Towards the end of the book of Esther, which we shall read this week, we are told that after their miraculous deliverance the Jews accepted upon themselves the observance of Purim forever after. Kiymu ve’kiblu, the Jews “confirmed and took upon themselves” and their children after them to observe these two days of Purim. Now, logic dictates that the two key verbs should be in reverse order: not kiymu ve’kiblu, but kiblu ve’kiymu, first “took upon themselves,” accepted, and only then “confirmed” what they had previously accepted. It is probably because of this inversion of the proper order in our verse, that the Rabbis read a special meaning into this term in a famous passage in the Talmud (Shab. 88a). When the Lord revealed Himself at Sinai and gave the Torah, they tell us, kafah alehem har ke’gigit, He, as it were, lifted up the mountain and held it over the heads of the Israelites gathered below as if it were as cask, and He said to them: “If you accept the Torah, good and well; but if not, sham tehei kevuratkhem – I shall drop the mountain on your heads, and here shall be your burial place.” Moreover, the Rabbis then drew the conclusions from this implication that the Israelites were coerced into accepting the Torah. R. Aba b. Yaakov maintained that if this is the case, then modaa rabbah l’oraita – this becomes a strong protest against obligatory nature of the Torah, it is “giving notice” to God that the Torah is not permanently binding, for the Torah is in the nature of a contract between God and Israel, and a contract signed under duress is invalid.The other Rabbis of the Talmud treated this objection with great seriousness. Thus, Rava argued that, indeed, the Torah given at Sinai was not obligatory because of the reason stated, that modaa rabbah l’oraita; but, Rava adds: af-al-pi-ken hadar kibluha bi’yemei Ahashverosh, the Israelites reaffirmed the Torah voluntarily in the days of the Purim event, for it is written: kiymu ve’kiblu, that the Israelites “confir…

It is a fact of life that, except for those young people who transmuted their awareness of the Shoah (Holocaust) into active protest on behalf of Soviet Jewry, large numbers of the generation of American Jews who were born or grew up after 1948, are “turned off” by the Holocaust. For some of them, the “six million” and all that is implied by it is too imagination-staggering and therefore simply incredible. It is, truth to tell, too heavy a burden to bear, both in the guilt that it induces (and there have been several psychological studies of the guilt feelings by the survivors) and the consequences that it suggests. Hence, there has been an unconscious attempt to reduce the scope of the Holocaust. Of course, no American Jews go as far as the Polish government which, after a centuries-long experience of denying that Jews are human, let alone good Poles, now decides that the martyred Polish Jews died not as Jews but as Polish citizens, for which reasons the memorials to them at the concentration camps in Poland’s territory have no mention of their Jewishness. Rather, what has happened is that in the consciousness of many young Jews, Auschwitz has been diminished to manageable proportions by inflating the rhetoric that deals with other problems of our own times. The Holocaust experience becomes understandable, credible, assimilable, only if some of the evils of our own times are conceived of as being in the same order of wickedness. Thus, if the city provides inferior teachers for Harlem – and that is certainly a bad thing – shrill voices term that evil, “genocide!” If there are those who oppose our government on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, we escalate the criticism and refer to it as – “genocide.” And sometimes some young radicals, in their utter recklessness, refer to the actions of college administrations which decide to discipline unruly protestors as – “genocide!”Thus, Auschwitz was simply another act of genocide in a whole list with which we are acquainted. It …

"Jewish naivete?" That sounds surprising, even ludicrous. Surely, a people that boast so many successful businessmen, shrewd merchants, pragmatic scientists, and men of affairs cannot be accused of naivete. And yet—the charge is true. It seems that there is a strain of collective naivete that runs through our history like some spoiled gene that had fastened itself on our chromosomes. It expresses itself not merely in idealism—often done to excess—but in an ingenuousness that borders on dangerous ignorance about the nature of man.The trait was already noticeable in the ancient Persian period. The key verse of the Megillah, the Book of Esther, concerning this problem is: "the city of Shushan (that is, its Jewish population) was perplexed." The word "perplexed" is too weak. Perhaps "overwhelmed" is more accurate. Persian Jewry was completely unprepared for the possibility of genocide. In Persia, Jews thought that "it can't happen here." Surely, civilized men and a cultured society cannot suddenly be transformed into beasts. The Jews of Persia were comfortable in their society. They felt at home in the Empire. The Tradition, commenting on the story of the opulent oriental banquet which opens the whole Book of Esther, maintains that the reason the decree of destruction was issued against the Israelites of that generation was because they participated in the banquet of the wicked Ahasuerus. Rabbi Meir Shapiro, of blessed memory, the great founder of the Yeshiva of Lublin, sees in this talmudic dictum more than the mere assertion that the Jews were punished for eating non-kosher. The Rabbis did not say that they ate, but that they benefited from or enjoyed the meal. The Rabbis were pointing to the whole psychological attitude, the total social outlook that characterized the Persian Jews. The latter saw in that banquet of the Emperor to which they were invited not a meal but a symbol, a symbol that they were on par with all others of the 127 provinces of Ahasuerus. They we…