A Thought for the Week with Rabbi Jay Kelman
Purim - For the People

What should one do when the needs of the Jewish people conflict with the needs of Judaism? When the only way to keep our people Jewishly involved is to bend (or perhaps break) the norms of a traditional way of life? The Jewish people have been debating this question since the Enlightenment. With the ghetto walls crumbling, most Jews sought out new expressions for their Jewishness, unwilling and perhaps unable to maintain traditional frames of reference.

Navigating between Jews and Judaism led to the founding of Reform, Conservative and even many of the varieties of Orthodoxy we see today (they too are reactions to modernity). Hard as it for us to imagine, many of our greatest rabbis opposed the granting of equal rights to Jews, preferring our second-class status to emancipation. They fully understood that these benefits to Jews would exact a horrific price from Judaism, and felt that it was not worth the cost. Whether they were right is no longer pertinent. Our concern today must be to make Judaism meaningful to the masses in an age of unprecedented freedoms.

Such issues are not limited to the modern era and find expression in different contexts throughout Jewish history. It seems that Mordechai and Esther argued along these same lines.

"Then the King's scribes were called on the 13th day of the first month and it was written according to all that Haman had commanded" (3:12). The decree of Haman to destroy the Jewish people coincided with Pesach, the holiday that celebrates the formation of the Jewish people. While Mordechai demanded that Esther use her position as Queen to plead on behalf of her people, he was quite taken aback by Esther's suggestion "to gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan and fast for me, neither shall they eat or drink for three days, night and day" (4:16). This would entail fasting on Pesach, thereby cancelling the seder (there was only one in those days), with its crucial role in transmitting Judaism to our children.

Mordechai reasoned that salvation would not come about through transgression. It would take a miracle to save the Jewish people and surely G-d would be less likely to perform miracles for sinners. G-d could still save us were we to fast next week, Mordechai argued. Tampering with Jewish law is too dangerous regardless of the situation. While Mordechai may have been a political activist, he was a staunch defender of Jewish law.

Nonetheless, Esther's suggestion carried the day. "If there is no Israel , for whom will there be Pesach?" she retorted. Without a Jewish people there can be no Torah. First, we must save the people, afterwards we can discuss Jewish law. From a halachic perspective, Esther invoked the need for a (temporary) emergency measure that would supersede Jewish law. These measures have become an integral part of Jewish life and it is what allows us to study the vast oral law from written texts, despite the ban of committing these teachings to writing (Temurah 14b). It is interesting to note that our Sages viewed Purim as the holiday that celebrates the Jewish people's acceptance of the Oral Law (Shabbat 88a).

Rav Soloveitchik has often pointed out that it is the father's role to be the disciplinarian, the teacher and enforcer of Torah rules. The mother, on the other hand, nurtures, caresses and affectionately leads the child into a life imbued with Torah values (Family Redeemed, pp.158-163). In other words, the father focuses on Judaism, whereas the mother focuses on Jews. And ultimately it is the mother who passes Judaism from one generation to the next. It is precisely because the mother is the one who most often sets the religious tone of the home that she was chosen to biologically pass on Judaism to her descendants.

Making Judaism relevant and meaningful for the masses of Jewry who have rejected the binding nature of Jewish Law is one of the great challenges facing us today. Living in a world in which those committed to halacha are but a small minority of the Jewish people, it behooves us to be especially cognizant of how our practice of Judaism impacts on the vast majority of our people. Does our commitment to Jewish law serve as a Kiddush Hashem in the eyes of the masses of Jewry or are we viewed as people only concerned with the narrow needs of the committed? If we want Judaism to be meaningful for all our practice of Judaism must embrace all.