We continue our study of the Tehillim of David HaMelech alav hashalom. Today, Psalm 129, Kuf Chaf Tet (one hundred twenty-nine), is part of the Shir HaMa'alot (Song of Ascents) series from that collection.
“Yomar na Yisrael” (let Israel now say): “Rabot tzeraruni mine'uray” (greatly have they afflicted me from my youth). This chapter talks about anti-Semitism, and it says that anti-Semitism is as old as the Jews. They hated us when we were still young. The first Jew was Avraham Avinu. He was called Avraham, or Avraham Ha'Ivri, not only because he was a Hebrew, but because ever means to be on a side: he was on one side, and everybody else was against him. They tried to burn him in a fire. They tried to pulverize him in a war. Avraham Avinu lulei (if not) would say about himself, “I should have been ashes and dust,” based on what they tried to do to me. So the chapter is right when it says, “They hated me from time immemorial.” As long as there was a Jew in the world, there was somebody on the other side trying to kill him.
The Goyim (gentiles), says Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, used this as an excuse: “Listen, the fact that we hate you—you've always been hated. Therefore, you must have deserved it, and we're just following precedent. What are you blaming us for? Somebody hated you before. If you were the most hated nation, then they must be right.” So they use that as a claim: “We're not the only ones who hated the Jews. Anybody who ever had something to do with them ultimately comes to hate them. So could everybody be wrong?” The common denominator among everybody in the United Nations is that they all hate the Jews. “So you've got to follow the majority.” They're saying that if all nations have such a track record of coming together to agree to hate the Jew, that must prove they're right and we're wrong.
Rabbi Hirsch says the opposite: they hated us when we were just one Jew. What did they have against Abraham? He wasn't a nation. What could Abraham have done to cause such animosity? Abraham was a man of chesed (kindness). I don't mean that he was a kind man. I don't mean that he was a man of values and morals. And they hated him. The explanation is that they didn't hate Abraham; they hated what he stood for. Whenever we talk about hatred of the Jews, it doesn't start with hating the Jews. It starts with hating the values, what we represent.
Society doesn't want to have a conscience, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “We have to kill the Jews because they brought a conscience to the world. They brought right and wrong. They brought ethics.” Society wants to be free. Society wants to do what it wants. People want to go after their desires, to go after their hearts. So the Jew comes along and says, “You have to be honest, and you have to have derech eretz (proper conduct), and you have to be kind to the poor, and you can't take advantage of the weak, and you have to give charity.” All of a sudden, a society built on brutality, thievery, bullying, and survival of the fittest—like Sedom (a society of tough guys)—doesn't like it. That's why they didn't like Avraham. This is Sedom. Sedom is what the people wanted: a society of tough guys. Avraham Avinu comes and invites people to eat in his house for free. So they don't hate Avraham; they hate what Avraham represents. I'm sure that if Avraham Avinu had given up his values and taken the book of Nimrod, they would have liked him like everybody else. They would have joined the club.
That's why they hate us. Avraham Avinu says, on the contrary, they hated us for no reason. That's an indication that it has nothing to do with us. It has to be something deeper. Like I said, it has to do with what we stand for.
But the chapter does tell us, “Gam lo yachlu li” (Yet they have not prevailed against me). “Lo yachol” (he could not), “lo yachluli.” We know that from early on. When there were not too many Jews in the world, Yaakov Avinu was one of—I don't know—one of ten Jews in the world at the time, just him and his kids, and the Satan came to kill him. The Pasuk (verse) says, just as it says in this chapter, and from there we learn that the Jew will always be invincible. The Goyim will never be able to destroy us. That's why the Pasuk says that, as much as they tried, they couldn't.
Now look at the next Pasuk. We have two Pesukim (verses) here: Pasuk Aleph, and then a repeat in Pasuk Bet. It's basically saying the same thing twice. If we use Yaakov Avinu's story with the angel, we'll be able to understand why there's a double hatred here.
If you remember, the angel of Esav meets Yaakov at night to wrestle him, and it says they wrestled the entire night. Make no mistake about it: that was the Satan. Satan's intention was not to hurt Yaakov, but to kill Yaakov. If you kill Yaakov, there are no more Jews. It was a very, very consequential fight, maybe the most significant wrestling match in history. It was a pay-per-view event. Miraculously, Yaakov Avinu was able to withstand the anger and violence of Satan, which shows how great Yaakov Avinu was.
After that, the Pasuk says Yaakov Avinu walks away from a place called Peniel. That's the name of the place, Peniel. I don't know where it is on the map today, but it says he left a place called Peniel. Then it says he was limping because they did get him in the leg. It says the sun came out, and when it came out in the morning, the Pasuk says he left the city called Penuel. So Rabbi Breuer asks, “Last night it was called Peniel, and this morning it was called Penuel. What happened?” I don't think they had an emergency meeting with the council to change the name overnight.
He says something amazing. The angel of Esav tried to kill Yaakov Avinu in two ways. First, they tried to kill us physically. If they can't kill us physically, they try to kill us spiritually by assimilating us. That represents the two ways the Goyim throughout history have come after us: they're going to come after our bodies, and they're going to come after our souls.
At night, Yaakov Avinu is getting pounded; his body is getting pounded. That represents one “Rabot tzeraruni, rabot tzeraruni”—“Rabot tzeraruni mine'uray” (greatly have they afflicted me from my youth). That's the enemy coming just to kill the Jewish people. Hitler, Haman—they don't care too much about assimilating us; they just want to commit genocide. That's what the Malach (angel) wanted to do. But guess what? It always has a reverse effect. What ended up happening as a result of Haman's decree, for example? It caused us to make teshuvah (repentance). We came back to God. That's why, on the night Yaakov was getting beaten up, the name of the city was Peniel. Peniel means the face of God. This type of anti-Semitism actually caused the Jewish people to see the face of God, to come closer to Hashem. That's a reverse effect.
