Home Away From Home
On Exodus and Esther
“And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).
“Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says: Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before the Holy One, Blessed Be God. As every place they were exiled, the Divine Presence went with them” (Talmud Megilla 29a).
“If you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis” (Esther 4:14).
The Book of Esther—which we will read this week—is set in Persian Exile, in the parenthesis between the destruction of the First Temple and the rebuilding of the Second Temple. God never appears as a character or agent in the story. The tale is one of human faith in dark times. The happy literary ending (the Jews survive) saves it from being cancelled, but the annihilation they nearly meet feels all too modern.
This Shabbat, we read parashat Terumah (Exodus 25:1–27:19), which details the construction of the mishkan, or portable Temple. It’s a text in which God promises the people that God will dwell amongst them. In Terumah, God is revealed. In Esther, God is hidden. In Terumah, God instructs. In Esther, God is silent. In Terumah, God is what George Steiner calls “a real presence.” In Esther, God hovers ambiguously in the wings, kind of like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The God of Esther manifests mostly through memory and hope.
The Jewish calendar juxtaposes two texts that speak to different temperaments as well as different moments in our personal and collective history. The effect is both strange and touching. Terumah speaks to the fact that we can find God in specific times and places (and not others). Esther speaks to the fact that we must make the best of what we have when there is no organizing institution, tradition, or community in our life. Terumah reminds us of the times when our lives are full of love and joy. Esther reminds us of the times when we feel scared and unsure. In Terumah, we are told what to do down to the smallest detail. In Esther, we must write the script ourselves.
Do we need the Temple? If we only had certain parts of the Torah, such as Leviticus, we might think that without the Temple there is nothing left for us to do. We are lost. What is Judaism without sacrifices, pilgrimage, a priestly system? If that sounds foolish to you, ask yourself what your identity would be without the places and institutions that you regularly visit, reference, occupy, value? Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor makes this argument in defense of the Church—people need and prefer institutions (even corrupt ones) to the existential burden of following their own hearts.
On the other hand, we know from books like Esther that God can be found even without a Temple, that the covenant remains meaningful even in Exile. This insight made (and makes) it possible to remain Jewish in uncharted territories, to see our relationship with God as durable, possibly even “anti-fragile.” If we over-focus on being in the Land and at the Temple, we become unhealthily dependent on something that is temporary. If we get too comfortable in Exile, we may forget to strive for the immediacy and splendor we once knew and of which we are yet capable.
Deuteronomy (12:5-7) forbids worshipping God outside the Temple of Jerusalem (at least as long as it is standing), and yet, if we were strict followers of this law, we would have nowhere to go today. Even when the Temple was initially built, people seemed confused:
“The people, however, continued to offer sacrifices at the open shrines, because up to that time no house had been built for the name of the LORD. (3) And Solomon, though he loved the LORD and followed the practices of his father David, also sacrificed and offered at the shrines” (1 Kings 3:2-3).
King Solomon, who built the Temple, worshipped God at shrines other than Temple, following the traditions of his father (despite the Deuteronomic prohibition). There is something anti-climactic about this. The Temple is supposed to be a great watershed in Jewish history, and yet the builder himself is still off practicing folk religion.
Jewish tradition hasn’t made up its mind about whether God is to be found in the center or the periphery. Official forms of Judaism have always been dialectically entwined with “pop-up” forms of “alternative spirituality.”
Yehuda Halevi captured the paradox of the Temple with these lines:
Where, Lord, will I find you:
your place is high and obscured.
And where
won’t I find you:
your glory fills the world (trans. Peter Cole)
If God is infinite and transcendent, why deign to descend into the crude dimensions of earthly architecture? And if God is tangible and immanent, why limit Godself to one specific site? Halevi quotes from Isaiah, but it’s not too far from Isaiah’s panentheism (God’s presence fills everything) to Spinoza’s pantheism (God is everything). In either case, the modern question arises, “Why be Jewish? Why care about Torah, temple, people, place? Why embrace a particular tradition or mode of worship if one can just be an individualist, a free-floating cosmopolitan, finding God wherever God goes?”
