Purim 2025: “The Choice Was Mine and Mine Completely”
Rabbi Andrew Oberstein
Qabbalat Shabbat, March 14, 2025
Temple Israel of Boston
There’s a midrash you may have heard before that reimagines the story of the Israelites accepting the Torah at Mount Sinai.
The traditional understanding of revelation, the story that we just read in the book of Exodus last month, the story that forms the basis for our annual celebration of Shavuot, imagines our spiritual ancestors standing at the foot of the mountain, with Moses our Teacher descending from his lengthy one-on-one conversation with God, now proposing terms for an eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people.
And the Israelites stand in awe, witnessing God’s power through a thunder and lightning spectacular rivaling anything Disney could ever imagine.
Here at this mountain, the Israelites have a communal opportunity to hear and understand the laws that form the fundamental system of morality that still guides us today.
And the Israelites, recognizing the opportunity that they have before them, understanding what it meant to live in service to a cruel tyrant like Pharaoh, burst with excitement about a different kind of service, a holy service to that which is Eternal, a new system of laws and statutes that prioritize human dignity, and sacred rest, and economic justice, and compassion, and empathy.
And they speak in a unified voice in response to these covenantal terms, saying “Na’aseh v’nishmah” – [roughly translated as] We will do this and we will hear these commandments, We will really understand them, And we will obey them.”
For people who have only known slavery and degradation, this moment represents a beautiful moment of voluntary submission, a moment where this people makes a conscious choice to cleave to Torah, to place trust not in rulers of flesh and blood or idols of gold and bronze (at least temporarily), but rather to place trust in that which is invisible and Eternal, to trust that this system of mitzvot, of sacred obligations, is a good one, and one that brings goodness into the world.
But this notion that the Israelites actually entered this Eternal covenant of their own accord is complicated by one small word in the book of Exodus.
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The text tells us that right before Moses gave the Israelites the 10 commandments, he brought the people out from the camp to have an encounter with God, “Vayityatzvu b’tachtit hahar” “and they took their places at the foot of the mountain.”
But the word I translated as “at the foot of” – b’tachtit – can also be understood to mean “underneath,” meaning the Israelites stood underneath the mountain.
So, the hyperliteralist rabbis of the Talmud do what they do best.
In this case Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chassa teaches that the Jewish people quite literally stood underneath the mountain.
He teaches that this incredible covenantal moment actually involved God overturning Mount Sinai, holding it over the Jews’ head like a tub and saying to them, “If you accept the Torah, that’s excellent, and if not, right over there will be your burial place.”
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This is not my favorite midrash.
This is not a story that I teach often.
And it’s certainly not how I personally conceive of the moment of revelation.
But the implications of this interpretation are monumental, providing, as Rav Acha bar Yaakov teaches, a “substantial caveat to the obligation to fulfill the Torah.”
After all, if the Jews accepted the Torah under duress and coercion, none of it is binding and the covenant no longer stands.
Who wants to be a part of a covenant that was not actually made according to our own free will?
And so the rabbis of the Talmud grapple with this until our sage Rava stands up and says, “af al pi chen,” even so, even if it’s true and the Israelites didn’t actually accept the Torah willingly at Mount Sinai, we are still in an eternal covenant and it was absolutely accepted of the Jews’ own free will.
They may not have freely chosen at Mount Sinai, but they certainly did at another time, later in our Hebrew Bible.
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So when is this moment when the Jews took Torah and Jewish tradition and ritual and sacred obligation upon themselves freely and willingly? Rava teaches us that it happened “Biymei Achashveirosh,” in the days of Achashverosh.
That’s right.
Today of all days.
It happened on Purim.
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We often lift up our Mt Sinai moment as the true commitment ceremony between God and the Jewish people, we celebrate it every Spring on the festival of Shavuot, but what if it’s actually this week’s holiday of Purim that we can point to as the moment when the Jews commit to being Jews, the moment when we finally say yes, without a mountain dangling over our heads?
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Rava points to the verse in Chapter 9 of the book of Esther: “Kiymu v’kablu hayehudim aleihem” – the Jews undertook and irrevocably obligated themselves and their descendants, of their own free will.
In the context of the Book of Esther, the commitment the Jews are making is clearly just to celebrate Purim, but Rava expands the notion and sees the verse describing the moment that the Jews commit to “the whole megillah,” so to speak.
It is the moment, he teaches, when the Jews commit to the entirety of being Jewish and all that it entails.
This is the moment, not Shavuot but rather Purim, when we celebrate what it means to commit ourselves to our Jewish identities, to obligate ourselves to each other and to our Torah and to the traditions that have sustained us for so many generations.
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You or I may not buy the story of the upside down mountain, but I still love the interpretation that Purim was actually the moment when the Jews chose Judaism. I love the idea that it was a thwarted eradication attempt that made the Jews say, “people may want to get rid of us, but we are never going away.”
I love the idea that it was an audacious Jewish woman risking everything to save her people that made the Jews say, “we choose not to hide ourselves any longer. We choose to publicly and eternally claim our place among the peoples of this world.”
I love imagining a story that begins with so much hatred, so much fear, so much discrimination simply for being who we are, and ends with so much pride, with intentionally unmasking ourselves, and with choosing, of our own free will, to never give up that which makes us unique, to never give up that which makes us Jewish.
This year, and every year, there are so many people out there who would like to see a more homogenous society, who want to marginalize or even eradicate entire groups of people from our midst.
This year, and every year, we hear voices of people dreaming of a world where Jews do not exist.
And so we take our cues from those who came before us, who experienced the vitriol and the hatred firsthand, who lived in a time of existential fear, and could have chosen to use their circumstances as an opportunity to renounce their Judaism, to make themselves less of a target, to capitulate out of fear to those who peddle malevolent conspiracy theories, but instead they chose to double down on their Judaism, to be more proudly and openly Jewish than ever.
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We take our cues from the rabbis who pointed to this moment of Purim as the defining moment when the Jews, unequivocally and of their own free will, affirmed that this covenant is our lifeblood, that the Torah matters to us, that it mattered to our ancestors, and that it will matter to our descendants.
And so, with this midrash in mind, my teacher Rabbi Dalia Marx calls Purim “a festival of choice, celebrating the joy of choosing.”
This year, may we celebrate the choice that each one of us makes to be Jewish every single day.
No one is forcing you, you are not under duress.
Every time you walk in this building, or you join us online, or you put on a kippah, or a Jewish star, or you celebrate a holiday, or you identify yourself in any way as a Jew, you are walking in the paths of our ancestors and choosing your Judaism.
In this painful climate of antisemitism, in this painful climate of brazen Jew hatred, may we wake up every day and choose Torah once again.
May we wake up every day and choose to be more proudly Jewish than the last.
May the choice between hiding ourselves and living our truth never even be a question.
In a year with so much sadness and fear, At least in this month of Adar, may we find extraordinary joy in our tradition.
May we find extraordinary joy in choosing to be Jewish.