Rabbi Jeremy Gordon discusses his new commentary on the Book of Esther and the book's supreme relevance for our troubled times.
Rabbi Jeremy Gordon discusses his new commentary on the Book of Esther and the book's supreme relevance for our troubled times.
Welcome everybody to Between the Lines, a podcast produced by the Louis Jacobs Foundation and committed to Rabbi Jacobs' belief that the quest for Torah is itself Torah. My name is Simon Eder and this week we are deconstructing the book of Esther with Rabbi Jeremy Gordon of the New London synagogue in London. And, rabbi Jeremy, you've just published a new translation and commentary, I think, a translation, if I'm not mistaken, is by our very own Rabbi, adam Zagoya Moffat, and your, of course, wonderful new commentary, and this is published by Izzun Books and available now. And maybe to begin mark this wonderful publication, maybe just to ask you really why you turned to Esther, why was it a focus at this time?
Speaker 1:Hi, thank you Lovely to be back. Just on the subject of Rabbi Louis Jacobs. Rabbi Louis Jacobs was the Rabbi for 40 plus years at New London Synagogue that I now have the honour to lead. So actually I grew up with Purim at New London Synagogue, listening to Rabbi Jacobs read the Mugella and I grew up with you and I. Now Simon we're on Zoom so you can see this. This is a sort of 1960s publication of the Hebrew publishing co of 70 to 79 Delancey Street, new York, and it's what the synagogue has used for almost 60 years. We're 59 years into our celebrations of Purim at New London and it's falling apart. It's either staples are rusty, the paper's crumbling, the translation is the 1917 translation of the Jewish Publications Society.
Speaker 2:Wow that's history, it's just about workable.
Speaker 1:It's really terrible and I was looking for something to hand out and I've got my own personal library of Esther books. They're all 200 or 300 pages, they're all absolutely bravura publishing pieces of work, but none of them are usable. In short, so, together with Rabbi Adam and those of you who know Rabbi Adam's publishing he's done Sidorimi, he's done Agadar as well he's got such an eye and such an ability to present material in a way that I think is really attractive to people. He and I started to have a conversation and central to it has been this question, which is what do you want to have in your hand as you are in synagogue or in any kind of communal setting experiencing the McGillar? So it had to look beautiful, it had to look fresh, it needed to have a translation that felt contemporary, and we've also just folded into something that's being published in 5,784, 2,024, some rubrics that I hope people will enjoy. So every time that Heyman appears in either Hebrew or English, it's always in red.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I do as the McGillars being read in Rabbi Jacobs' synagogue is cue small children with a hold up a sign saying boo, or hold up a sign saying stop saying boo and I sometimes struggle to keep track of it. My Hebrew is pretty good at this point. We're helping with that. We're helping by setting out some of the places where the trop shifts. This is getting a little technical. Esther's read with a specific trop, specifically for Esther, but there are times when it moves in and out of other different reading musicalities, other different trops, particularly the trop for the book of lamentations. So that's in blue. There are verses which are repeated, that's in gold, and Adam did all of that work and deserves a huge amount of credit for it. I think the thing that I contributed are the commentaries and to the thing that I say in the introduction is I've done two commentaries, on the one margin and on the other margin.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I really want to say about this particular edition is that it's published in honor of our member, lester Kirchenbaum, and as I arrived at New London, lester was a Balcoray this is 16 years ago and he lanes magnificently, both with a kind of musicality and a sense of love of the Hebrew and accuracy that is magisterial, and he lamed Esther brilliantly and still is capable of laning brilliantly at the age of 85. But he stepped back as our Balmagedda and trained up a bunch of other people, including me. I'm a chapter one, esther Balcoray, and we just wanted to say thank you to Lester. So this is brought out for the world and we've delighted. We've been sending copies to Prague, to Stockholm, the seven or eight synagogues in the United Kingdom, copies out into New York and Chicago and also to Los Angeles on the West Coast of the States. So it's had a lovely reach. I'm really excited. I've been loving the feedback we've been getting for it.
