Mijal: Welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam. I’m Mijal and I’m without Noam for the next two episodes, but keeping his seat warm with a very special guest each week to wonder along with me. And wonder we shall.: Remember that this show is our way of trying to unpack those big questions being asked by Jews and about the Jews, working through the process together and whether we get to full answers or not, at the very least, we want to leave every episode feeling like we’ve learned something together. Like we’ve learned to think better about whatever topic we are covering more meaningfully. As we say each week, our favorite part of this show is really hearing from you.
So please continue to share your questions, suggestions, feedback, whatever is on your mind by emailing us at our new and improved email address, wonderingjews@unpacked.media. That’s wonderingjews@unpacked.media. And a quick shout out to Leon who got in touch with us to share how much he enjoyed last week’s episode with our special guest, Natasha Hausdorff, which I really enjoyed also, as well as to share a really interesting idea for us to explore in a future episode. So thank you so much, Leon, and please keep listening and keep emailing us.
So we are recording today’s episode on Tuesday, March 11th, which means we’ll be celebrating very soon the Jewish Festival, the Jewish holiday of Purim in just a couple of days. So it felt really worthwhile to kick off our mini series of Faith on Faith.
So we’re going to have the next four episodes or so focused on questions of faith by looking at Purim and using this conversation as an opportunity to both understand the holiday and also to understand big questions around faith and Judaism, especially what happens when God feels hidden. Really to have that conversation. I couldn’t think of a better person to have this conversation with than my very dear friend and theologian, I love calling you a theologian. Tanya, Dr. Tanya White. Tanya is based in Israel, so we’re recording this across different time zones.
And we met Tanya, it was, think, two years ago at this point. We both were part of the first cohort of the Sacks Scholar Student Affair by Jonathan Sacks. Tanya is a brilliant teacher, teaches on issues ranging from theology, faith, Bible, Jewish thought, and a lot of things in between. And it’s really such a privilege to have you here, Tanya.
So Tanya, we don’t like to read bios. So I’m just going to invite you just to share maybe like just three professional highlights if you want to share with us.
Tanya: So I would say if you asked, I think for me, more than any of the highlights of my career, and there have been a few along the way. It’s my weekly teaching, the women and the men that I meet every single week over decades who have been with me and who have journeyed with me and who have developed ideas and seen me develop as a teacher and an educator and as a lecturer and a thinker. And I really absolutely love and look forward to those weekly meetings, those weekly groups where we sit and we discuss sometimes as well. So that’s one highlight of my career in terms of just the development of individual relationships with my students. If I was talking, you know, the more kind of exciting, I guess, like events–
Mijal: Go for it, exciting events.
Tanya: Yeah, one would be getting my doctorate for many, many different reasons. It was a journey both personally, I’d gone through a lot of personal issues during it, the seven years of doing courses I had to do beforehand and then the four and half years of writing it. And the journey of obviously writing it, which in which I grew massively, I wrote it on Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s post Holocaust theology and postmodern thinking. He is, thank God, still alive and kicking. And it was just incredible to write on someone who was alive and really to you know, meet with him, speak with him and then develop his theology outside of our, you know, our meetings. So I enjoyed that immensely and it was a huge achievement for me for many, many different reasons.
And then the second highlight has been just recently I produced and created and produced and envisioned. then it’s now live, the Rabbi Sacks podcast. It’s called Books and Beyond. And it really kind of goes back to the first thing I said. One of the things I feel is that we’ve lost the art of reading in this day and age. Podcasting has become our new medium and it’s fantastic and it’s great. But I think reading gives us a breadth and a depth that maybe other mediums don’t. And many of us are screen oriented rather than word oriented. And I felt that people were listening to Rabbi Sacks, they were engaging with him with some of his, you know, his weekly biblical commentary, but they weren’t really gaining a deep overall, broad systematic insight into his works. And one of the reasons I did the podcast was for us to really engage with his written work. It was a journey as well. I had to really go out my comfort zone from everything from fundraising to producing to learning how to podcast to inviting guests when I didn’t have a product to sell because it hadn’t been made yet.
And I got really A-class guests, including the one and only Mijal Bitton. And it’s really been an incredible, it’s not really a podcast, it’s actually more of an audio series. It’s really a creative journey into his books.