But then what happened? They have a different tactic, and it's equally sinister. The second tactic is that the sun came out, which means that now the Goyim treat us with emancipation and all sorts of freedom. The Jewish people are considered equals. That represents the sun of equality shining on the Jewish people. And what ends up happening? When Jewish people taste equality, something they're not used to, they like it. It's addictive. They're accepted, and we don't have to sit at the back of the bus. We don't have to wear a yellow star on our arms anymore. We don't have to wear a dunce cap. Now we're invited to the White House. So the Jewish people start to shed their Jewishness because they feel it serves as a barrier between them and the Goyim. This is a chance for them to finally be accepted as equals. Therefore, they don't want to show any blatant Jewish behavior or practice because they feel that will separate them. That's a tactic of the Goyim: they come along and show us kindness in order to assimilate us, as America did with its melting pot, where a lot of Jews melted. I'm sorry to tell you.
Then what happens? The Pasuk says Yaakov leaves the place. But what is the place called at that point, when the sun comes out? Penuel. Penuel means to turn your face away from God, because that's the result. So there are exactly two actions of hatred. When it's physical, it leads to Peniel, the face of God. When it's assimilation, when they try to befriend us, it leads to Penuel. Penuel means we turn our head away from God.
Incidentally, that Pasuk says Yaakov doesn't feel the limp until the morning. At night Yaakov Avinu is still whole because, if they try to persecute us physically, we can survive that. We know we have a guarantee they won't be able to kill us. But when they come after us spiritually, that causes the Jewish person to turn his face against God, and then we feel the collateral damage. Then the B'nai Yisrael (Children of Israel) feel the pain.
So those are the two Pesukim of Eir: “Rabot tzeraruni mine'uray, yomar na Yisrael” (Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, let Israel now say). That might be the spiritual assimilation. Then the second one is, “Rabot tzeraruni mine'uray, gam” (Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, also). Gam is also a word to cut down. They were trying to cut us down physically.
The two enemies represent the two faces of Esav, which, by the way, I think it's appropriate to say, represent the two holidays: Chanukah and Purim. Chanukah and Purim are two distinct holidays. One is celebrated with a lot of physical joy. That's Purim: we have a Seudah (festive meal), and we get drunk. I don't recommend that the ladies get drunk. Maybe drink a little, but it's a very joyous day. Then you have Chanukah, and Chanukah doesn't have too much besides lighting the menorah. There's really no mandate to eat on Chanukah, although the jelly-donut business is definitely thriving on Chanukah. But there's no halakha (Jewish law) that says you have to eat a jelly donut; you have to eat a Seudat Purim (Purim meal). What else do we do on Chanukah? We spin dreidels and sing some songs—not too many songs. Even so, the mefarshim (commentators) ask why there's a difference between the way we celebrate.
The explanation is: which part of the Jew was in danger on Purim? The body was in danger. Haman wasn't trying to assimilate us; he was trying to kill Jews. So we were saved, our bodies were saved, and the body will celebrate. Whereas on Chanukah, they weren't coming after our bodies. They wanted us to forget the book; they were coming after our spiritual holidays. So how do you celebrate? You light a menorah. It's going to be a spiritual celebration of the soul. Whenever you want to represent the soul, you light a candle. So the menorah represents the holiday of the soul.
Therefore, we can say that the two Pesukim were actually hinting at the two holidays. They were coming after our religious values, but in both cases they weren't able to succeed. On Chanukah, we had the Chashmonaim, the last vestige of spirituality we had left, and they were able to restore the Jewish people to their original religious level. On Purim, we had Esther, who, through their vigil of praying and so on, was able to bring the people back to teshuvah. So both were failed attempts.
The next Pasuk mentions another event in the history of anti-Semitism. The Pasuk says, “Al gabbi charshu choreshim, he'erichu lema'aneitam” (Upon my back the plowers plowed; they made long their furrows). “On my back, they plowed over me.” They plowed a very long furrow. You know when they take the plow, it makes a line in the ground. So they went and plowed me from the beginning. It was an endless plow.
The Midrash (rabbinic teaching) gives a mashal (parable): You have a cow, and the father gives the cow to his son. He has 10 sons, so they share the cow. The problem is they don't give the cow a break. The first son uses it, and when he's done, the next kid takes it. Before you know it, the cow is falling from its—uh, from the pressure. Then the father comes home. He doesn't even chastise the kids; he's too worried about the cat. It's dead on the floor.
The Pasuk says, “Hashem tzaddik, kitzetz avot resha'im” (Hashem is righteous; He has cut the cords of the wicked). Hashem was the Tzadik (righteous one) when He saw the Jewish people being plowed over by the Goyim incessantly, one after the other. He breaks the rope, and therefore we're no longer attached to their brutality, and He can save the Jew.
Now, what is this referring to? Did they ever plow on us, or is this a mashal? I think it's a mashal. They didn't plow over us. That means they were killing the Jewish people. At one point, they used Jewish blood as fertilizer, it says. But where do we see that they plowed over us? Actually, the Gemara in Sotah, on page 11, tells us the following story.
By the merit of the righteous Jewish women, we came out of Mitzrayim (Egypt). What happened? The Jewish men had already been relegated to not having any more children. You can't blame them. It was a very, very difficult time to bring children into such a world. It wouldn't be fair. The ladies told their husbands that there would be Yetziat Mitzrayim (the Exodus from Egypt) one day. There would be an exodus, and the Bnei Yisrael would leave Egypt. But for Bnei Yisrael to leave Egypt, you need Bnei Yisrael; you need people. You can't have an exodus where nobody is in attendance. If we don't have any children, the sea will split, but there won't be anybody to walk across it. It'll be a dud.
