I. A Note on Sobriety
I have more abandoned drafts and never-expanded outlines on the topic of Purim than any other. The Torah of Chassidus on the upcoming holiday of concealment, intoxication, exile, and redemption is extremely rich and profound. The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Torah on the topic draws that richness and profundity into all sorts of seemingly mundane and unrelated realities, which, in turn, is a major theme of the holiday and the Rebbe.
All Torah holidays are eternally relevant, but Purim doubly so. Purim is the biblical exilic holiday. It is eternalized and raised above the mortal plane in the Written Torah in the Book of Esther. Yet, its story comes relatively late in Jewish history, after the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple, and describes Jewish survival under gentile regimes, which has become the story of Judaism for two thousand years. It is also connected, in this generation, with survival under Russian regimes, particularly Soviet and perhaps post-Soviet ones. This is not a raw political matter but a metaphysical one. A full explanation of this would likely require a thorough analysis of two or three Chassidic discourses, as many of the Rebbe’s extensive talks, a crash course in the history of Western philosophy, and a Chassidic/critical explication of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. I am 100% serious.
Thankfully, your humble author has committed to partial explanation and will get around to writing that full explanation some other year. I am pushing myself and doing what I should have done with many of those drafts a long time ago: I will write something incomplete, too short, poorly argued, and a bit abstruse. It will leave out many things, fail to bring the overwhelming number of citations that could bolster its case, and remain uneven in quality, clarity, and explanatory power. And then I am going to publish it. Because sober perfectionism is not in the spirit of the holiday.
II. Faith and Doubt
Haman, the genocidal antagonist of the eternal Purim, is a scion of Amalek, the ancient implacable enemy of the Jew. Amalek, of course, bears the same numerical value as “doubt” in the Holy Tongue, which is ironic because Amalek never doubts, the same way doubt never doubts. Doubt is redoubtable because its foundation is not further doubt but some high ineffable truth beyond knowing. This is also doubt’s weakness: its very certitude implies that it can never be the Ultimate. Ultimately, it must be merely a manifestation. The danger of doubt lies in how hard, almost impossible, it is to get at that ultimate state. The effect of doubt is not only to conceal its own source (which is the nature in many ways of our entire universe) but an absolutely dogged denial that such a source is possible in principle.
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