Mijal: Yeah, I just want to recommend for folks, if you haven’t listened to it, go ahead and explore it. We’ll put it in the show notes. And I’ll say I think one of my first one of the first times that I met you, Tanya, you were part of a group of philosophers and scholars who were presenting by Jonathan Sack’s work in a way that was very methodical, and which I remember loving that so much, because it wasn’t only sharing an idea that was inspiring. It was saying, here was this amazing rabbi who took years to really build an intellectual empire and we need to understand the development of those ideas. So that that was really, really fantastic.
Tanya, before we jump into Purim, and I really want us to spend time on Purim as really a window to understand questions on faith. I want to ask you a question that I haven’t asked you before. Like when I describe your work, say, Tanya, she’s a theologian. She studied post-Holocaust theology, which I think as a non-expert means to understand how Jewish thinkers and theologians were making sense of God and our approach to God after the Holocaust. It’s not a light subject. And I’m just curious, what drew you to wanna understand post-Holocaust theology and like these big questions around faith in such a dark place, I would say.
Tanya: So it’s so interesting you asked me because it actually relates back to Rabbi Sacks, funnily enough. It was actually fascinating because Rabbi Sacks is very critical of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg in his writings. He talks about him being, you know, outside the periphery of what he would call centrist or orthodox Judaism. And yet he was the one that recommended when I met with him after I’d written my masters on Emil Fackenheim, who’s another post Holocaust thinker. And I said to him, know, in the future, I want to write a doctorate. What would you recommend? And he said to me, I really recommend you read Rabbi Yitz Greenberg.
And I want to tell you, I picked up Rabbi Yitz Greenberg afterwards and I read his well-known essay, Clouds Smoke, Pill of Fire. And in that he talks about dialectical faith for him, the Holocaust was an absolute shattering on every level. He didn’t really know about it. He didn’t find out about it until he went to Israel in 1961. I think it was the year of the Eichmann trials.
Mijal: So you’re saying that Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, and who was an American Jewish rabbi? By the way, I love Rabbi Yitz, so it’s exciting to talk with you about him.
Tanya: Yeah. He’s really an unbelievable human being as well as being an unbelievable theologian. Yeah.
Mijal: So you’re saying that in the sixties, he traveled to Israel and that’s when he actually understood like the Holocaust in its magnitude.
Tanya: Yeah, he had family that had been through the Holocaust. His parents had come from Europe, but no one had been speaking about it. There had been a total silence.
Mijal: Wow. Wow.
Tanya: It’s like crazy for us to even think about it, because, we all know and speak about the Holocaust, but there really was a silence that permeated American Jewry during that time.
Mijal: Right. So he comes as like a fully matured rabbi with ideas and thoughts, and then he encounters the Holocaust.
Tanya: Yeah, yeah he was. And then he wanted to be an academic. went on a Fulbright scholarship to lecture in university in Israel. And all of a sudden he finds out about what happened in the Holocaust. And he said he spent the entire year, if he wasn’t teaching, he spent the entire year in Yad Vashem totally immersed in the history of the Holocaust. He said it shattered him. He would come out from Yad Vashem and the dichotomy of coming out from reading about all of those unimaginable atrocities to coming out and looking at developing Israel and his child who had just been born who was also developing. He said he just found himself oscillating all the time between absolute despair and absolute hope. And he just, it was this incredible movement and he calls faith after the Holocaust. says you can no longer have a pure absolute faith. It’s a broken faith and he calls it dialectical.
Mijal: Is this before like the Eichmann trial when people–
Tanya: It was literally during the Eichmann trial.
Mijal: Okay, so during, just to share with folks, the Eichmann trial in which Adolf Eichmann was caught in Argentina, brought to Israel and tried, it was a watershed moment also in terms of people in Israel and around the world speaking about the Holocaust. Beforehand, there was a lot of shame by a lot of Jews in Israel who felt like they couldn’t really speak about it.
It went a little bit against the Israeli ethos of fighting for yourself. And that almost was like a watershed moment in which the Holocaust becomes something publicly spoken about and in which many Holocaust survivors speak about it for the first time. So, Rav Yitz Greenberg, this American Jewish rabbi, you’re telling us, Tanya, is in Israel and discovering the magnitude of the Holocaust as the Eichmann trial is happening.
Tanya: Exactly. And he was offered tickets to go and see it. And he said, Oh, I’ll listen to it on the radio. And I think people didn’t realize at the time how massive and exactly as you said, the watershed that it would become by the way, also theologically, because no one had written about the Holocaust. No one until Richard Rubenstein, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein writes about it. And he calls it in, that’s right, after Eichmann in 1966.