So they had to convince their husbands to have children. The Gemara says they went out to the fields, brought mirrors with them, made themselves pretty, let's say, and fed their husbands lunch, eventually enticing them to have children. The ladies would go out to the apple tree when they were expecting, and they would deliver six at a time—six tuplets. That was the normal birth at the time. They couldn't raise them in the fields, so they had to leave them. A miracle happened, the Gemara says: the ground would open up and swallow them. There was a whole underground. The tunnels didn't start with Hamas. We actually had the first underground system in the Middle East, and it was the Jewish children who were raised in these underground tunnels. The angels came and gave us oil and honey, and we were raised in a miraculous way.
Some of the Egyptians witnessed this and saw the ground open up and swallow the Jews. The Midrash says, what did they do? They took their plows and started plowing over the ground, hoping the blade would go underneath and kill all the Jews there. So this Pasuk is actually literal: “Al gabbi charshu” (Upon my back they plowed), “he'erichu lema'aneitam.” A miracle ensured that the blade did not reach where the children were. They were really underground, like Hamas builds these tunnels 100 feet underground. We were all the way underground, so the blade did not touch them. Ultimately, those Jewish people would flourish from the ground, as we say in the Haggadah of Pesach, and we grew like grass from the ground. Then ultimately we would come out of Egypt.
That's what it means when it says, “Al gabbi charshu choreshim, he'erichu lema'aneitam.” He'erichu means it's a very long furrow. We're still living through that time today. But ultimately, “Hashem tzaddik”—Hashem is the righteous one—“ki kitzetz avot resha'im”: He breaks the rope that attaches us to that plow, and He's going to save us.
“Yevoshu v'yisogu achor” (May they be ashamed and turn back). When Mashiach comes at the end of time, the Goyim who persecuted the Jewish people all these years are going to make an about-face. Normally, when a person makes an about-face, it shows that he's humiliated. The verse calls these people all the haters of Tzion. I think this is a good point because it doesn't call them anti-Semites; it calls them those who hate the Zionists. Oh, that's for sure. They're included in this, by the way. Sometimes the enemies within are worse than the enemies from without.
Here you see they claim—and Rabbi Hirsch says this—that they start off as sonei Tzion (haters of Zion). The anti-Semite doesn't start off hating the Jew per se, because what does he have against the Jew? We never did anything. We're not warriors. We're not aggressive in that sense. We don't fight anything. We have our land; leave us alone. But their sonei Tzion are those who hate the Zionists. Tzion represents the land of Israel, and Israel has values. So they hate what the people of Tzion represent, and then that leads them to hate the person himself. You have to always know that if you ask why they hate us, they hate us because of what we stand for: justice, righteousness, and emet (truth). They don't want to hear that in the world. The world wants to be anarchy. The world wants to be chaotic. Look what goes on in the country over here. Everything is upside down.
The Jew comes along and brings light into the world. Who brought justice to the world? It was the Jews. We brought the Torah. We brought all these different types of things. Before the Jewish people came, the most sophisticated country was Egypt. What were they doing? They were killing Jewish babies, using them as human bricks, and taking bloodbaths every day. That was considered fine. Slavery? We didn't start slavery. They started slavery.
On the contrary, when the Torah was given, we gave rules. If you have a slave, after you learn how much responsibility you have to your slave, you're not going to want a slave. It turns out you become the slave to the slave. That's the Torah's version of slavery. It says whoever buys an eved (slave) is buying a master for himself. So we change the whole way people look at things. We worked for 20 to 10 years; we didn't get paid. They didn't pay us. The Torah comes along and says you have to pay your worker by sunset, and if you don't pay your worker on the same day they did the work, you're in contempt. They don't want to hear this. They don't want to hear about compensating workers' compensation. You damage somebody, you have to pay a medical bill. Who was thinking of these things? Animal rights. Were there animal rights? There weren't even human rights in those days, let alone animal rights.
The Torah comes along and says, “Where's the stuff coming from? You're taking the wild animal human and trying to domesticate him.” They didn't want to be domesticated. Therefore, they didn't have a problem with the Jew, but they had a problem with his book. All these things—the book—is being promulgated from Tzion. That's why it says they hated Tzion, but from Tzion it comes to the people of Tzion, and they end up hating us as well.
But we have a good prediction here at the end of the chapter. It says, you know what a gag (roof) is? Very good. You know what chatzir (grass) is? Grass on the roof: they will be like grass on the roof. Sometimes there's dirt on the roof, and I guess sometimes grass and other things can grow between the cracks. The grass on the roof initially grows very, very tall because the rain comes directly on it and the sunlight is right on it. However, since it's very close to the sun, what usually happens is it burns and dries out. Although it initially looks like a success, by the time the farmer comes to cut it, the Pasuk says, the stalks have become dry.
Now, what's the mashal here? The rabbi says the Goyim come along and try to advance themselves on the back of the Jews. They promote their agenda by blaming everything on the Jews. The Jews are the ultimate scapegoat for the problems of the world. They get away with everything because there's a point to the Jew. It's the Jewish aggressor, the Jewish money, the Jewish lobby. So they can blame all their ills on somebody else.
Ultimately, it's going to catch up to them. Rabbi Hirsch calls it the parasitic grass. Grass is not supposed to grow on the roof; it's supposed to grow on the ground. But it tries to grow on the back of the roof, and it succeeds initially. What ends up happening to it? Since it doesn't belong there, ultimately it dries up. They're doing the same thing. Their time will come, when all those who use the Jews as an excuse and blame them for all the ills in the world are on our back, and we have to take the brunt of it.
The Pasuk says they're not going to be worth anything, as the Pasuk says in Tzion. Has anybody ever gone to a farm? Have you ever seen how they cut the wheat? They hold it in one hand and cut it with the other hand, and their palm gets filled with a stalk of wheat. When you're cutting the wheat from the roof, your hand is empty. There's nothing there because it dries up. It just disintegrates.
Chetzno is the hem. Again, if you've ever seen farmers, in the old days they would sometimes cut the wheat and make a cuff on the bottom of their hem. They would fill it like a basket and throw it over their shoulder. That's how they made a kind of sack out of their chetzno, their hem. The Pasuk is saying that the grass that grows on the roof isn't enough to fill your palm, and isn't even enough to fill your chetzno. Basically, the Goyim who came along and grew on our back—on our reputation, our credit, our money—will one day be worthless. There's no time to cut them; there won't be anything there. That's the way of saying those people will be destroyed.
