I looked for an anchor within the historic days we are living through—not only during the past week, but throughout this recent period, and especially since Simchat Torah 5784. The transition from a terrible hester panim—a divine concealment so horrifying that we never dreamed something like it could happen again after the Holocaust—to a state of ga’on Yaakov, where Jews gather together and stand up for their lives to fight their enemies. Amid all these turbulent events, I searched for an anchor—something that would frame the moment, that would provide a point through which one could look and understand everything.
This week, I found it.
When Alexander Grodetsky, 95 years old, presented the Rebbe’s emissary in Russia, Rabbi Berel Lazar, with a miniature yet fully kosher Megillat Esther about 200 years old—a scroll that his great-grandfather had given him. His great-grandfather was born in 1870, long before the Soviet Revolution and long before the many upheavals that the world in general, and the Jewish world in particular, have undergone. This tiny megillah had been somewhere in an attic in Russia all those years, serving as an anchor for an old man who had seen much and knew where everything had begun.
The Baal Shem Tov explained the Mishnah’s statement: “One who reads the Megillah backwards has not fulfilled his obligation.” The simple meaning is that the Megillah must be read according to the order of events—and therefore according to the order of the chapters. The Baal Shem Tov added: “One who reads the Megillah as though it were an event that happened back then—in the past—has not fulfilled his obligation.” For all the stories of the Torah, and the Megillah in particular, are not merely historical narratives; they are also—and primarily—contemporary stories.
The megillah that Sasha Grodetsky gave to the Chief Rabbi of Russia this week seemed to cry out: I am not “back then”! True, I come from the past—but I am not the past. The megillah was written long before we knew what the internet or smartphones were, and certainly long before artificial intelligence. Yet it is far more current, relevant, and filled with a stable and clear message for our times than its new competitors. A scroll written with quill and ink on parchment comes from the past—and brings clarity to the future.
When we blotted out the memory of Amalek on the morning of last Shabbat at Chabad House, we did not know that Khamenei would also be erased. And when we said in the Torah reading, “May He who blessed the soldiers of Israel on land, in the air, and at sea bless them,” we did not know that they had already locked the crosshairs onto Ahmadinejad. But we did know how to say, at the close of Shabbat during Havdalah, the verse written in the Megillah: “For the Jews there was light and joy, gladness and honor.” And we added: “So may it be for us—Kos yeshuot esa u’veshem Hashem ekra—I will raise the cup of salvations and call upon the name of the Lord.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zalman Wishedski