And he calls it the death of God. He uses Nietzsche’s language and he says we can’t believe in God after the Holocaust. And that, by the way, triggers the response by modern Orthodox thinkers because they realize that if they don’t offer a response, they’re going to have many people that are going to be totally shattered. Their faith is going to be shattered by the Holocaust. So a lot of things happen in that time period.
Mijal: Let me try to understand this, Tanya, I think what you’re saying is that the conceptual tools, the religious and theological ways the Jews thought about ourselves and God, that there was something about the magnitude and the horrors of the Holocaust that challenged those and broke those. Can you give us one example to understand, what are some of the ways that we thought about God before the Holocaust that were suddenly really, really challenged and shattered by it?
Tanya: So I’ll give you a classic example. First and foremost, I think the magnitude of the Holocaust, the fact that a third of world Jewry was destroyed. Not only does it challenge, you know, the basic most fundamental question of the problem of evil, you know, how can there be a good God who’s all knowing and all powerful and all the omnis, right? Omniscient, omnipotent. How can we reconcile that conception of God with the empirical evil that we see manifested in the world, things that we experience the suffering of anyone or anything. And when it’s on the scale of the Holocaust and God’s chosen people, how can God have remained silent? That’s like the big theological question, where was God?
And this was a massive shattering because of the scale and the uniqueness of the event. It was just a rupture, a total rupture in people’s theological conceptual, conceptual theological structures. And I think for Yitz Greenberg, he explains it and he explains it, by the way, in such a visceral way. It’s like you just have to read him. You can like imagine him going on this journey of total like fragmentation. And he says that he recognized that after the Holocaust, there’s only what he calls dialectical faith.
Mijal: Yeah, say slowly, dialectical faith.
Tanya: Dialectical faith is the idea that faith is all the time oscillating. We’re moving all the time from the image of the, and he uses this language, the image of the burning children, right, which Elie Wiesel talks about in his book in Auschwitz, in Bergen-Belsen, in Birkenau, all of these places where they, know, and it’s been verified and proven that they wanted to save money and they threw live babies into the fires. And on the other side between the images of the redemption of the state of Israel in 1948 and how can we on the one hand believe in the redeeming God and on the one hand believe in a God that allows the Holocaust to happen. And so what Rabbi Yitz Greenberg said is that faith is no longer whole. It’s no longer absolute. It’s oscillation, it’s dialectical, it’s a dialectical tension between these two points.
And I want to share something, the reason why I decided to write on Rabbi Yitz Greenberg. My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He lost his entire family. He was in Buchenwald. We know very little of his story. He died, unfortunately, he was 63 and that was before people were really talking about their stories. The only time he ever spoke about it was to my cousin who was doing a school project and he gave him very, very few details. For example, he said, I escaped from a camp, but he doesn’t explain how he lost everyone. He came to Israel in 1945. He fought in the war of independence.
My grandmother, who was a Kindertransport child, she left on the Kindertransport from Germany to England, had come with her family to Israel for the first Maccabiah games. She met my grandfather. They fell in love and they went back to London. Now, by the way, the majority of his grandchildren, great grandchildren live in Israel. But what’s fascinating is that every, he was a totally believing, very pious kind of, know, I always saw him davening and he was a totally Orthodox Jew. But every single lel has said it, every seder night, he used to start screaming. And by the way, this was a man who was extremely placid, like this, he really never got angry, but he started shouting.
When we got to Vehi She’amda under the part where we say God stands by us and keeps his promise in every generation, he doesn’t allow us to be destroyed. My grandfather used to start screaming and he used to say, it’s not true. It’s not true. God didn’t save us.
Mijal: Wow.
Tanya: This was such a, it was such a, a, like very strong memory for me. And I remember coming up to that point in the Haggadah and I used to start, my heart started beating because I knew it was going to happen every year. And my mother and her sisters, all of whom were named after his three sisters that died in the Holocaust, they would say to him, but daddy, look, look at your children, look how you saw, and he couldn’t accept it.
Now for me, I couldn’t express or put language to the kind of faith he had as a child. But when I read Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, I realized that what my grandfather had and probably many of the survivors, what what Yitz Greenberg calls dialectical faith. And that’s why it spoke to me. The oscillating between on the one hand, the belief in God and the belief in God’s saving hand and the belief that we are part of a bigger picture. And Am Yisrael is, you know, the eternal people. And on the other hand, not being able to get over the burning children, like the experience of rupture. And that to me was my grandfather. So I wanted to dig deeper and that’s how I got into Rabbi Yitz Greenberg.
