Excerpted from Hasidus Meets America: The Life and Torah of the Monastryscher Rebbe zt”l (1860-1938) and an Anthology of his Teachings, co-published by OU Press and Ktav Publishers
Purim: Nahalat Yehoshua, pp. 126-128
Rabbi Yohanan began with this verse: “He recalled His kindness and His faith to the House of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God” (Ps. 98:3). When did all the ends of the earth see this? In the days of Mordechai and Esther. (Megillah 11a)
R. Yehoshua Heschel asks: How are we to understand the question itself? Was it only on Purim that the world saw God’s salvation?! After all, the redemption from Egypt was vastly more impressive, both the Exodus itself and the chain of visible, breathtaking miracles that led up to it. What, then, makes Purim a clearer sign of God’s power than the redemption from Egypt? After all, then, too, all the ends of the earth saw God’s salvation!
He prefaces his response by recalling some basic principles concerning the way God runs the world. Three orders must be distinguished: the natural; supernatural, revealed miracles; and hidden miracles, concealed in nature. Revealed miracles utterly defy the laws of nature; they emerge from the very depths of Divine being to enter this world, and thus they are humanly incomprehensible. While those who personally experience such miracles will believe they occurred, others, more distant from the experience may question, doubt, or even deny them. The Exodus itself attests to this reality. Even though “Nations heard – they were agitated; terror gripped the dwellers of Philistia; the chieftains of Edom were confounded, trembling gripped the powers of Moab, all the dwellers of Canaan dissolved” (Exod. 15:14–15) – nonetheless, Amalek, the absolute non-believer, refused to recognize any of the miracles that God had wrought for the Jewish people. Recklessly, “Amalek came and battled Israel” (Exod. 17:8). In the same way Balak King of Moav saw the Exodus as a natural event, and thus he brought in Bilaam to conquer Israel by force of his curses.
All this, of course, stands in sharp contrast to the inner workings of the third order: hidden miracles, concealed in nature. Ironically, on R. Yehoshua Heschel’s understanding, here alone, all the nations of the world have the capacity to recognize the hidden presence of Divine influence. He offers a series of biblical examples. Yitzhak sowed his field as farmers do; “and in that year he reaped a hundredfold” – clearly a heaven-sent blessing (Gen. 26:12). Yitzhak made wells, as shepherds do; unexplainably, wherever in that arid land his servants dug, they discovered flowing wellsprings. Hearing of his success, the shepherds of Avimelekh and Phicol approached Yitzhak, saying: “We have surely seen that God is with you” (Gen. 26:28). All this suggests that when abundant Divine blessing is bestowed through natural means, all of humanity recognizes the hand of God in it.
These thoughts lead R. Yehoshua Heschel to a radical conclusion:
In truth, it is the order of hidden miracles concealed in nature that testifies most cogently to God’s greatness. For God could of course supervise the world solely via miracles, in a continual, incomprehensible show of Divine omnipotence. Instead, though, God chose to constrict His infinite greatness, to confine His power in the guise of nature. This mighty act of tsimtsum (contraction) is far greater than any gesture of expansiveness (hitpashtut).
Finally, now we can understand what the Rabbis then taught some pages later (B. Megilah 16a): “[Haman] found Mordecai with the Sages sitting before him, and he was showing them the laws of kemitsah.” Those halakhot that Mordecai was teaching [on the simple level, they concern how a pinched handful of flour is to be taken from the meal-offering to be burned on the altar] – his intent was to grant the Sages more profound insight into the way God runs the world: God may choose to bring respite and salvation disguised in natural event; this most of all reveals His power. For the laws of kemitsah allude to the mystery of tsimtsum: miracles contained and concealed in nature. Thus, such phenomena actually enable us to recognize God’s glory.
To this point, R. Yehoshua Heschel has focused on the second part of the “prooftext” that would define the unique nature of Purim: “He recalled His kindness and His faith to the House of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God” (Ps. 98:3). But what of the first part? How are “God’s kindness and His faith (emunato)” related to the Purim experience in particular?
“Kindness” (hesed) symbolizes the infinite measure of beneficence that God gives the world as it is manifest in the supernatural order. Miracles disguised within nature, on the other hand, are entrusted to the Jewish people, a gesture of pure faith (emunah). God, as it were, believes in them: even if He conceals the traces of His surveillance of the world, the House of Israel will recognize and know that, here as well, God’s hand secretly guides all of history. Thus, in the days of Mordechai and Esther the miraculous was concealed in natural law, finally to emerge and, ultimately, to be acknowledged unto the ends of the earth.”
