Sanctifying the Wheel of Fortune: R.

ShaGaR on Purim
Rabbi Josh Rosenfeld, Judaic Studies Faculty

Most of the holidays and rituals on the Jewish calendar follow a very regimented and
predictable order of practice. Tellingly, the main ritual of Passover is called order. In a
departure from the rest of the holidays with their Halakhic choreography, Purims rituals are
geared toward encouraging revelry, and seemingly designed to promote an atmosphere of
anarchy. Purim is a spiritual tabula rasa. The blank spaces left in the wake of the relative lack
of Rabbinic moderation of the holiday led to the depth of religious thought that penetrates
into the meaning behind this day. It was the Torah of Purim that drew many with a
philosophical proclivity towards the profundity of Jewish religious thought. That, coupled
with the unpacking of pent-up emotion and energy via the medium of wine, leads to a holiday
with a potent religious punch.
In this search for religious meaning behind Purim, we eventually hit a wall of sorts.
From the Hassidic tapestries woven by the
Nesivos Shalom
, to the intellectual
mamaros
of
the
Pachad Yitzchak
, rooted in the
torah she-bktav
of the Maharal of Prague, those thirsting
for ever-deeper motivations and understandings of their practices on this day drink deeply
from the rich literature of Jewish thinkers ancient and modern. I would admit that after
following along this path for sometime one eventually feels they have reached the point where
a
hiddush
, a novelty, is difficult to locate. The feeling of
ein hadash tachat ha-shemesh
sinks
in, as does a certain drop in the religious fervor with which one engages Purim. This article
will briefly outline the novel and radical perspective on Purim of a modern-day Rabbinic
thinker whose thoughts on Purim reflect his
sui generis
approach to Judaism in general.
R. Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (ShaGaR; 1949-2007), whose inspiring biographical
details lie outside the purview of this essay, can be described as the premier and perhaps only
Orthodox figure to fully engage the profound challenges raised by the collision between
postmodernity and Judaism. His thought draws from the wisdom of Rabbinic literature, the
Hassidic Masters, and 20th century philosophy & literary criticism. A short collection of his
essays and teachings,
Pur hi ha-Goral
, representing only a fraction of R. ShaGaRs writing on
Purim, was published in 2002. In conversation with a close student, he confided that R.
ShaGaR experienced Purim without much of the outward joy and exulting seemingly
mandated by the Halakha and Minhag. R. ShaGaR approached the day with trepidation and a
heaviness of the heart, brought on by the profound consideration of the darker and, as we
shall see, nihilistic undertones of the holiday and the Megillah narrative.
___________
There was a very odd book called
EarthSearch
that figured largely in my childhood. It
had a spiral binding, pages made of different materials, and all kinds of interesting science

activities throughout. One of the games in the book was a page in which there was a circle
with an arrow that you spun. Most of the circle was filled in with a picture of bags of rice and
mud, and a tiny, miniscule sliver of the circle had (I think) a picture of sugary breakfast
cereals in a pristine kitchen. The point of the game was that you flicked this arrow and
watched as it nearly always landed on the miserable third-world tableau that was some 95% of
the circle. Once in a blue moon you thought the arrow might just stop on some Frosted Flakes
and then, maddeningly, it didnt. The lesson was supposed to be a reminder of the pure chance
by which the 1st-grade reader was born into a world in which he could afford a book like this,
and not into a world where he would have to sell the metal binding for scrap so that his family
might eat. A random accident. This simple exercise has a great deal to do with Purim,
especially in R. ShaGaRs thought.
Even though we have read the Megillah many times before, it is still a thrill of sorts to
watch as the various threads of narrative blend together in reaching the final crescendo of
vnahafokh hu
. In R. ShaGaRs language, the Megillah is
tzirufei mikrim ha-mitgalim
ke-hashgaha
, a combination of random events that reveal themselves as [divinely]
orchestrated. One of the most striking elements of the narrative is that none of the key actors
have any complete knowledge of what will be, no barometer for making sense of the events as
they unfold. Mordekhai, in perhaps the moment of greatest insight into the series of events he
is part of, says to Esther, ...
and
who knows
but that you have come to your royal position for
such a time as this? [Esther, 4:14] The doubt and very real possibility that events may have
turned out quite differently for the Jews of Sushan is highlighted in the very name of the
holiday, Purim, which signifies chance, happenstance, and being cast at the whims of fate. A
close reading yields the insight that if perhaps one solitary detail of the story had been
different, the resultant conclusion of the story would be vastly changed.
R. ShaGaR breaks down this trace into the categories of chance, fate, and
providence. Chance means that things could be this way or another way. An example of this
from popular culture involves a particularly callous gangster who has just stolen from a store
in plain sight confronted by the hapless security guard (a hardworking family man who is later
casually dispatched). The security guard begs him to not do this, and the antagonist replies you want it to be one way, but its the other way. Fate means that this is the way things are
and it is impossible otherwise. It was the security guards fate to be at such a low level on the
pecking order, and the gangsters to be at the top. Providence is the understanding that this is
how things are and this is how they are ordained and
meant
to be