Mijal: Wow. It sounds from what you’re saying that part of, tell me if this resonates, like thinking of post-holocaust theology, maybe there are those, like you quoted the rabbi who basically said this is like the end of God or like the end of faith. And I also know of people for whom there was almost like a continuation of faith. This didn’t necessarily change their paradigm. And then there are those like Rabbi Yitz Greenberg who says it’s, it’s transformation of Jewish faith. That we have to think about God differently based on the history that is happening around us. And that history includes the Holocaust and the state of Israel simultaneously.
I’m curious, Tanya. So we are a couple of days out before Purim, the holiday of Purim. Just quickly, you know, Purim is such a I don’t know if you feel this, but I always feel like there is I feel like there’s a jarring gap between the holiday, which is such a kid-friendly holiday. Like we are dressing up, my kids have costumes, we’re making mishloch hamanot, gifts of food one to the other, parties, like the whole, it’s so happy and so joyous and so much drinking and celebrating and all that. And then when you read the story, the story in the scroll of Esther, right? It is a very grown up adult sobering story. It is, like I’ll say it in like not not perfectly exact biblical terms, but it’s the story of like like Haman, who’s like a Hitler like character who wants to kill the entire Jewish people in the Persian Empire across 127 provinces, which included pretty much all the areas where Jews were settled back then. And he wants to to kill them for like no real rhyme or reason, just destroy them.
And then, and then of course we have the story of like Esther, Queen Esther and Mordecai, her uncle or cousin, and the way that they are able to save the Jewish people. But I read the story of Esther and part of me just feels always very dizzy when I read it. I was actually speaking about it with some friends who asked me, well, was there a Plan B?
Mijal: You know, they had Esther in the palace who interceded on behalf of the Jewish people and she saved everybody and we’re all like celebrating and you know, Esther’s awesome, Purim is awesome. But then it’s like, well, if that wouldn’t have happened, would that have been, you know, an earlier Holocaust, God forbid? Like, I don’t know. don’t know. Do you have, what thoughts do you have about this jarring gap?
Tanya: It’s so, it’s so, it really is so interesting because you know, the rabbis say that Purim is ki-pur, ki-purim, Yom Kippur, right?
Mijal: So the day of atonement, like the holiest day of the year.
Tanya: The Day of Atonement is ki-purim, is like Purim. And you’re like, there could not be two festivals that are further apart, right?
Mijal: Right, because just the Day of Atonement is like a day of fasting and super serious, we’re being judged. And then Purim is like a day of festival and masks. So it’s like, why do the Talmudic sages say that they are like each other?
It’s like a really interesting comparison because as you said, they’re totally different in their nature, but maybe theologically there’s a connection between them because to me, they both speak about how we connect with God, know, different ways of connecting with God. And it goes back to what you were asking, you know, was there a plan B? It’s such an interesting question.
And I want to just add another thing about the Megilla, which I think is really important, or the scroll of Esther that we read or the story that Mijal you just spoke about is that God’s name, unlike almost every other book in the Bible, the scroll of Esther, God’s name doesn’t appear at all. There’s no name of God at all. In fact, we could just read it like a kind of, I don’t know how you would call it, like a fable or, you know, like a story of the baddies and the goodies and the goodies win and, you know, nice Hollywood ending where the queen who was hiding in the castle and she hid her identity.
Like, where’s God in the story? He’s just not there. And there’s a very interesting law that when we read the scroll of Esther, we have to read it open. So when you read it, you can’t just have the scroll like scrolled up. have to like, the parchment has to be totally open.
And the reason for that law is there’s in every law, there’s always like an theological idea that underpins it. And the reason is because if you do not see the whole story, it’s almost impossible to see the hand of God. Meaning if you see every part on its own, it’s just, you know, the King Achashverosh has a party and invites everyone to the party and the Jews are part of that party. Okay, that’s a nice chapter. He has a, his wife Vashti who he exiles from the kingdom and then he does a whole beauty competition of all. I mean, it sounds like it doesn’t sound like the kind of book that should be in the Bible, right? And to me, I always say like, the people of Israel are, where is God?