Speaker 2:Really amazing to hear and thank you for adding out some of that key detail. I have seen a copy. I don't yet have a copy ready, for sure next week, but look forward to getting one.
Speaker 1:But I have seen it and it is wonderful in the way that you can read both the commentary and also the text at the same time, so you can think with your prompts at the same time as following and the text which yeah, what's what I know to be true and maybe there's a rabbi, louis Jacobs, of blessed memory, point to all of this as well, which is we have reason to believe the kind of the original, as it were, cause of all this was built out of an adult education class, taught in a synagogue to real people with the real experiences of their lives and their relationship to Judaism. And this book is to the idea. Is it's useful for a kid following with their finger bumping into the red and knowing to go boo? I hope it's useful for people who've got a kind of an, a bright person's academic interest in Herodotus and the influence of some of these kind of ancient Near East parallels into this text. And then one of the things that I was excited to do is to do some like short commentaries, you know 40, 50 word commentaries, but then also to have essays, short essays that go down each the other side of the page, one per chapter that you can follow. If you're not going to be following Esther word by word. I hope it will be read well, but it is. It's a long period of time to sit and listen to Hebrew and attention to wonder, and I think that's okay. For example, chapter one.
Speaker 1:I talk about Esther as icky that's a technical term from Professor Rianne and great bills and book texts after terror, where she talks about sexual politics and sexual ickiness. In the Hebrew Bible Her experience of being a professor in a undergraduate world in America is that she says to people and then in the Torah there's a rape scene how terrible a thing is this? And she looks out at this room of undergraduates and they all know rape, they all know that consent is complex and uneasy and absolutely necessary, but they live in a world of sexual politics. That's frankly and this again is her term icky. So what I wanted to do is apply that to the book of Esther to raise some of these kinds of questions.
Speaker 1:Does Esther consent to what happens to her with a hashverosh? What is does that question mean in the context of this enormous power disequilibrium between the kind of the great king of all of these midi knots from Hadoo to Kush? Do they actually have sex? Is she actually married to him or not? Other icky things. What's more of the high's role in this. What would you call somebody who takes their niece, their orphaned niece, and offers her up as a prize and a beauty pageant to this very literary king who's so drunk that he doesn't even realize that he's dispatched his first wife and now suddenly regrets it, not realizing what he's done. One of the things that I refer to in one of the commentaries I talk about the Israeli satirical television program where Esther turns around to Mordechai and says to Mordechai in a skit, you're pimping me out and Mordechai says oh no, I'm not.
Speaker 1:And Esther doesn't buy it. What happens if we think about Esther as icky? Does it help us deal with some of the ickyness of our own relationship to Hebrew books and to our lives contemporaneously? Also in that chapter I did just do a short quote from the Handmaid's Tale. There's a moment in the Handmaid's Tale I don't think I need to take people through the story in that but in the Handmaid's Tale Offred says of her own mistreatment. This is a quote from Margaret Atwood. Rake doesn't quite cover it. Nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice, but there was some and this is what I chose Now. That seems to me to be quite a kind of an interesting way to think about Esther in this context. Is it okay?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Is it acceptable? In my modern standards, definitely no. But you're helping us read Handmaid's Tale, read contemporary moral ideas against the story and read the story against a contemporary world. So that's what I'm trying to do in some of the slightly longer essays. That's the one on the first chapter.