. Providence says that

despite the sheer unfairness, cruelty, and frustration of the security guards situation, there is
an acceptance that it is part of a plan, that it is right and correct at some incomprehensible
level.
Fate is probably the hardest of these three to reconcile with reason, especially for the
modern individual. To some extent, we may see fate in that God willed something to be as it is.
We cannot pretend to comprehend why, we may never truly accept it, and therefore we resign
ourselves to it. Fate, or
goral
is terrifying. It means that despite our greatest efforts, we cannot
escape it, and that resistance is futile. R. ShaGaR sees
goraliut
as a key conflict and source of
anxiety - we generally refuse to accept ourselves and our lives as they are. We constantly

wonder, what if?, maybe, if only the arrow landed on the rice sacks and not the Rice
Krispies.... Nihilism offers one answer to this anxiety and tells us to discard the thought of
reconciling this with reason, and to embrace the absurdity and meaninglessness of it all.
Amalek can easily be seen as the exemplar of this approach, and their wanton attack - for no
conceivable purpose other than why not?! - on a fledgling and defenseless Jewish people is a
crowning achievement in the history of random, pointless, and nihilistic violence.
Reading the Megillah as an Amalekite, there is no reason to celebrate and be joyful
afterward - who cares, says Haman, hanging from the tree: It could have just as easily been
me riding the horse, Mordekhai on the tree, the Jews and not their haters massacred in the
streets. No lesson is learned, no point is taken, and the absurdity of chance and happenstance
is simply reinforced.1
The other attitude to
goraliut
is to elevate it to the level of providence, of
hashgaha
.
We read the Megillah and we sanctify the randomness that appears on the surface. The Jewish
approach is to say that yes, it may have been otherwise, and yet that too would be the will of
God. We take comfort in realizing the plan that was in place from the very beginning, hidden
behind a veil, and finally laid bare for us to see and rejoice in. This is why the very reading of
the Megillah itself is seen as a form of praise,
keriatah zu halellah
[
b
Meg. 14a]. Reading
1

Much has been said about the subtle divide between discerning the divine in everyday events (and the general thrust