And this goes back to the idea that we were talking about of faith and maybe the Holocaust and this idea of rupture. And how do we conceive? What kind of faith do we believe in? You know, what kind of faith? Is it like dogmatic propositional faith that like, believe in X, Y, Z, okay? Or I believe in these concepts or these ideas and they are absolute, like nothing touches them. But what happens when something contradicts them? Like, how do I navigate that? Like we said about the Holocaust, right? And I think that the book of Esther to me, it doesn’t have God’s name because the entire redemption, the entire salvation of the Jewish people rests on human beings. It rests on Mordechai and it rests on Esther and it rests on the people of Israel as well. It rests on all of these people who take agency of their situation. And I think that question you asked is so important. Like what would have happened had Esther not done what she did? But Mordechai answers the question for us in the Megillah.
Mijal: I think what you’re beginning to present is a textured approach to Jewish faith that says, when God seems hidden, okay, seems being a big word there, when God seems hidden, one of the ways to have faith is to step up and to, in some ways, partner with God, right, and do good in the world.
I’m curious. I’m curious if they’re going to ask like a somewhat sacrilegious question. Can ask that?
Tanya: And yeah, of course, we love those.
Mijal: I mean, there’s other. Yeah, we love. Right. So a different way that the megillah could be read is like one way is to say God is hidden, but it’s all a play. Open the whole thing up. God is everywhere. You know, another way is to open it up and to say, God, comes. God seems absent. And and then people just act in many ways. I was thinking about, this year, I was wondering about how the poem story reminded me in some ways of like early Zionist leaders who were secular and who were basically taking control of Jewish destiny. And if God was hidden, they didn’t find ways to find God. They just said, we are going to move forward.
Tanya:A lot of them, by the way, did not believe in God, right? Actually, Mijal, what is the scroll of Esther? It’s basically a book for our time because it’s a world in which God is totally hidden. We don’t know what we’re meant to be doing. There’s evil that is in, you know, in our face or encountering us or decrease for our death and whatever it happens to be. And we’re kind of trying blindly to navigate a space that seems really, really empty. Empty of transcendence, empty of divinity, empty of even empty of humanity and moral conscience. And you’re like, what do you do in that space? Like, what is our role? And that’s why I think the Book of Esther has such an important message for us. Yeah.
Mijal: Let me add to that, Tanya. Speaking of someone living in America right now in which you have a ruler and half the time you’re not sure if the ruler is like a secret genius or if the ruler has no clue, is like a capricious, you know what I mean? It’s like
Tanya: Right at the beginning, said that he reminds me a bit of an Achashverosh. Trump, like you’re not sure if he’s going to be swayed, who he’s going to be swayed by. Is he swayed by Haman? Is he swayed by Mordechai? Like, is this good for the Jews? Is this bad for the Jews? Like it’s such an unknown, it’s such an unknown entity.
Mijal: Right. Right. Who finds favor when? Yes. Yep. You feel dizzy. I feel so dizzy with Purim. I feel so dizzy.
Tanya: It’s dizzy, right. And by the way, that feeling of dizziness is like, I feel like the Megillah itself, puts you in, by the way, even the idea of dizziness is on Purim, we’re meant to drink, right? We’re meant to get drunk because that feeling of dizziness is so often what happens in a post revelatory world where we, where there isn’t certain, where God isn’t coming down telling us what to do, where there is an opening of seas and plagues and miracles.
And the miracle comes to us. So my daughter couldn’t go to kindergarten. She couldn’t go. I mean, when I left, she would get very upset. So a friend of mine recommended a book called The Invisible String. And the book is about two children who can’t fall asleep and they come to their mother and they say to their mother, we can’t fall asleep. And she tells them a story about all invisible strings that exist in the world. And she said that we are all tied through an invisible string to all the people that we love. So they said, what? Like even to daddy who’s at work, yes, even daddy who’s in the office, even cousin Millie who lives in Australia, yes, even cousin Millie who is there, even to granddad who died in heaven, yes, you have an invisible string, even granddad’s in heaven. And she said to him, and you know what, more than just the invisible string, if you pull on the string, they feel the pull.
So you pull on the string and they feel the pull. And sometimes they’ll pull on the string and you can feel the pull, but you’re connected all the time. So when you go to kindergarten, this is I said to my daughter, right? If you are not there, you can’t see me, but when you pull on the string, I’ll feel it. And that day I picked her up. She went happily. I picked up, said, did you feel me pulling on the string? And I said, I felt you pulling on the string. And it was such a cute and it was such a brilliant, cute idea. But you know what? I’ve been thinking more and more about that book recently because at least my conception of faith is very much influenced by covenantal thinkers, people who believe that Judaism brings a new idea to the world through the Bible. And that’s the idea of covenant. And covenant means not that God is going to do everything for me, not a capricious God in the ancient worlds who you had to kind of placate in order to get what you wanted. No, covenant means that God has faith in me, that God
Mijal: It’s relational. It’s both ways.