The Pasuk then says, “these ha'ovrim” (the passersby). Who are the ha'ovrim? The ha'ovrim are the—we could call them the sinners, these people, the Goyim. They never said, “Birkat Hashem aleichem” (May Hashem's blessing be upon you). They never blessed God. “Berachnu etchem b'shem Hashem” (We bless you in the name of Hashem), but we bless God. The last Pasuk frames where the anti-Semitism comes from. The machloket (dispute) is very simple: “Velo amru ha'ovrim, Birkat Hashem.” The transgressors don't want—they're not looking for God. What do we say? Ultimately, it's about religion, and therefore they're not happy with what we stand for. That would be a simple interpretation.
Since this chapter talks about anti-Semitism, in its two forms, we might as well open up a very important discussion about, I guess, the number one anti-Semite of all time: Amalek. I guess it's timely to talk about him because this week is Parashat Zachor, and then we're going to have Amalek's grandson to talk about after Motza'ei Shabbat (after Shabbat), which is Haman. We have many iterations of Haman and Amalek still in our generation. They could be in the Middle East today, in the north or the south of Israel. Amalek is not necessarily a family. They have certain qualities, and if you see a nation that shares these qualities, it can also be referred to as Amalek, even though it's not directly related by DNA, let's say. When we refer to Amalek, we refer to a type of enemy. Those enemies are obviously still around today.
We have a parasha that says that when we came out of Mitzrayim, we were defenseless. We weren't an army of any sort. All of a sudden, who came—the first enemy of the Jewish people, Amalek. They came to attack us. Later in history, the Jewish people would be defenseless in the lands of Persia. We were all over the place; we didn't have an army, and we weren't a physical threat to the Persian Empire. Haman again took advantage of these people. In the times of Moshe, we had Joshua, and in the times of Haman, we had one of Yeshua's great-great-grandchildren, Mordechai. So these are the two tzaddikim (righteous people) from the same family, basically. Both were children of Rachel Imeinu. Okay, that's a side point.
Now let's discuss the issue: why did they come against us? This is an important point to know. I spoke about it on Shabbat, one of the reasons for anti-Semitism. Today I'd like to explain it in a different way. Both could be true. There are many truths when it comes to this. Why do they hate us? It's a big question. If you ask the ADL, they'll tell you, “We did scientific studies, spent $100 million, and spoke to experts at Harvard and all that.” And what did they come up with? Nothing. They still hate us. They didn't figure it out. They're always saying, “If we take the senators to Jerusalem and show them the beauty of Israel”—they're always pointing to the Goyim. “It's their problem, so we have to educate them. If we can educate them, they won't hate us anymore.” They never figure out how to educate the Jew. It's always the Goy's fault that they hate us, and therefore we're such good people.
But to appreciate why they hate us, you have to go to a Torah-based reason. The Torah has all the reasons. So instead of generating some synthetic reason in a think tank in Washington to tell us why they hate us, which is secular, we need to go to the Torah and see the real reason they hate us.
What better place to go than Megillat Esther? Let's take a tour for a minute. There's a decree, nothing new. Haman is one of many, and Mordechai finds out about it. He has Ruach HaKodesh (Divine inspiration). Don't put anything past the tzaddikim. Tzaddikim are always going to find out about everything. You can't hide something from a tzaddik. You can't hide something from your wife. You can't hide something from the tzaddik. There's some similarity between the two.
What does he do? He puts on sackcloth (rough mourning garment) and starts making a whole, you know, stink—running in the streets, screaming, yelling, making a lot of noise, a ruckus, wearing sackcloth. The queen is told, “We don't know what the sky is to you, but we know you have something to do with it. Maybe you're an advisor.” He's making a show, making a ruckus in the street, so she sends out Hatach. “What is going on over here? What is going on over here?” The Gemara says Queen Esther wasn't just asking; it was a social question. A tzaddik always gets to the point. She obviously wants to know: if you're wearing sackcloth, the Jews are in trouble. You only wear sackcloth, which represents destruction. If you're wearing sackcloth, we know the Jews are in peril. So the question is, why are we in peril? Why do they want to kill us? By the way, that's our question. Queen Esther is going to answer the question: why do they want to kill us?
She offers an interpretation. She says, “I know why they're killing us: we're in contempt of the Luchot (tablets). We're breaking our tradition of the tablets.” I don't see the word “tablets” in that Pasuk; I see “mi-zeh.” Where does the Gemara see that she was saying they're in contempt of the tablets? If you look at the Torah when it talks about the tablets, it says the writing on them was written “mi-zeh u'mi-zeh” (on this side and that side). They were written on both sides. That's a Torah way of saying “tablets”: you say the tablets that were written on both sides. Basically, she's saying it has to be because we're doing something wrong. We're not keeping the Torah. Although she just could have said, “I don't know why she had this.” No, they had all the Torah, but for some reason she refers to the Torah as—I would have said, “Are they in contempt of the Torah?” Instead, you know, you need the—that are written. Wow, really talk in code.
I once heard that somebody was having lunch with—I think it was Rabbi Rosenblum—and his wife brings him the lunch. His wife says, “That's the—that.” They don't say the foods; we don't talk food. Then she says, “You want anything else after you finish?” He says, “I'll have more of the Shehakol.” The way she says the Luchot—and we'll see.
Mordecai answers back. He comes along and says, “Let me tell you over here.” He mentions the word. What does that mean? She told Esther all that had transpired. But that word was a buzzword because in this week's parasha, when Amalek comes to fight us, it says he met us—he met us on the road. Here he comes again, that guy who met us on the way out of Egypt. He's back, the sequel. He named the enemy. He said it's “karahu”—the guy who met us on the way out of Mitzrayim. So he's back again to attack us.
