Saving Torah from Ourselves

When the month of Adar enters, joy (simcha) increases—so the Talmud teaches.

Adar brings us the first moments of spring: buds beginning to adorn bare trees, daylight slowly increasing, and the arrival of the joy-inducing, cacophonous, topsy-turvy festival of Purim.

Purim’s central practices are about experiencing joy and enabling joy to be felt by others. We celebrate through festive meals, rowdy shpiels, weird cookies, costumes—a day where the normal ways of doing things are peeled away to make space for a more joyful, differently attuned way of being together.

But as I enter Adar, it’s hard to imagine embodying this kind of joy. 

The Purim story itself challenges the notion of pure simcha, as it is both a farce about the familiar characters of Esther, Vashti, Mordechai, and Haman and their woes in King Achashverosh’s court, and a glorified tale of murderous vengeance enacted by Jews. (They didn’t teach me that last bit in Hebrew school.) 

We grapple with this deep violence contained within the festive jubilation in Purim’s more recent history, too. Purim marks the anniversary of the 1994 massacre in the al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hevron by Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on hundreds of Palestinian Muslims praying during Ramadan. Goldstein believed he was reenacting the end of the Purim story. One scholar, Elliot Horowitz, uses Purim as a prism through which to better understand Jewish violence, and Peter Beinart’s new book charges readers to allow Purim’s story in its fullness to help us Jews shape our self-understanding into one that incorporates the reality that we are not only victims of violence but that Jews are violent actors, as well. As one of my teachers, Rabbi Ethan Tucker stated plainly last January, “Jews are killing more people since…when? The Bar Kochba rebellion? The Purim story?”

Rabbis Jessica Rosenberg and Ariana Katz express this tension beautifully in their guide to the Jewish calendar, For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year: “Alongside and deeply woven into the story of resistance and rebellion, it is essential to confront and be accountable for acts of violence by Jews that this story spawned and encouraged…This text has inspired violence and harm that continues to impact Palestinian lives in our lifetime. We must create new rituals to shine a light on and disrupt this violence.”

In this same spirit, our Rabbis (Yoma 72b) teach us to recognize that Torah has the potential to be either life-giving or deadly:

אָמַר רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי, מַאי דִּכְתִיב: ״וְזֹאת הַתּוֹרָה אֲשֶׁר שָׂם מֹשֶׁה״, זָכָה — נַעֲשֵׂית לוֹ סַם חַיִּים, לֹא זָכָה — נַעֲשֵׂית לוֹ סַם מִיתָה. 

וְהַיְינוּ דְּאָמַר רָבָא: דְּאוֹמֵן לַהּ — סַמָּא דְחַיָּיא, דְּלָא אוֹמֵן לַהּ — סַמָּא דְמוֹתָא.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “And this is the Torah which Moses put [sam] before the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 4:44)? If one merits, the Torah becomes a potion [sam] of life for them. If one does not merit the Torah becomes a potion of death for them. 

And this idea is what Rava said: For one who treats Torah as a craft, it is a potion of life; but for one who does not treat Torah as a craft, it is a potion of death.

One who can approach Torah as a craft, Rava teaches, can help use it for good. One who can’t, will use it for harm. To “craft” Torah, from the root אמן, which also means “to train,” and “to be skilled in” or “skillful with,” offers a sense of the deep work, discipline, and rigorous engagement involved in truly working the tradition.

I used to think this alchemical process was about Torah itself: sometimes Torah can be problematic, painful, or hard, and those who are able to work it have the power to transform Torah into a life-giving substance. This helps me pull my way through the parts of Torah that hurt, and find myself with a renewed teaching on the other side.

According to Rava, we can redeem Torah from itself. This has helped me bring critical-but-crafty attention to the points of the Purim narrative that outrage and agitate me, wondering how I can turn those verses that feel so clearly like a death-potion into something enlivening. But recently, I’ve wondered if Rava might also be telling us, perhaps more importantly, that we can redeem Torah from ourselves. 

While the violence we find in Torah surely demands grappling, the violence we’ve done in Torah’s name cries out urgently to be addressed. 

I don’t know what it means to carry all of this into Adar with me. And I don’t have an answer for us. But as we enter this month of Adar together, this season of Jewish joy and violence, I hope we may be able to find even the smallest moments in which we craft Torah towards redemption.