Tanya: When I pull my string, it pulls the string of God. And by the way, that’s what I’ve seen in Israel. That’s what I really feel. I feel like when we take initiative, God responds in kind. There’s this like, and by the way, think going back to the Zionist thinkers you said, they didn’t believe in the vertical string, but they believed in the horizontal strings.
Mijal: Yeah, and let’s unpack that because Tanya, I think the Purim story can be read in both ways, right? So, right, so on the one hand, if we talk about the vertical string, right? if we can argue that God is hidden, there is hester panim, hiddenness of God’s face as if it were–
Tanya: Totally. That’s exactly what I was going to say. Exactly.
Mijal: but right, but that God is still like moving things behind the scenes in a way that is magnificent and miraculous and allows for salvation. And there is also what I have been just thinking about so much this year with Purim, that horizontal string.
So I’ll give just two examples that I’ve been thinking about. One is, so Esther is alone in the palace. And by the way, when we read the story of Esther, I don’t think we realize how alone she was because the words seem to describe her talking to Mordechai, her, you know, uncle slash cousin, but we forget that it’s all through an intermediary. She’s alone in the, how do you pronounce it? The harem, harem, the, yeah, yeah. She’s alone there, right? And nobody knows who she really is. She’s completely hidden, completely alone. And she has to risk her life and like feeling so alone.
And then she turns to Mordechai and she tells him through an intermediary, before I risk my life fully, please tell everybody to like fast and to pray for three days. And I just kept thinking that there’s like a religious way to read that, like, she’s trying to get God to listen to the prayers, but there’s also the string situation, right, that you just described, right? It’s like feeling.
Tanya: I think it goes even before that, the way, though, Mijal, because I feel that that whole kind of conversation between her and Mordechai when he finds out about the decree and comes to the palace and whatever, and he says to her, he says, If you deafen yourself to the call, to the tug of the way that I see it is like literally if you deafen yourself to the tug of the string at this time, right?
Mijal: Right, this is after he tells her of the decree.
Tanya: He says, I believe that the Jewish people will be saved, meaning I believe that God is the God of history. God, there is a bigger picture here that you’re part of a much bigger story. Your people are going to be saved, but you and your father’s house will be lost. Will be lost to what? Will be lost to history, will be lost in the pages because you wouldn’t have taken agency of the situation.
Now for me, what we’ve been seeing since October 7th, by the way, I really think is that moment is that liminal space between being almost apathetic and not even recognizing the string that connected me for many Jews around the world, right? Even here in Israel, that kind of apathy to my strings vertically and horizontally. And all of a sudden, October 7th, we feel the pull of the string. It can be a Jew somewhere in the, you know, South America, Argentina, Morocco, wherever it is, a Jew all of a sudden, October 7th for many Jews around the world, they felt the tug of that pull. They realized that, hold on a minute, my people’s pain is my pain. I’m feeling this string that I can’t account for rationally, right? But something’s happening. And the big question, and this is what Mordechai says to Esther, you know, you are part of your people and your people will be saved because I promise you someone else is going to step into that role. Like that’s your question. If it wasn’t for Esther, would the people have been saved? So I believe the answer is yes, because I believe someone else.
Mijal: Really? As a post Holocaust theologian you say that?
Tanya: I really do say that because I think that the Jewish, I think quintessential Jewish trait is to take agency of our situation, not to be victims.
Mijal: Yeah. Can I read to you something beautiful that I read? Let me just try to open this here. So was reviewing this book called The Dawn by Yoram Hazani in which he has a political read of the book of Esther. And there was a quote there that I just found so beautiful exactly relating to what you’re saying right now. He said like this, because he just used the word agency. So this he brought it up. Says:
and here lies the key to Esther. The most remarkable aspect of the book is not God’s absence itself, but the fact that this absence does not induce the fit and despair. Mordechai and Esther prove that even in the grim new universe of the dispersion, the most fearsome evils may yet be challenged and so long as man, and I’m going to add woman, himself is willing to take the initiative to beat them. Thus, while Esther adheres faithfully to the message of earlier Jewish teachings in terms of the outcome of the story, it heralds a dramatic shift in the burden of responsibility for this outcome. Man may still find out what God wishes of him, but he will not be given the answers. He will have to seek them. Men may still participate in the actions of God in history, but He will not be called to them. He will have to initiate them. And men may still see God’s justice and peace brought into being in the world, but it will not be handed to Him. He will have to build it.