That was the conversation between the two. Esther says it has to be because we broke the Luchot. We're in contempt of the Luchot; we're not following the Luchot. Mordecai mentions who the enemy is. He's the arch-enemy, the same enemy that met us on the way out of Israel. So there are two generations. Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah) is much later than Matan Torah in the year 2448. This is at least 500 years later, because the Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) was destroyed. The Beit HaMikdash lasted 410 years. So it's at least 500 years after Matan Torah, and that's the story.
Before we explain this conversation, which is obviously a deep conversation—“mi-zeh u'mi-zeh asher karahu”—I want to make a very, very important point. Rabbi Breuer makes this point. When we talk about the reaction when the Jews find out about the decree, you'll see in the Megillah that there are different reactions. Different places reacted differently. Where do you see it? The Megillah says that in all the provinces where the decree was known, they started mourning, fasting, and crying. That was a reaction. They right away made teshuvah. They were crying and penitent. That's in all the far-off provinces. But in the close proximity to Shushan HaBirah, what does it say about the city of Shushan? “Navocha”—they were confused.
This is a different reaction from everybody else. Everybody else wasn't confused. They jumped into action and did what they had to do. But the Jewish people in Shushan—what were they confused about? The guy's trying to kill you? Open the Tehillim book. They were confused. So I'm explaining it to you. They asked the rabbi, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, “Rabbi, why did this happen? What inspired the decree of Haman?” That means Hashem let him make this decree. It has to be not because of a mitzvah that we did. It has to be because of some sort of sin that we did. What's the sin?
What does Rabbi Shimon say to his students? “Say you.” That's a good rabbi. Don't lean on me. What do you have to say? They say they went to the party. He says, “Yeah, it's a good reason. But that only explains why the people of Shushan should be under this genocidal attack, because only the Jews of Shushan went to the party. What about everybody else?” Then he says, “Okay, what do you have to say?” “Oh, it's an old sin. They worshiped, they bowed down to Avodah Zarah (idolatry) many years prior, and therefore that's coming to haunt us.” So we see in the Gemara that there were two sins here.
Let's talk about the sin of going to the party for a minute. I'm not discussing the kashrut (kosher status) of the food now. I personally don't think you can get any “mashkiah or it is weight” to give Ahashverosh a good certification. We have a hard time giving our shuls a kashrut certification, let alone keeping an Ahashverosh kosher kitchen. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure they checked all the bugs and the strawberries and the lettuce. I don't think they had a light box in the kitchen where every piece of lettuce went under some Hashgachah, under Shushan HaBirah kashrut.
That being said, why did they go to the party? Very good, very good. What happened here is they said, “Listen, we don't have a Beit HaMikdash anymore, and we don't have the temple, and we're in exile. We're Persian. If we want to fit in and this will be our ticket into Persian society, we have to show that we're normal. So we'll go to the party. You have to eat something; we'll eat a little. But for the greater good, it'll give us emancipation participation, and we'll show that.” I'm sure they didn't have a Mincha (afternoon prayer) in the hallway at the party. They probably said, “Okay, listen, Mincha is important, but this is just as important as that. Ingratiate us with the king.” The Jew feels good. All of a sudden, you're sitting at a table with Haman. You're sitting with all the movie stars in Hollywood. You're sitting with all the professors in college. These are people you were never able to rub elbows with. Now the Jewish people saw going to the party as a way to be accepted, and this is a problem, because now they were seeking acceptance. Once you seek acceptance from the Goyim, you start having to show that you like them. So you can't wear your kippah (skullcap) in public, and you don't want them to see where you take off your seat in the gym; they might look at you differently. Then you have to start being less apparently Jewish, and before you know it, in the name of—I'm sure some of those people came out of the party of Ahashverosh and said, “What a Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of Hashem's name) we made here. We showed that we're regular, we're normal.” Meanwhile, it was a costume party. He's walking around with the clothes of the Kohen Gadol (High Priest), making fun of the religion, and we're there taking selfies with Ahashverosh, dressed like Aharon HaKohen. It was a terrible thing.
What happens? You have to remember this lesson. This is what Queen Esther was able to pick up in her prophecy. Let's talk about these Luchot. Something very important to know about the Luchot: they were chiseled on both sides. Certain letters, like the Samech (Hebrew letter samekh) and the Mem (Hebrew letter mem), are basically complete circles or squares. If you chisel them through, what's going to happen to the center of the letter? It's going to fall out. The Gemara tells us a miracle happened: the Mem and the Samech of the Luchot were suspended. That's the word. It was an open miracle. What is God showing us with that miracle? What does He want to show us? What does that miracle represent—that the Luchot have such a miraculous anti-gravity rule?
The explanation is like this: don't think for a second that the physical stone was holding the letters. It was the letters that were actually holding up the stone. To the extent that when Moshe Rabbeinu threw the first set of the Luchot, the letters dissipated; they went up. Once the letters went up, the rock became dead weight, and he just dropped it out of his hands. That means the Luchot were being held up by the spiritual.
“Mi-zeh u'mi-zeh” teaches us that as long as the letters and the Torah were on both sides, the light of the Luchot was actually the ruchniyut (spirituality) of the Luchot. Without it, it falls. That's a lesson to Klal Yisrael (the Jewish people). Klal Yisrael is the stone, and the letters are the Torah. As long as the Jewish people live their lives surrounded by Torah, “mi-zeh u'mi-zeh,” the Torah will lift us up among our enemies and against anti-Semitism.
But once the Jewish people look for an alternative and say, “Nah, Torah's not going to do it. We need to try something else—political maneuvering, ingratiate ourselves with the king, go to Washington, make ourselves normal, and not be so...” Basically, now you just have a stone. And what happens once you have a stone? Boom. It's going to shatter; it's going to crash. That's what happened to Goliath.