Speaker 2:It must be the first time that Margaret Atwood is brought into a commentary on Esther and thank you for showing how relevant that you've made the commentary. I really wonder. Maybe, just drilling down on Esther a little bit, you refer to the first chapter. Really I wonder what is really the evolution of Esther's character. It feels like she starts me compassive and then there's perhaps a moment of transfer to Esther as the more proactive and orchestrator rather than passive recipient. What do you see as to the development of Esther throughout?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the book really cries out to be understood using literary skill. It is a Bildungsroman, it is the story of the evolution of its hero and lead character and I suppose it really depends on how you read one very precise moment, mordechai and this is chapter four. Mordechai is outside of the harem. There's such a glorious word here I'll come to in just a second, sorry, let me just go back and read that. It really depends on how you read one key moment in chapter 4 on which the whole story hinges. Mordechai has heard the decree that all the Jews are going to be killed and he's outside the harem and he realises that he has to get this message in to Esther and he sends this and he's wearing sackcloth and ashes and he goes in to say let Esther know what's going on. And it says that the queen was horrified.
Speaker 1:I want to do just the Hebrew on this because it's such an interesting Hebrew word, but t'chal you can almost the whole means like profane or sandy, or, but it's almost like she's choked. Adam translates it here as she was horrified. You can almost hear it on a matipiacly in the language. It's such an exquisite moment of Hebrew. And she sends out for him smarter clothes, and my instinctive relationship to that part of the story is that she's lost it. She's in this world I think you can think about Instagram, social influencers she's having to look perfect. She spent six months being bathed and six months being fancified with makeup and jewellery and she's in this rarefied, elite, elite, vapid, superficial world. And in comes her uncle saying you really need to respond and she looks at him and he's dirty and she sends out clothes and Mordechai says wait, like you can't hide on this, this is your moment and this is the extraordinary moment. And she goes, oh, and she gets it. And the next time that we meet her, she's preparing to do something which must have been utterly terrifying. Right? You don't go in to see the king? I didn't quote this in the commentary, but in my mind was that amazing film. Hero and the whole story of hero is trying to get within 10 steps of the king. And are you allowed to walk into the room? Way? There's a lovely line that says that.
Speaker 1:I took from the Anker Bible commentary by Harry Moore the king didn't marry Esther Like. Esther was there for fun. Proper kings only marry women from proper families. Those of us, lots of film, right, those of us who see the end of June 2, right, you don't marry the person you fancy, you marry for political advantage. But Esther goes in to meet the king at the threat to her own life, and then we start to see something which I think is brilliant. You start to see an incredibly powerful, skillful operator but powerful, not in a masculine way operating with a deep understanding of how to play the king, a deep understanding of how to play Heyman. There is that extraordinary moment when she breaks the news at the dinner party this is the second dinner party, right. The king offers her anything that you want, up to half the kingdom and I'll give it to you. And Esther says great, come to a dinner party. Are they come to a dinner party?
Speaker 2:Perfect irony.
Speaker 1:It's a shadow dog story right. And then at the end of the first dinner party the king again says anything you want, up to half the kingdom. She says, come back. And then she says, oh, I wouldn't bother you about this, but it's only that I'm going to be killed too. There's this guy and he wants to kill us.
Speaker 1:The way it's crafted it is funny. It's supposed to be funny. It's funny in a very particular way and the person who I think is written on this best is Adele Berlin.
Speaker 1:In her JPS commentary she talks about the Rabbalasian carnivalesque, almost to Michael Barton-like sense of a kind of slightly horrific horror. That's funny, where you just feel that you're just one moment away from all hell breaking out. But it's just contained and it functions as a kind of pressure release in a society that's so buttoned down that you get this opportunity to have. Different communities have it differently. The Christians have Halloween, in Mexico you have the day of the dead. This is our moment as disempowered Jews.
Speaker 1:And Esther rides that brilliantly and comes out of that exposing Haman as the person who's plotting to kill her. That wonderful, again, desperately comedic moment. The king says who is this person who wants to kill you? And Esther says Haman. And what does the king do? He leaves the room. Bizarre, haman throws himself on the floor in front of Esther pleading for his life. In comes the king and says what? It's not enough. You want to kill her, you want to rape her as well. It's just, it's very deathly done. And I think if we appreciate the book of Esther as it is, without trying to place on top of it a kind of a piety or to excuse its boardiness deeply sexualized nature in places, it's deeply funny place in nature in places you can allow it to be a much richer experience than I think it is. I'm going to wake up with a new London cynical guide.