Tanya: So beautiful.
Mijal: It’s the covenantal theology you were talking about basically, yeah.
Tanya: So you asked me when you asked me to speak on podcasts and you said to me, our topic is faith. And I thought to myself, if there was one book in the entire Bible to me that represents faith in our postmodern world, it’s the book of Esther. Because to me, faith isn’t waiting for God to come down and save me. Like that is not faith. To me, faith, at least Jewish faith, is the idea that we fight our battles knowing that our eyes are raised to heaven. And where’s that model? The first time we fight Amalek, Amalek being the quintessential evil, right? Who comes to attack us. And we know that Haman is the descendant of Amalek. The very first time is after we come out of Egypt and God has done all those miracles for us.
And we ask, ha’yesh Hashem b’kiryeinu, who is God within us, we ask this strange question and God sends Amalek. And I think his answer to the question of is divinity within me? Where’s God? Is he out there? Is he in the heavens? Are we waiting for him to come and save us? No. Part of being created in the image of God is to know that God is turning to us. That’s covenant. That’s the string. That’s the invisible string between us and God. And that string requires more than just its vertical direction. It requires a horizontal direction. How do we know that? Because when the people battle against Amalek, Moshe goes to the top of the mountain and his hands are in the air. And that is the first time, Mijal, that we hear in the Bible the word for faith, emunah. We have not heard it until that moment. And his hands are called yadei emunah, the hands of faith and they are held up by Aaron and Hur.
Mijal: His brother and his nephew.
Tanya: It takes a community. It takes a faith community for us to be able to battle the evil in the world.
Mijal: Wait, I think it’s such a good way to conclude the faith and Purim conversation, Tanya. I’m going to remind you of something because what you’re helping us think of right now and based on your work as a theologian who studied responses to God and to Jewish faith after the Holocaust and your you know, I love your metaphor about the spring, the string with Purim and so much of what you’re saying and covenantal faith and theology is basically saying we might live in a world where we don’t necessarily see God.
It’s dizzying, it’s confusing. But faith means that we are going to step forward knowing that there’s this string connecting us. And you just expressed a beautiful example of it being vertical and horizontal.
Now, Tanya, I want to remind you of something. I don’t know if you remember this, but I think it was one or two, within a week of October 7th, was very close afterwards. You live in Israel. You have so many family and friends in the IDF. I live in New York. And I remember that you were one of the people that I was talking to. Just, you know, there was just so much despair. Everything was so rotten. And I forgot if I was talking to you or WhatsApping with you. But at one point, I told you, like, I don’t even know.
I think I felt the inadequacy of being far away and just saying like, feel like the world is falling apart and it’s so bad and you’re in Israel. you responded to me with that teaching that you just shared. You reminded me that when Moses was fighting, when the Jewish people were fighting Amalek, this evil nation that attacked them for no reason, attacked them as vulnerable, that there were different roles and different positions there. There were the people fighting with arms. There was Moses giving them hope by raising his arms. And there were those holding up his arms. And you told me your job as American Jews right now is to hold up our hands.
And you should note, I’ve written some things, but this is like the thing I wrote that I’m probably most proud of and that most people have read. And I know it’s resonated with people from like Australia to South America about what it means to be a Jewish people who’s really tied to each other. To me, that’s really important because I describe myself as a person of faith, but my faith in God and in Judaism, it’s not divorced or separate from my faith for the Jewish people.
Tanya: Faith in the Jewish people. for me, it’s about faith in ourselves. Like I always say more than our faith in God, it’s the knowledge that God has faith in us and that we are part of the eternity of the Jewish people. It’s as much us taking responsibility and agency as us relying on God to save us. And I think it’s a two way thing. And by the way, it’s so funny that you said that about October the 7th, because I still feel it today. I really do. I was just in London, and I was walking around and in central London, there’s trees, loads of trees with yellow ribbons. And I can’t even tell you what that did to me. you know, my, my daughter’s in the IDF and we have, we’ve unfortunately had many losses, some very close. It’s been a really, really difficult 15 months, 16 months. But when you walk around and you see that we’re being held, we’re all, everyone’s holding each other up, you know, and that is.
To me, that’s what faith is. It’s faith in the knowledge that we pull our string, God will pull his, but sometimes we also need to pull the string that connects us vertically to our people and have faith that we’re going to be able to connect to both elements of our string, the vertical and the horizontal, to bring about redemption here down on earth. And sometimes it’s a long way. It’s a long path.
