Community Magazine March 2019

22 Community Magazine But the same professor would say, “Don’t tell me about Moses putting some bitter stick into bitter water to sweeten it. That’s not rational.” A Story All Can Relate To I once visited Windsor castle in London. There you can see the showcases of the kings’ treasures. Actually, I didn’t feel particularly connected to their legacy, as it was not my heritage. But then, the tour guide showed us a room which he said was called the Queen Esther Room. My eyes lit up. “Now you’re talking… tell us more.” Apparently, one of the British kings was obsessed with the story of the megillah . He was so infatuated that he commissioned his royal artists to depict the entire story on the walls of this chamber. You can see there Mordechai on the horse being led by Haman, the gallows, the whole story from beginning to end. Thus, we see that the story of Megillat Esther speaks even to the non-Jews. They can relate to it because it seems like a totally natural sequence of unrelated events. The Megillat Esther opens in the third year of Achashverosh’s reign. Afterwards there are nine years of nothing until Haman rises to power. The story stretches over a decade. When you read the megillah , you are under the impression that all the events happened immediately back to back, almost as if all the events were compressed into a half-hour television show. However, for those living at the time, it was much harder to connect the dots of these seemingly random events. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You put it together, piece by piece, but you don’t knowwhat the picture is until you finally put in the last piece of the puzzle. Each event on its own, like a single piece of the puzzle, is not earth shattering. It sounds like the news of today: Fickle kings, conspiracy plots, etc. These things happen. Interestingly, the Vilna Gaon writes that Gd prefers running the world through the second way of orchestrating events, from behind the scenes. He prefers not to intervene with open miracles. Yet every “natural” occurrence is under the direct hand of Gd. As the Ba’al Shem Tov said, even for a leaf that falls off a tree - the place where it lands, face up or face down, was determined from Above. If you’re riding in your car and a piece of hay falls off the truck in front of you - it’s from Gd. The normal state of the world conceals Gd. The job of the Jewish people is to reveal the concealment. Hence the name - “Megillat Esther.” It is our job to reveal Gd’s hand from behind the veil of the so called “natural” events of the megillah . Unlike the professor and the king, we look at the Purim story with the lens of emuna , seeing how each event was divinely orchestrated until, finally, in retrospect, we understand that there was a purposeful chain of events perfectly calculated to achieve the domino effect. If any single event would have been missing, the chain would have stopped. לעילוי נשמתם של משה בן עליזה, יצחק הלל בן עליזה, והנרייט לאה בת עליזה, דוד בן גילה, רבקה בת גילה, יהושע בן גילה, משה בן גילה, שרה בת גילה, יעקב בן גילה, ואליאנה בת גילה. ולרפואה שלמה ליוסף בן אהובה מסעודה, שילת אהובה בת עליזה, ודניאל בן עליזה.