Speaker 2:So much that we've explored there, maybe changing tack just a little bit. Obviously, it's really the centre of human interaction, of different examples of leadership that we see throughout. I wonder really, your thoughts around the absence, or at least the direct absence, of God's name. What's your take on that? I think the only book in the Bible that does not have God's name, though obviously there are lots of episodes where he remains absent. But suddenly a big absence here, at least a direct absence. What's your take?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's super interesting. It almost doesn't make it in. One of my mini essays is on Esther's canonical. Did it make it into the canon? It's the only Biblical book that isn't attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker 1:And there is this sort of argument. There's a missionary near Diome about what the 24 books are that make it into the Tanakh, and there's a question about this book and a question about that book, and you can feel that this stuff wasn't absolutely clear. And then on the other side and this is directly to your point about the explicit mention of God's name there are non-masoretic versions of Esther. What do I mean by that? The Christians canonize the Septuagint translation and there is a massive chunk where God is very explicit. Also, by the way, and this is important, mordechai explicitly prays to God, invoking God's name, which of course doesn't happen. Nobody prays to God to come and save them in the version, the Masoretic version, that we have. So it's a very odd book and for me, the important thing about that is that it canonizes this as an acceptable way to think about what Judaism really is, which is to say, if the only way that any problem ever gets solved, if God solves it for you, then I feel like I don't know precisely what my human role is, or rather, my human role becomes to besiege God. But there is no God in this in any explicit sense. Things are very fragile. It hangs on a thread. It literally falls on a lot, on a poor, as in. So if your experience of the world is that God is not very obviously present and the bad things happen to good people, or bad things happen to bad people, or good things happen to good people or good things happen to bad people, it all feels like it's dependent on the fall of a lot. This is the book for you. What happens because this is canonized, as this is canonized, and the festival is canonized is it says that this too is an okay way to have a existential relationship with the world.
Speaker 1:As a Jew, it's not just that other festival which hovers into the distance as we come through the other side of Purim, right Pesach. Pesach is the opposite of Purim. God is all over the place. At the Haggadah of Purim we say I am not an angel, I am not a seraph, I God, I alone. Moses is role in the Haggadah Gong. The Haggadah is Seder and Purim is Eseder, but both are acceptable Jewish experiences and like maps against which to locate oneself. If you feel the world is a bit of a mess, you don't have to abandon Judaism, because Judaism says, yeah, you think the world's a bit of a mess, I've got the perfect book for you, I've got a bunch of Psalms for you, I've got a festival for you, and I think that's incredibly empowering for me as a Jew who moves backwards and forwards in terms of my own sense of God's imminent and Hashkachah imminent divine, direct engagement with me and the world on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 2:I really wonder. Obviously we've spoken about the book's comedic nature. We've spoken, you've addressed, these kind of ideas around God's absence. Of course, the book also is very much written as yet another one of many in our people's histories examples of an incarnation of national peril. I really wonder your take on that, and particularly in these times following 7th of October.
Speaker 1:Just that my heart breaks because of what happened on the 7th of October, the horror that is both struck within the very hearts of Israel and we've had members of our own community in New London very directly affected and we all feel it but also for the loss of life in Gaza, and it's a deeply miserable time. There is this piece in Esther Haman is an aggagite. Agag is a king whose story we read on the Shabbat before Pesach this year, the very day, as it were, leading into Pesach. And Agag is a descendant of Amalek. And Amalek behaves so badly towards the escaping children of Israel as they were coming out of Egypt that we are instructed to destroy Amalek entirely. When Saul fails to destroy Agag, his kingship comes to an end because of that failure. And that's how we encounter Haman, as what happens if you leave someone who has a destructive attitude towards you out there in the open. So it is possible to read Horim in that way, and people have Just awfully of all is Baruch Goldstein who, in the name of a religiously sanctified act, went into the Islamic side of the cave of Machpeler in Hebron and murdered criminally and unethically and in an appalling way, and did so as a Purim Jew on Purim. It could not be more explicit. That too, that this Megillah, which I love, justifies in some warped, horrible and misguided way that too. It seems clear to me that the Megillah does not say that is okay, and there is a massive massacre that happens at the end of the Megillah. It seems clear that that's what is called, in rabbinic terms, lashon Guzma exaggerated language again.