Mijal: Yeah. So Tanya, we finish with some takeaways. So takeaway number one, what are you dressing up for Purim this here? I’m gonna make this a takeaway from our conversation.
Tanya: We always do, we do every year a family theme. This year we are doing a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We’re not seven, we’re actually six. So we’re doing five dwarfs and a Snow White. Yeah, we went for kind of an easy one, but it’s, it’s very cute. It’s very fun. And it’s like a family discussion. What are we going to dress up as? It starts like Hanukkah time.
Mijal: That’s very cute. For me, it’s what does Amazon have that arrives within 24 hours? That’s what I just did earlier today. Got some.
Tanya: You see, you can get Amazon in 24 hours. Us and Israel, have to plan in advance.
Mijal: Yeah. That and no Sundays is something that I think is well, needs to change. OK, so one second. I’m channeling Noam right now. So we like to close with a segment called So Nu, What Now. So besides for the costumes, top three takeaways about faith and God and Purim and all that.
Tanya: Okay, so gosh, so I think number one, faith is as much belief in our, in the vertical and horizontal ties that we have both to something transcendent, God, whatever you want to define, and to our people, to our history, to the generations that came before and the generations that are going to come after.
Number two, I think it’s, really believe that Judaism is about agency, human agency, about God looking to us and saying, okay, nu, what now? What are you going to do? Like Mordechai says to Esther, you’re in the palace, you’re in the perfect position. You need to do something that is going to change the trajectory of your people’s destiny, of your people’s history. And Esther says, I will do it, but go and gather all the Jews because I’m not going to do it alone, because it’s not about the individual. It’s about the collective, but it’s about the individual taking agency and recognizing they’re part of the collective.
And number three, I think, that we are, for me, we are the Purim story. We are literally living out the Purim story. Like that’s the way I see it. And I think the question that we can ask ourselves today is, are we going to be an Esther? Like, are we able to transition from things being done to us, connecting to our people because, oh, I don’t have a choice or I’m being pointed out as a Jew or okay, you know, I’m a Jew, there’s nothing I can do about it, to saying, okay, now I’m a Jew, what am I going to do with that? How am I going to be part of my people’s story? Am I just going to be lost in the pages of history or am I going to be an Esther? And by the way, just to finish, why is it not called Megillat Mordechai? Like he is the quintessential believer from beginning to end.
Mijal: Because men have way too many books in the Bible we need like couple of them for women, come on.
Tanya: You’re 100% right. You’re 100% right. But you know what? I really think it’s because Esther represents the Jewish journey. Like she is the one that she transitions. And she bravely and courageously transitions. And to me, that’s why it’s the Megillah is named after her.
Mijal: I’ll add to that my takeaway. She transitions and she, I think, is the only one who didn’t have to. What I mean by that is that she could have conceivably escaped. And she chooses to risk it all. And I think it’s fabulous. I’m gonna cheat my takeaway. You started with, you know, started with Yitz Greenberg. So I’ll share with you one idea from him that I’m obsessed with about Purim. It’s not only him, but I’ve learned it first from him.
He describes Mordechai and Esther as like totally assimilated Jews who have this awakening and then they become the saviors of the Jewish people. And to me, that’s also part of this moment about what it means to, for all of us. I just mean like, the transformation is not only as somebody who decides to step up, it’s someone who thought that she wasn’t in charge of the story, then she realizes that she gets to write it and she gets to shape it and she’s the only one.
So this was so good, Tanya. Thank you so much for being here bringing your Torah, your wisdom. Encouraging everybody again to check Dr Tanya White’s amazing series podcast on Rabbi Sacks’s books. We’ll put it in the show notes.
Tanya: Thank you for having me.
Mijal: And just as we are closing out this week’s show, a reminder that we always love hearing from you, our fellow Wonderers. So please do get in touch if anything resonated today in past shows, if you have new interpretations of porn you want to share. I actually really enjoy receiving that. And also if you have ideas, like questions around faith or other big ideas that you’d like for us to explore, let us know. It’s really become a community just getting so many emails from people, and learning together. that’s really exciting. Next week, we will continue with our faith theme, this time with another special guest and good friend who’s going to join me in wondering about faith, about do we need God to have faith, faith during crisis, faith for Jews in America? How do our beliefs evolve under pressure and other questions like that? And again, just a very, very special thank you to you, Tanya, for joining me and us today and I look forward to wondering with you all again next week. Bye for now. And happy Purim.