Here's the story: the Jews who didn't go to the party weren't invited to the party. So when they saw a genocidal decree, they right away said, “Teshuvah; it must be because of our sins.” But the Jews who were working to become friends with the queen, putting so much effort into socializing with them and going and doing, heard a couple of years later those same people say, “Death to the Jews.” And what's their reaction? They're confused. They say, “How is it possible that all our efforts to become normal—and even after all that, they come along with death? There was a mixed message for them. These are our friends. These are the people we sat with. These are the people we made l'chaim (to life) with. These are the ones we started to socialize with, and so on. And they're the ones who come along and say, ‘Death to the Jews.’” Queen Esther figured it out right away. Yes, because you're a rock, you're a stone, and you don't have the spirit. You thought the alternative would keep you protected from the Goy, and you're wrong. On the contrary, you only opened a door to assimilation, and therefore you were off sides. Hashem had to push you back, and therefore we must return to the—
That's why Mordecai says, “Yeah, it's karahu again.” Rabbi Hirsch explains the word karah. I know sometimes they explain to us in yeshiva that karah comes from the mikreh. Mikreh means something like a coincidence or happenstance. He doesn't explain it that way. He teaches that whenever you use the word mikreh, it's something that happens by surprise. It's a surprise event you didn't expect. That's why you think it's a coincidence: you think, “Wow, I wasn't expecting that.” It's a mikreh. The suddenness of it makes a person think it's coincidental. You don't think it was planned.
Haman came. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody. So they thought they had everything lined up. “We have the government with us. We have the senators with us. We have lobbies with us. We're all good. We're using our political machinations, and we're okay.” All of a sudden, they hear those same people asking for our death. That's why Mordecai says it's “asher karahu.” Yeah, they're surprised. They didn't expect it. It's the same surprise the Jewish people had when they came out of Egypt. The Jewish people came out of Egypt and wanted to say, “Amalek came.” Now we had to do something.
Amalek isn't going to come unless we invite him to come. You have to invite him. How do you invite him? The Pasuk says we got to a place called Refidim. What is Refidim? I don't know. Look on the map. But I don't think there's a place called Refidim. The Gemara says Refidim—they started to, exactly, they let go. It's a great question. The fragility of man. The weakness of man. But that's what happened. They let go. And oh, so what? You think there's another option?
Amalek comes, and again, surprise. That's the great lesson: any time you think there's another, better way—an alternative in order to—you make the mistake. That's why the Pasuk doesn't say they weren't learning. Rafu yedeihem—“they lightened their grip.” That means if you lighten your grip on this, you were holding something else tighter. They felt Torah is okay, but it's not the main item.
The Midrash gives a famous mashal about Amalek. But listen to how Rabbi Breuer learns this Midrash. The mashal, he says, is that the Jewish people are coming out of Egypt, and God is carrying the Jewish people like a son carrying his baby on his shoulders. God is doing all these things for them. The father is carrying the child, and there are snakes, scorpions, lions, tigers, and bears on the floor. The father is holding the baby and protecting him. All of a sudden a dog comes, and the kid says, “Where's my father?” The kid says, “Where's my father?” The father gets upset: “I'm here.” He takes the kid, throws him down, and says, “Good, let the dog go after you. Then you'll see who your father is.” That's the mashal, she says.
The mashal is that the Jewish people come out of Egypt after God does all these things for them, and they say, “Where is God?” “You're asking where I am? I'll throw you to the dog.” Amalek comes, and then you'll find out that I was taking care of you the whole time.
Look at the mashal here. Doesn't it sound very, very similar to the breaking of the Luchot? You have the son on the head, and all of a sudden they leave the Torah. What happens? The father takes the son and throws him down. Rabbi Breuer says that's exactly what happened. The Jewish people without Torah are a stone that's dead weight. And if—what happens? It's thrown to the ground. It happened exactly in the times of Haman, and it would happen again in the times of—or earlier, in the times of Amalek.
There is no substitute. That's why she said, “Is it because of mi-zeh u'mi-zeh? Did we forego the old tradition of the surrounding letters of the Torah that keep the stone in abeyance, instead of leaving it and causing the stone to shatter and fall to the ground?” And he said, “Yeah.” The people of Shushan were surprised. They were the most surprised because they thought, just like what happened in Hollywood—all the Hollywood people thought. Then all of a sudden you start to see all the anti-Semites and all the crazy people, and they're shocked. “Navocha”—how could this happen? We're living with them, we're just like them, and they hate us. But the Jew in Bnei Brak already knows us. He's already reading Tehillim. He's not Navocha at all. To him it's not a mikreh; it's not a surprise. To him, it's: you leave the Torah, you're going to get anti-Semitism. It's very simple. But the Jew in Shushan says, “How did this happen?” It becomes a Navocha.
I'll go further. Basically, you can't leave the Torah. By the way, none of those organizations give you that solution. They don't tell you: when they put up the sign in the golf club, “No dogs and Jews allowed,” what's the answer? You've got to call a lawyer, and you've got to have a constitutional. But nobody says, “What are those Jews doing in the golf club with all those Goyim, eating shrimp and ham and playing golf on Yom Kippur? Maybe that's got to do with it.” No. “Freedom of religion, country,” and go litigate. They put it on the Goyim. I'm not justifying the Goyim, but they don't look at it from our standpoint. Maybe it's because the Luchot lost their flight. They lost their koach (strength).
Now watch this. The Gemara says, “Haman min haTorah minayin?” This is the Gemara I always like to call, “Where's Haman in the Torah?” But I'm going to say something else, so you can know a chiddush (novel insight). Now it's a better one, I think. “Haman min haTorah”—now guess what, girls? You're not going to find Haman in the Torah. You're not going to find Haman in the Torah. You know why? Just like you're not going to find Eliyahu Mansoor in the Torah. I was born after the Torah was written. What kind of question is that? He's not in the Torah. It's enough that we have to erase his name in the Megillah. Every time you say his miserable name, the guns go off. You want to put him in the Torah now? It's enough what he did to us in Megillah.