Speaker 1:Adele Berlin, professor Adele Berlin, just spends a lot of time just showing that none of the numbers in the book of Esther are to be taken literally. There was no. A Khashbir issue had 180 Medinot. 360 day party is ridiculous. So none of these sort of numbers are genuinely meant to be real.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I came across when I was doing my research on the essay on the violence in Esther is a commentary by Emmanuel Balshamo, italian 14th century, who says that the only reason Mordechai wrote of this massacre in his book interestingly, of course, whose book? Was that if he hadn't, it would have been seen as Gennai Ladate, medeo Fras, as a demeaning account in the eyes of the religions of Persia. In other words, he had to put this stuff in to make it look like the Jews were seriously. Of course, these things didn't really happen.
Speaker 1:I think that's what's going on actually in the Megillah as a chance, but in the context of what's going on now, in this awful time, I was really moved by something that I caught from Rabbi Howard Cohen, a contemporary colleague in the reform world, who said that there are two kinds of Jews, and then any. He set it up with lots of equivocations, and these are oversimplifications, but I think it's incredibly interesting. There are Purim Jews and there are Pesach Jews, and Purim Jews see the world out to get them and respond to a failure of the world out to get us by striking back as hard as we possibly can, because if we don't, then they might defeat us and we will be gone and we hang on a thread in terms of our contemporary existence, and that's an oversimplification in one direction. The oversimplification in the other direction is the Pesach Jew, who he suggests is somebody, who he understands the nature of enslavement and is so repulsed by that experience and comes out of it with such an empathy for the enslaved. Now, sean, I'll hit the Egyptians, for you were a slave in Egypt too.
Speaker 1:They just fight against anybody being enslaved in any way and that any abuse to the freedom of any is an abuse to the freedom of all, and I think it's a kind of an interesting way to think about where we are now. It's not, I think, that people who struggle with the loss of life that's going on at the moment don't care about the Jewishness of that right. They walk away from being a part of a Jewish narrative. It's that they read their Jewish narrative, for some of them, in that kind of sense of a sort of a universality of an abhorrence of violence and lack of self-determination. Now, of course, what any of that means in terms of military campaigns and hostage negotiations and famine support and all of that is, as you were, above my pay grade as an ethicist, but I think it's interesting to just experience, within the multiple voices of a Jewish tradition, a breadth that hopefully can give us inspiration and a routing, without necessarily oversimply closing down difficult questions by oversimple answers.
Speaker 2:Robert, jeremy, thank you so much for exploring with us today, for your wonderful breadth that we look forward to exploring more in the commentary and all the literary references that you've given just a sprinkling, no doubt, of your further scholarship that we can all enjoy. I love also that latest dichotomy that you've presented of the Pesach and the Proem Jew. I think I heard the other day I think it was on the Unholy podcast a reference to two types of Jews as the money Jew and the bookish Jew.
Speaker 1:So anyway, just to add yet another dichotomy to Maybe there are two types of Jews the one who thinks there are two types of Jews and the one who thinks it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 2:But you know that's that Very good. Please, everyone, do go to Izzun Books where you can buy your very own copy of this wonderfully new translated book of Esther with Robert Jeremy's commentary. Thank you everybody for listening and if you enjoyed this podcast, do remember to subscribe. Wherever you get your podcast, you can find out more about all of our information on our sites, LouisJacobsorg and also JewishQuestorg. We look forward to meeting again as normal for our weekly, our Shah in-depth weekly dissection. Thank you for watching.