Purim - To celebrate not knowing
Genesis 25:19 - 28:9 | Malachi 1:1 - 2:7
Summary: One of the primary weapons of Haman/Amalek is to feast on not-knowing. When someone is ambivalent, they are often weak. So, to create ambivalence in your enemy is to put yourself at an advantage. So, we should celebrate the defeat of Haman/Amalek by bolstering our clarity, right? Wrong! We create a holiday that celebrates and sanctifies, not-knowing.
***
“I need ammunition, not a ride.” God, I envy Volodymyr Zelensky’s clarity. He just knows that he is not leaving his people in Ukraine. No question. Send bullets.
He’s not the only Ukrainian with that kind of clarity. For every photo of a destroyed Ukrainian building that we see, we also see a photo of some stout Ukranian grandmother with a rifle and some sunflower seeds and a colorful curse that would make my yiddish-speaking grandmother blush.
So many people fighting for Ukraine are quite clear - as clear as their leader Zelensky. I’m not at all surprised - when your country is being attacked by an obvious enemy, when the choice is between freedom and not-freedom and between democracy and tyranny, these people know exactly where they stand, and many of them know that they are even willing to die. Wouldn’t most of us react in the same way if Putin were attacking our homeland?
Part of what makes it so easy is that Putin is so obviously wrong. There isn’t any question. He doesn’t have a reasonable explanation. There is no doubt. For once, it’s black and white. But what happens when it’s not so clear? When there are two paths you can go by, and both of them seem perfectly fine, or neither of them seems even remotely satisfactory? People often lose their resolve when there are no clear indications of which is the right way to go. They don’t fight so hard.
So if I were trying to defeat someone who is stronger than I am, I would try to diminish their strength by causing them to doubt themselves. I’d want to encourage their ambivalence so that whatever they do they will do half-heartedly. My primary tactic would be to get them to doubt themselves. Will you fight so hard if you feel guilty? Will you passionately battle me if you are also battling yourself?
Maybe there really is an invisible enemy somewhere who is trying to throw us off their trail by catalyzing, cultivating and encouraging our ambivalence, and it’s working. Of course I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that many of us, like me, are of two minds (or no minds) about many things, ranging from the mundane to the sublime, all the way from “what should I have for dinner” and “what should I watch tonight” to “do my actions really matter” and “what is my soul?” Many of us our struggling to figure out what is real, what is important, and what is right.
This not-knowing is insidious. It leaves people paralyzed, performing actions without real commitment, half-in and half-out, stuck, confused, caught up, disconnected, looking around for external verification of our actions, for approval, to make sure we’re on track, on the right team. Because we just. Don’t. Know.
And what is the Jewish response to not knowing? Obviously, to make a holiday out of it.
**
The Purim story is an Amalek story. Amalek is the tribe in the Torah that is devoted to the destruction-from-within and then destruction-from-without of the Jewish people. There are three instances of encounter with Amalek in our ancient tradition, and each of them is characterized by some not-knowing, some confusion.
The first, in the wilderness, a few weeks out of Egypt, after crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites become confused and wonder, “Is God with us, or not?” And, immediately, Amalek engages them in battle. The second: Shaul, the first king of Israel, is told to destroy every person and animal in the tribe of Amalek, but he falters. Should he listen to the prophet of God and kill the animals, and also the funny, adorable king, or should he listen to the people, who want the animals to be left alive? Amalek has struck. The third: In Shushan of the Purim story, the Jews doubt whether God has abandoned them. They had been told by the prophet Jeremiah that they would return to their land after 70 years, but 70 years had long since lapsed. And, anyway, they wondered: did they even deserve to return to the land? They had gone to Achashveirosh’s feast. They had bowed down to idols. They were asleep at the wheel. And while they were wrestling with their own guilt and their own worthiness, Amalek strikes again.
Clearly this not-knowing comes hand-in-hand with Amalek, and makes us very vulnerable to his attacks. But, unlike Putin, an attack from Amalek doesn’t feel like some bad guy has got us backed against the wall because of that not-knowing. Since we suspect that the enemy is contained in our very selves, a result of our own actions, and that we might be wrong or unworthy, we are not clear and whole-hearted like Zelensky. We fight ourselves and we half-fight Amalek, and with those odds, Amalek will win.
But Mordecai sees through it. He sees the invisible enemy Amalek. He knows that this doubt doesn’t just attract Amalek, but somehow emerges from Amalek. Mordecai alone sees that we are under attack. He gets it: the not-knowing is a destabilizing Amalek-tactic. So he goes into the town square and screams a mighty, bitter scream, and everyone who hears it wakes up and can now see what he sees - that invisible doubt-inducing enemy. Suddenly Haman-Amalek emerges from the shadows and everyone knows what they’re up against. At that point, Shushan turns into something like Ukraine - “the king has given permission to the Jews in every city to gather together and to fight for their lives…” (Esther 8:11) And so it was: “The Jews gathered together in every province of King Achashveirosh to fight against all who sought ill of them, and no one stood in their way.” With the enemy in plain sight, the fight is whole-hearted, uncomplicated, full and fierce.
So how do you celebrate the holiday that commemorates this defeat? It’s tricky. If you look for the root of the problem in the Purim story, you find that it lies in the Jews’ inability to manage their not-knowing. Amalek somehow induces not-knowing, they take the bait and self-destruct, and then Amalek comes to physically finish the job. The Jews didn’t know how to be when they thought God had abandoned them; they didn’t know how to deal with their missteps without letting those mistakes imply unworthiness.
Because they wavered in not-knowing, they became susceptible to Amalek. So the work has to be in learning how to not-know without letting it throwing us off-course. How can we draw a clear line between uncertainty and doubt? How do you not-know without assuming the worst, without giving up, without lurching toward a tempting but facile resolution to a complicated and challenging situation?
To work on not-knowing, we are encouraged by our tradition to achieve a state of not-knowing on Purim. The Talmud says that “a person is obligated to achieve an altered state on Purim to the point where they do not know” - and, from that state, to make good choices (or non-choices), to find clarity in non-clarity, to find connection amidst confusion, whole-heartedness amidst split-heartedness, passion within perplexity.
No simple task, but we’re not a simple people, and we’re not looking for the easy way out. We’re here to do the hard work, with joy.