So maybe that's not the question, although the Gemara does ask it. We found him, we found him, because there's a Pasuk. It's not Haman, but it has the three letters in sequence: “Ha-min ha'etz” (Did you eat from the tree?). If Adam and Eve ate from the tree, it says, “Did you eat from the tree?” We got him. It's close enough. I said, where else are you going to find him? You're going to find him by the tree because that's where he ends up. He ends up getting hung on a tree. So the Pasuk is already hinting to us: if you want to know where Haman is going to end up, he's going to end up on the gallows. That's correct. But that's what we said last time. That's what we said last time.
But now we're going to say something different, in honor of Purim. You know what I was asking? The gezeirah (decree) of Haman, the decree. You know what I was asking? Anti-Semitism. Meaning, what's the cause of anti-Semitism in the Torah? I don't want to know what the JDL has to say, or the ADL, or the other organizations. I want to know, “Haman min haTorah, anti-Semitism min haTorah, minayin?” What do I have to say about it? A Torah-based reason. Once I can figure out what the Torah says about why this happens, I can figure out what aroused Haman.
The Torah tells us you have to go back to the Etz HaDa'at (Tree of Knowledge). Go back to the Etz and you'll see that whatever happened in the times of Persia was only an offshoot. It was a branch of the Etz HaDa'at. What happened to Etz HaDa'at? Ladies, can you ask yourselves a simple question? I want to be very, very blunt. Why did they eat? It was such an easy mitzvah (commandment): eat from all the trees, don't eat from that tree. Poisonous fruit. Sounds like if you were there, it's easy. But guess what? You were there. Your neshama (soul) was in Chava, and my neshama was in Adam, and you didn't tell him to stop, and I didn't tell him to stop either. When he came to the tree, you told him, and you ate too. So we all ate.
The question is, what could the motivation be? If God said it's wrong, how could Adam and Chava say it's right? How could a wrong of God become a right of Adam? It's not like he had too many mitzvot, so he can't say he was too busy with all the other mitzvot. He had one mitzvah: don't eat from the tree. It's very simple. Torah is one item: don't eat from the tree, and actually—and eat from all the other trees. It's too much all year; just eat fruit all day long, and don't eat that fruit. You go into the store, they give you a voucher, and you can buy any fruit in the store except the kiwis. Okay, keep away from the kiwis. You buy everything else. No, you have to eat from the kiwis, the passion fruit, whatever you call it.
Here's the explanation from the Arizal. It was a religious maneuver, because Satan tells Adam HaRishon, “Yeah, if you don't eat from the tree, evil is over there and good is over there. When you do good, it's really not such a challenge to do good because you're not being tempted. If you have no temptation, your service of God is robotical. But imagine if you had a temptation and overcame it; then your religious service would be worth much more.” When a person is lifting weights, if there's no weight and no resistance, what are you going to get credit for? You put on 50 pounds; that's the resistance. So maybe eat from the tree. The tree will bring you some resistance that you don't have now, and then when you overcome that negative influence, you'll serve God on a higher level.
What a religious calculation. “So we're going to eat a little. The problem is God said don't eat. We have a better way to serve God than God. God said serve me this way. You can serve that way. We have a better way.” But God said don't eat. “He'll accept the calculation.” So it's a religious manipulation, a religious calculation, thinking that if you make this compromise, ultimately it'll be—it'll be better. That's why they call it—whenever you see da'at, da'at means the combination of two things, putting two things together. Whenever the Torah talks about a couple having children, it means they came together. Before he ate from the tree, the good was here, the bad was there. Etz HaDa'at puts it—puts it together. Now he has good and evil inside him. Now he has temptation, and according to the painting, you can justify this. Obviously Adam—we're making it simple—but obviously Satan must have given a two and a half hours from the tree. At the end of the day, it was a calculation against God.
The Gemara is asking, “Haman min haTorah minayin?” What aroused Haman's anti-Semitism? You know what aroused them? The same thing Adam Rishon did. It was a religiously motivated calculation: “We have to lighten our grip on the Torah for the sake of heaven, so the queen will accept us, so there will be less anti-Semitism. We have to go to the party. The wine is not kosher. God will understand. We don't want to stand out, and we don't want to be too—and therefore—for the greater good.” Like I said, they probably had a picture in the Jewish press that week of all the Jews sitting at the party. They probably had an envoy. They took a picture and had all these different shots, different people eating there and all that. Everybody was so proud: “Look at that, we're now going to be accepted in Persia.” As a result, the Torah had to be second fiddle. They lost their grip. “Rafu yedeihem” (their hands weakened)—Rafu yedeihem means their grip on the Torah became weak. It was a calculation.
What they should have said is, “Listen, we don't make cheshbonot (calculations). Hashem wants us to pray three times a day, dress modestly, don't speak Lashon Hara (evil speech), be Shomer Shabbat (one who observes Shabbat), observe kashrut, and...” They came along and said, “Yeah, but you know, too much Shabbat in a secular country. You know, it's a weekend. We have to show that we're normal, and for the greater of the—” Before you know it, the “mi-zeh u'mi-zeh” is gone. Now you just have dead stone. All of a sudden, they're shocked: “We thought you liked us, Haman.” “Like you? I hate you more than ever.” Because you came to the party. They realized that the party only had a reverse effect. Just like Adam and Chava eating from the tree had a reverse effect. Instead of bringing them closer to God, they thought eating would bring them closer to God, but it actually brought them away from God. You can't calculate against Hashem.
“You have a minute for one more point?” “All day.” “All day. Beautiful. I also have all day.” Now watch this. To understand how we're learning the Gemara, “Haman min haTorah minayin”—anti-Semitism, Haman minayin—they made a false calculation. They thought that by overriding Torah, they would succeed. You have to learn the lesson: “Kol ha-shome'a li eino mafsid” (Whoever listens to Me does not lose out). There's no alternative, like you said. You can't be smarter than God. We know Hashem says, “Do this,” but you know what? “We'll try that. Don't try Hashem. Tell Him what to do.” One hundred percent. But the God you're trying to get closer to told you not to do it. You think you know better. That's the problem.