A challenging question, but one that our own experience answers for us. We may, in theory, be capable of finding God or meaning or uplift everywhere—and yet most of us do not. We are loyal beings and habitual creatures, and though God may be “all things to all people,” as Paul put it (1 Corinthians 19:22)—for us, phenomenologically, God is not all things. Even cosmopolitans have a zip-code, a language, friends, enemies. The Temple isn’t the only place where God can be found—but it answers the human need for “onlyness,” much like a committed romantic relationship does. The best, deepest, and most trusting relationships are Temples—we could be somewhere else, in theory, but in reality, we can’t be anywhere else. We are home. The Temple is a manifestation of a partnership model in which we and God share “skin in the game.”
But note that God doesn’t say, “I will dwell in the Temple.” God says, “I will dwell among them [the people].” The Temple is a vehicle for a relationship, not a substitute for it. While the vehicle shouldn’t be taken lightly, the Talmud (cited above) suggests that God can accompany us even when we are destitute, confused, estranged.
The same paradoxes we encounter in the figure of the Temple recur in a crucial moment in the story of Esther. Esther is told both that she is instrumental in the salvation of her people and that the people will be saved even if she bails. The parallel to the Temple is this: Without the Temple, God will find a way to appear, but that shouldn’t exonerate us from building one. Without our effort, God will offer us “grace.” But that doesn’t mean we should rely on it.
Esther’s choice to risk her life is both necessary and unnecessary, just as the Temple is. The stakes are simultaneously high and low. (Don’t focus on the low part or you won’t do anything; don’t focus on the high part or you may be overwhelmed.)
The Temple offers us a chance to to experience our own agency, our own desire, in making something happen. Esther’s entry into the King’s palace—in courageous violation of an imperial decree—offers her the gift of experiencing her own power. Why is God absent from Esther? Why is God, at times, experientially, absent from the world? One possible answer is: so that we can experience the full friction and exhilaration of living in a world where our deeds have consequences.
The whole world is full of God’s glory, but, for us, unevenly so. Some of us live at the Tabernacle, suffused with a sense of holiness. Some of us live in the time of Esther, where realpolitik and survival hold primary focus. Both attitudes have a place in the Torah. The fact that we encounter them together in the same week suggests that each offers an important counterweight to the other.
In classic rabbinic form, the Talmud transforms Mordechai into a sage. At the precise moment that Haman comes to kill him, Mordechai is lecturing on the laws of the atonement sacrifice (Megilla 16a). What a strange and obscure (not to say anachronistic) thing for Mordechai to be doing. And yet, for the rabbis, it’s clear that the study of the sacrifices was itself a kind of sacrifice. Mordechai wasn’t a priest, but learning and teaching were his korban—the way he drew close, not just to God, but to the God of his ancestors. In rabbinic hands, the Book of Esther is a postmodern tale about a Jewish community that sought to connect to their tradition through study (much like we are doing now). The Temple, as it were, was no longer a monumental structure, but a Book. The words on the page became a pale reflection of the holy of holies. What one biographer said of the poet Heinrich Heine might well apply to the Mordechai of rabbinic imagination: “As he had a spiritual home, it was the language rather than the land.”
The concept of God and the meaning of Jewishness are, today, for many of us, neither easy nor obvious. Ours is a time where there is good reason to be confused. And as much as Mordechai is depicted in the Talmud as a sage, the text itself is spare about what he knows (other than not to bow down to anyone other than God). No matter—he was accompanied in his state of Exile (Narrator’s voice: and so are we).
Reading Terumah through the prism of Esther, we are given a double charge:
1) Build, maintain, and treasure specific places, communities, and traditions that are meaningful.
2) Seek insight and connection in new and difficult places and do not conflate the loss of physical structures, habits, and experiences, with the loss of agency and meaning.
There is a saving power hiding in our displacement, and who better than us to discover it?
Shabbat Shalom and Purim Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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