i aten't dead

Rabbinical school application essay question.*

Faith: How do you experience the Divine? What do you believe about the nature of Torah as revealed in word and deed, and how does this affect your religious action? How do you relate to the concepts of obligation (chiyuv) and choseness ('am segulah)? How do the destruction of European Jewry and the birth of Israel affect your religious landscape? What would a redeemed world look like?

Speaking as an European Jew, and one of the more favoured ones at that, I find this question deeply, deeply offensive. The phrase the destruction of European Jewry reflects accurately the popular notion among US Jews that there are no Jews to speak of, and no Judaism worth mentioning, in Europe - that Jews in Europe are merely the stuff of legend.

Of course the Shoah did ghastly things to the European Jewry which was flourishing in the 1930s. Of course European Jewry was more or less razed to the ground and all but paralysed by trauma. Of course those events are relevant in a question about faith. But the thing is, European Jewry was not destroyed.

So a major US rabbinical school here betrays its working perception of European Jewry as entirely destroyed. This is terrifically problematic: certainly there no longer exist the major centres of learning and whopping great Jewish communities for which pre-Shoah Europe is remembered, but there are still Jews, and they are not dead. All too many Jewish institutions in the USA operate on the basis that they are, and frankly it'd be jolly nice if they didn't.

A redeemed world? Could start with schools like this recognising that European Jews are real live people with real live communities, and not behaving as though we're all phantoms of nostalgia. It would do an awful lot more to foster the growth of such communities, and it would probably be good for the personal development of the American rabbinate to have to stop navel-gazing now and again. Plus of course it's just rude to go around making like we're all dead, and believe me you don't want me making woo-woo noises in your bedroom in the middle of the night.



* No, I'm not applying to rabbinical school.

Finding God in the Megillah

The Megillah never explicitly references God, and since it's a biblical book, people at various times have found this a tad problematic.

I mentioned last week that the practice of starting each column with the word HaMelekh - The King - is perhaps a nod heavenwards, as it were, given the allegorical representation of God as King.

Another custom you sometimes see is the enlarging of certain letters such that the four-letter Name of God stands out, thus:

ותאמר אסתר אם על המלך טוב יבוא המלך והמן היום אל המשתה אשר עשיתי לו

This is the only place you get it in consecutive words (chapter 5). I've never looked for it happening in different places - non-consecutive words, or line heads, or column heads - I don't have access to that many manuscripts. Anyone want to pitch in with info?

I strongly suspect that what came first was some scribe noticing "Hey, cool..." and subsequently us getting all serious about it. Compare some of the liturgical poems wherein the name of the poet is spelled out by the first letters of the verses - that's either arrogant beyond belief, or it's playful (or something else that I don't know about but Gabriel does and if that's so I'd be obliged if he'd say so in the comments), and I don't know about you but I'd rather assume it was playful.

Making letters big is different from tweaking the column heads - big and small letters carry more significance, generally, than column heads. So tweaking the text so that the column heads are all HaMelekh - or HaMalka - is fine so long as you don't mangle the columns, but making letters big and small is more dicey - easy enough, but significant enough that one shouldn't do it unless one has a tradition of doing it. So spelling out yud-hey-vav-hey in enlarged letters is one thing, but doing, say, חמה ויתאפק המן for someone called Hava would be Pretty Darn Dodgy. There's fun, and then there's taking it too far, you know? Spelling one's name in a poem is less dodgy than spelling it out in a sacred scroll. Anyway, point being, we have fun with letters and words and layout, within the bounds of good taste, and I bet the fun came first and the Serious Interpretations after, with the yud-hey-vav-hey and the HaMelekh both.

Talking of fun. Another large letter in the Megillah. You see the similarity here? A happy accident.