Here's the story. He tells Queen Esther, “You have to go into the king.” She says, “That's not a good idea, for the simple reason that every two-year-old knows if you're not invited, it's basically a death sentence. I haven't been invited, so basically you're asking me to die. How can I be effective if I'm going to die? And don't tell me he's not going to kill me. Go to chapter one. He killed Vashti, and although maybe he lost one or two nights of sleep, he recovered. This is just another beauty pageant. That's it.”
So Esther is making sense. “I'm due anyway. He didn't call me for 30 days. Let's do Pesach. The lady's prepared the charoset (Passover fruit mixture). People have their reservations, and so on. We don't want to cancel Pesach. Let them finish the seder (Passover ritual meal). Let everybody come back. Listen, the decree isn't until 11 months from now anyway. It's not imminent; we don't have to deal with this today. No rush.”
By the way, it still makes a lot of sense. Mordecai is very rash. He's saying, “Cancel Pesach. You have to go in tomorrow to the king.” Other than that, whoa, that's extreme. What's the machloket over here? What does Mordecai tell Esther? “Listen, we're going to get saved whether you're part of it or not. The only one that's going to lose out is ‘ve'at u'veit avich tovedi’ (You and your father's house will perish). You know who's going to lose out? You and your father.”
You, I understand. Your father—explanation is like this. It's not deep. Esther's great-grandfather was Shaul the king. He was a great king. How do I know he was a great king? Who chose Shaul to be king? God. All the other kings of David are automatic: you're the son, you're the son, you're the son. Shaul had no dynasty. God chose him. It shows you how great he was. He's Bechir Hashem, the chosen one from God. Shaul. Charles. Charles I.
What happened? God tells him, in the name of the prophet, “Go kill Amalek.” What does he do? He's told to kill all the animals and everybody. He comes back with the animals. We're going to read it this week. Shemuel tells him, “What are you doing?” And the thumbs came out. “Listen, I thought, you put him on the Mizbeach (altar). Korbanot (offerings)—killing animals for what purpose? Wouldn't it be better to bring korbanot?” “Yeah, but God said, God said don't bring the korbanot.” “I know, but it's better for Jews to bring all these sacrifices.” “And who's that?” “Oh, that's Agag.” “And what is he doing?” “That's the ace of spades. That's the guy we were going after.” “What did you bring him back for?” “Kavod (honor), I'll let you kill him. I figured, you know, let Shmuel, all these...” These are religiously motivated calculations.
Shaul isn't trying to go against God. He's saying, “If I want to serve God better, a dead animal or a korban? You have to vote for korban.” The problem is, God said, “I don't want these korbanot.” Somehow, the religious maneuverings of a person's brain start making him think, “I know better.” So he made calculations, and ultimately those calculations got him fired.
What does God say? “I'm going to give your kingdom to your friend who's better than you.” “L're'acha hatov mimeka” (to your neighbor, better than you). Those are the same words in Megillat Esther when Vashti is replaced: “L're'utah hatovah mimena” (to her companion, better than her). That hints to us that he was replaced because of this calculation—or, I should say, miscalculation.
Now watch. Mordecai, who's the chief rabbi, comes to Esther and says, “You have to go in tomorrow.” What does she start doing? This way and that way, after Pesach. So he says, “Deja vu, here we go again. You're just like your grandfather.” He says it's in the genes. “Now is not the time to start making political—this isn't a political item. The reason we're in this mess is that we made political calculations. Now you want to make more political calculations? You have to put sackcloth on, pray, and go in. If you don't do this, ‘ve'at u'veit avich’—you're not going to rectify your grandfather's sin. This is the way to rectify your grandfather's calculations: don't make a political calculation now. Your job is to go in and do what Hashem wants. The solution has to be Torah-based. It can't now just be a diplomatic solution. The whole mess was caused because we were trying to handle it diplomatically.”
That's why Mordecai wouldn't take off his sackcloth even for a minute. He said, “It's nothing to do with political maneuvering now. We have to pray, wear the sackcloth, and cry.” Esther accepted it. She said, “Okay, but I need three days of praying so I can have success.” Mordecai accepts that as well. Ultimately, she goes in against logic, and Borei Olam (Creator of the world) ultimately brought the— But you see that this is a fix to a previous generation. God was telling Esther through Mordecai, “We'll get saved, but the two people who will be held out are Esther and Shaul. Hashem sent you into this moment on two missions: number one, to save us, and number two, to save your grandfather from the sin he committed.” Ultimately, the tikkun (rectification) was made.
Again, the chapter here is very, very significant. It talks about how they hated us from when we were a young nation. Today I added: why is that? Queen Esther said it. When you leave the spiritual surround, the rock has no flight, and then it falls to the ground. When you try to substitute the words of Torah with all the secular stuff and all the other mundane stuff, the rock cannot sustain itself. The rock, the stone of the Luchot, will fall. That's why she gave that mashal, “mi-zeh u'mi-zeh.” Then, “karahu”: the guy who thought his political moves would help him is going to be surprised. “Karahu”—surprise! The city of Shushan was confused, but everybody else understood. You shouldn't be confused at all. If you take away the gravity from the Luchot, they're going to fall. If you take away the Torah from the Jewish people, even if you try to replace it with something else, thinking that—but there's no substitute. There's no synthetic change you can make to protect the Jewish people from anti-Semitism. That's the ultimate. The Pasuk says at the end that finally they're going to be cut down. Barav is going to cut that plow, that long furrow they've been plowing over our backs for so many years. Then at that moment we'll be able to bless Hashem, as the Pasuk says, “Berachnu etchem b'shem Hashem,” and we bless God. For the Jews, it was a joy and a joy and a special celebration. Amen and Amen.