TO LIGHT ON TIME, FOR IT IS PROHIBITED TO BURN FIRE ON SHABBAT!)

And yet the rabbis did not just take the safe route and say, "You know what, never mind, you don't have to light candles. Just pretend, or make the blessing on an electric light." They won't allow us to be wholesale "machmir" and avoid risk always, even if it does say אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד.

Go rabbis!

Our Inner Sailors

And back to the story of Jonah, from which I cannot keep away.

A comment in a bibliodrama on Jonah chapter 1 led me to notice how we can read the story as symbolic of our inner processes.

The boat is akin to our psyche, our whole system. Jonah’s falling asleep in it represents repression and denial, two mechanisms that manage to keep us asleep even during powerful storms. They keep us blind to our own inner crisis, which then ratchets up, higher and higher, in a bid to get our attention.

The captain would normally have nothing to do with a passenger asleep in the bowels of his ship. However, he is thrown off kilter by the storm and – in an example of a topsy-turvy order of things, where those above descend below – he leaves his usual post to come down, find the offending sleeper and urge him (1:6): 

"What do you mean, O sleeper? Arise! Call upon your God! Perhaps God will give a thought to us, that we do not perish."

No answer from Jonah.
Symbolically, the captain is the superego, the voice of our conscience. When it sees that the boat, i.e. the psyche, the self, is cracking apart, it tries to take charge of the situation through the means with which it is familiar: rousing words, intstructions, and commands.
But this is not a language that the repressed awareness can even hear. It continues to sleep.

It is only when the sailors arrive, and plead (1:8):

"Tell us, we beg you, for whose cause is this evil upon us? What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?"

that Jonah finally responds, replying (1:9):

"I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."

He is connecting to his identity and to a higher power. This leads to his suggesting a solution. He is now in charge, and knows what to do. This is the healthy ego, the functional self that rejects both the id’s denial and the superego’s unbearable pressure, and listens to intuition that helps the divine voice to come through and give aid.

Our captain, the voice of reason, our adult voice, cannot actually speak to the parts of us that are in distress, that are childish, unreasonable, shut down. If we shout at a child acting from within emotional baggage, we may have all the reason in the world on our side, but they will not hear us. It was the sailors’ approach in a respectful manner, as equals, their actually showing interest in Jonah and his personal history, that successfully elicited a response. Their warmth of approach, their genuine humanity (expressed even more strongly when they do not want to throw him overboard, even to save their own lives) give him the space to wake up to his true self, connect to his identity, connect to God, and get back in the saddle.  

We need to find those sailors inside us – the compassionate voices of our inner loving parent, our inner kind therapist, coach and friend – that can hear us and want to understand who we really are, without judgment. It reminds me of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's story of the Turkey Prince, or (the Option method for treating autism), in which the wise adult figure descends “under the table” to the child's level, in order to genuinely understand and create an atmosphere of trust. This allows the prince to eventually come back up to sit at the table.

What Abraham Starts, Hannah Completes

On each of the two days of Rosh Hashanah there is one reading from the Torah and one from the Prophets.

The Torah portions are Gen 21:1-34 - the miraculous birth in Sarah's old age of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael; and Gen 22:1-24 - the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

The Prophetic readings are I Samuel 1:1-2:10, the story of childless Hannah who finally makes a vow to dedicate the son born to her to the service of God in Shilo; and Jeremiah 31:1-19, about the ingathering of the exiles.

A theme running clearly through the first three is the complex interplay between parents, their love for their children, the sacrifices they make and God's response. The fourth reading, Jeremiah 31, also contains the verses:

So says the L‑rd: A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, for they are not.

So says the L‑rd: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work, says the L‑rd, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

Unlike Hagar, Rachel is not "exiled" with her children. She remains behind, lamenting their absence.

I want to, however, speak of the other two and the connection between them. I have spent years wondering what went through Hannah's mind, what was the process that she went through as she wept bitterly for many years in her barrenness, before finally finding the way to pray in order to open her locked destiny as a mother.

Did you ever wonder if the later biblical figures had the stories of the earlier biblical heroes to draw upon? Surely Hannah knew the story of Abraham and the Akeda.

I imagine her drawing upon this story with its example of the ultimate sacrifice (that was not made in the end), whether conciously or uncosciously, in casting around to try to answer for herself what God's will for her could be, or what God might want her to do, in order to revert the harsh decree upon her. She hits upon the idea of doing a kind of Akeda - offering her son to God, in the best way she knows how. Not for death, but for life - for a life sanctified and elevated.

We see how once this idea arises in her, a calm descends upon her, and she finds the words and the way. Eli the priest accuses her of being drunk, but even that cannot shatter her calm, for she knows she has found the right path.

Ultimately God did not want Abraham to kill his son. God apparently only wanted to bring Abraham (and Isaac) to the very edge of religious devotion. The lesson for the world was: do not kill your children. This is not the way to serve God.

But it is in the Hannah story that this lesson reaches its culmination. God says, if you however wish to dedicate your child to Me (assuming it is the right child for it), then that is welcome. That is the evolved path. And it leads to the birth of the prophet Samuel.

From Abraham we learn the negative, what God does not want us to do. But from Hannah (inspired by the Akeda, perhaps) we learn the positive, what God wants us to do.
Most of us will not dedicate our children to temple service, and neither should we. But we can find a way to convey to our children that we are willing to let them go, however painful that is, if they need to evolve in ways that leave us behind.