Rabbi Ismar Schorsch on the radio once or twice, so I made an appointment—it felt like making a date with a dentist—and on the day I took the subway up to 125th Street.
The rabbi's secretary showed me into his office, and after a couple of minutes, there was Rabbi Schorsch.
“Rabbi,” I began, “I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways.” I don't know; that's how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn't make head or tail of the Book of Esther.
“It's a spoof, a burlesque, really,” he almost mumbled. He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. “This is a Christian Bible,” he said, genuinely puzzled.
He was the kind of hyper-alert elderly man who, instead of putting on weight around the middle, seemed to have drawn all his energy upward into his eyes and ears, which gleamed, outsized. “Yes. It's a kind of comic chapter, not to be taken entirely seriously,” he went on, holding my King James Version in his hand as though it might beloaded. “It's a light book with a serious message. You see, Scripture, the Bible, one of the remarkable things about it is that it contains a chapter about every form of human experience. There's a book of laws and a book of love songs. A book of exile and a book of homecoming. A skeptical and despairing book in Job, and an optimistic and sheltering book in the Psalms. Esther is the comic book, a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit.”
You could see my whole skeleton underneath my jacket; my hair stood on end; I turned into a pile of black ash, smiling sickly as I slowly crumbled.
“It is?” I said.
“Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated—a court Jew, really. It's a book for court Jews. Why doesn't he bow down to Haman? Well, it might be because of his Judaism. But I think we have to assume that he's jealous—he expects to be made first minister and then isn't. Have you noticed the most interesting thing about the book?” He looked at me keenly.
“I hadn't even noticed it was funny.”
“It's the only book in the Bible where God is never mentioned,” he said. “This is the book for the Jews of the city, the world. After all, we wonder—what does Esther eat? It sure isn't kosher. But she does good anyway. The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together—the writer obviously knows that the king is a bit of an idiot—but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before or even after. She stays married to the Gentile king, remember. This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city and how they struggle to do the righteous thing.”
I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews … I had been assigned to burlesque it when the text was preburlesqued, as jeans might be preshrunk.
We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred yearsago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. In the end, the rabbi gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)
We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, “Why not? What have you got to lose?”
What have you got to lose? It was, I reflected, like the punch line of a Jewish joke.
I n the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing
The rabbi's secretary showed me into his office, and after a couple of minutes, there was Rabbi Schorsch.
“Rabbi,” I began, “I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways.” I don't know; that's how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn't make head or tail of the Book of Esther.
“It's a spoof, a burlesque, really,” he almost mumbled. He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. “This is a Christian Bible,” he said, genuinely puzzled.
He was the kind of hyper-alert elderly man who, instead of putting on weight around the middle, seemed to have drawn all his energy upward into his eyes and ears, which gleamed, outsized. “Yes. It's a kind of comic chapter, not to be taken entirely seriously,” he went on, holding my King James Version in his hand as though it might beloaded. “It's a light book with a serious message. You see, Scripture, the Bible, one of the remarkable things about it is that it contains a chapter about every form of human experience. There's a book of laws and a book of love songs. A book of exile and a book of homecoming. A skeptical and despairing book in Job, and an optimistic and sheltering book in the Psalms. Esther is the comic book, a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit.”
You could see my whole skeleton underneath my jacket; my hair stood on end; I turned into a pile of black ash, smiling sickly as I slowly crumbled.
“It is?” I said.
“Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated—a court Jew, really. It's a book for court Jews. Why doesn't he bow down to Haman? Well, it might be because of his Judaism. But I think we have to assume that he's jealous—he expects to be made first minister and then isn't. Have you noticed the most interesting thing about the book?” He looked at me keenly.
“I hadn't even noticed it was funny.”
“It's the only book in the Bible where God is never mentioned,” he said. “This is the book for the Jews of the city, the world. After all, we wonder—what does Esther eat? It sure isn't kosher. But she does good anyway. The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together—the writer obviously knows that the king is a bit of an idiot—but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before or even after. She stays married to the Gentile king, remember. This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city and how they struggle to do the righteous thing.”
I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews … I had been assigned to burlesque it when the text was preburlesqued, as jeans might be preshrunk.
We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred yearsago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. In the end, the rabbi gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)
We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, “Why not? What have you got to lose?”
What have you got to lose? It was, I reflected, like the punch line of a Jewish joke.
I n the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing
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