of history), and the very real human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Albert Einstein sums
up the former, and we might say, Jewish/Purim perspective articulated in this essay in saying that coincidence is
Gods way of remaining anonymous. [Albert Einstein,
The World as I See It
: Collected Writings; New York: 1956]
However, noted skeptic Michael Shermer writes in his
The Believing Brain
[New York: 2011] that we have the
tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. This corresponds to what statisticians call a Type I
error, which is defined as the identification of false patterns in data. What Shermer calls patternicity and then later
agenticity is actually the idea of
apophanie
, or apophany (contra epiphany) which was coined by the neurologist
and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, who employed it in describing an unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied
by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness." This process of repetitively and monotonously
experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field was initially used in clinical
descriptions of the behaviors of paranoid schizophrenics, but it is unsurprising that modern New Atheists such as
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have copted the idea that religion
is itself
a form of mental illness and that the
believers perception of God is nothing more than a delusion. It is no less surprising that a thinker who put the
Amalekite idea of profoundly meaningless and absurd happenstance into modern idiom also became a member of the
Nazi party in 1940. The spiritual emptiness in the wake of such a confrontation with meaninglessness is perhaps the
central theme of Sartres short story
The Wall
which demonstrates best the mindset of Haman ha-Agagi described
above. Pablo, one of the prisoners condemned to death, remarks at the prospect of his being released that
In the state
I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would
have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being
eternal. [Jean-Paul Sartre,
The Wall
: (Intimacy) and Other Stories, p. 8; New York: 1978] It simply makes no
difference to him how things play out - its all meaningless and he is resigned to his hidden fate.
In contradistinction to the above, thinkers like Carl Jung articulated theories that coincidence is everything
but mere, and that there is a barely perceptible, but logically comprehensible framework in which events that are not
causally linked are in fact meaningfully related [see Carl Jung,
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

.
Bollingen, Switzerland: 1952]. Jung called this Synchronicity, and other scientific minds like the great biologist Paul
Kammerer developed similar ideas, and even collected and wrote down incidents of coincidence that he experienced,
all of which he attributed to The Law of Seriality, which none other than Albert Einstein called interesting, and by
no means absurd. [See Arthur Koestler,
The Roots of Coincidence
, Vintage: 1972]

through the mundane and fragmented narrative of the Megillah and going back to replace
ha-melekh
with
ha-Shem
is what elevates the Megillah to
kitve ha-kodesh
(the Holy Canon)
2
[
b
Meg. 7a] and from
goral
to
hashgaha
.
____________________
Understanding or even paying lip service to this final category of providence is one of
the greatest gifts of Judaism and faith in God. It allows us to confront the outwardly random,
unfathomable, and generally absurd experience of life with the comfort that there is another
plane in which this all makes sense. To the reader of the book of our own lives, our own
Megillot, the story comes together and the reasons why it was this way and not the other is
perhaps apparent. May we succeed in turning away from the pull of
mikra
and
goral
and
toward the comfort of
hashgacha
on this Purim and on all days.
_____________________

It seems that the very act of attributing the events around us to pure chance and randomness is itself a sin. See
Leviticus 26:21, where
vhalakhtem imi keri
is the harbinger of great travails.
Keri
here is related to what we
termed above
mikriut
[see R. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch,
Commentary on Torah
, ad loc.] or a resigned capitulation
to nihilism. Maimonides explains the verse in the
Yad
, Hilkhot Taaniot 1:3 to mean that saying that these things
(the troubles) happened to us simply because it is the way of the world is the way of cruelty, and causes (us) to
cleave to our evil ways. It is also a punishment in its own right, as God continues in 26:23 to say that He will
reciprocate the ways of a backsliding Israel by indeed acting towards them in
keri
. R. Hirsch continues to say that
this is the state of being in which one is incapable of saying God has a plan, and their suffering is therefore perceived
as pointless and random. Mordekhai is an exemplar of one who believes that there is always some indiscernible divine
plan, as he declares at a moment when things look particularly bleak for the Jewish people that in some way and some
form, salvation and redemption
will come
for the Jewish people from
some place
. [Esther 4:14] R. J.B. Soloveitchik
adds further depth to the statements of Maimonides above in his
Kol Dodi Dofek
, where he proposes the concept of a
double covenant - that of Egypt, and that of Sinai. R. Soloveitchik writes that just as Judaism distinguished fate from
destiny in the realm of personal individuality, so it also differentiated between these two concepts in the sphere of our
national-historical existence. The individual is tethered to his nation with bonds of fate and chains of destiny. In
accordance with this postulate, one can say that the Covenant of Egypt was a Covenant of Fate, and the Covenant of
Sinai was one of destiny. [R. J.B. Soloveitchik,
Kol Dodi Dofek
, pp. 51-52; trans. David Z. Gordon, New York: 2006]