Our family dog, Phoebe, is a 50ish pound Plott Hound (the official state dog of North Carolina, it turns out). Plotts are hunting dogs, and Phoebe certainly likes to be active. She requires at least two long walks a day, and often more. And she will frankly take as much stimulation as we can offer.
Sometimes I play a game with Phoebe: I dangle a rope in front of her, just out of her reach. She jumps at it and I tug up just in time, so that she can’t reach it. We do this a few times (this may well be related to years of my older brothers playing monkey in the middle—where I was said monkey) until eventually I let Phoebe get the rope and we do a little tug of war.
Now, I could just let Phoebe get the rope on the first try. But I’m not so interested in that (since I want to help her get some energy out) and I don’t think she’s terribly interested either (she likes the play of it). But I often feel a little bit of guilt around it, like I’m taunting her. At the same time, I recognize that as soon as Phoebe gets hold of the rope, we’re at the beginning of the end of our game. The adventure here is in the chase, the Quixotic quest for the rope. Once she has the rope, it gets a lot less exciting for both of us.
This is, of course, a conundrum as old as literature, perhaps best summed up by Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride after he has finally fulfilled his life’s mission to avenge his father’s death: “It’s very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.” It also goes to a much deeper set of questions about attaining, possessing, and having.
Writing about the study of Torah, the contemporary French rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin observes a similar dynamic in our ability to make meaning, to understand. “The Text can never be attained,” he writes. “One could say that it is caressed. In spite of the analysis undertaken, in spite of the research, the bursting open, the laying bare, the text slips out of our grasp, remains inaccessible, always yet to come. It reveals itself only to withdraw immediately. The text is both visible and invisible at the same time; ambiguous, its meaning twinkles, it remains an enigma” (The Burnt Book, 63).
Making meaning of a text—in this case, Torah—is like my game of rope with Phoebe: As soon as we think we’ve grasped it, the game is over, and the dynamism in our relationship with it fades away. What makes the study of Torah—or our relationships with people, or our experience of the world—interesting, generative, and life-giving is when there is play, a healthy amount of openness and possibility, a caress rather than a grip.
Parashat Ki Tissa provides the Torah’s most forceful lesson in this teaching, as the Israelites, unable to bear the indeterminacy of an ineffable divinity, create a golden calf. Ouaknin quotes Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion: “What the idol tries to reduce is the gap and the withdrawal of the divine. Filling in for the absence of divinity, the idol brings the divine within reach, ensures its presence, and, eventually, distorts it… The worshipper lays his hand on the divine in the form of a god; but this taking in hand loses what it grasps… The idol lacks the distance that identifies and authenticates the divine as such—as that which does not belong to us, but which happens to us.”
If this kind of French philosophy isn’t your thing (I’m a fan, but I get it if you’re not), here’s my summary: Like the ancient Israelites, we too are frequently tempted by the spiritual seductiveness of idolatry. It springs from our natural human desire for certainty, for control, amidst the profound challenge of living in a world of indeterminacy. The challenge the Torah sets before us is to mindfully respond to that uncertainty and our resulting drive for control: to pursue meaning, to seek truth, and yet to hold it lightly, to caress it. In our ability to caress rather than hold tightly, perhaps, lies our capacity to live peacefully with ourselves and one another.
Purim offers us a particularly rich opportunity to live into this challenge, as it is our holiday most explicitly infused with the world’s indeterminacy (even in its very name, Purim, from the lots cast by Haman). When confronted with the potential for annihilation, Esther’s first reaction seems to be despair—which is, perhaps, its own form of idolatry in the way it holds tight to the notion that the story as intended is the story that must inevitably unfold. With Mordechai’s help, Esther musters her courage to loosen her grip on that narrative—or perhaps, the narrative’s grip on her. In that psycho-spiritual gap, she finds the space to take action and change the story.
Twice a day—even on Purim—our liturgy calls us to remember the Exodus from Egypt. The Hasidic masters understood that our enslavement in Egypt was not merely a historical or political fact, but an ongoing spiritual reality. The constriction, the tightness, the idolatry of Egypt is something that haunts and calls to us all the time. Just like our ancestors, from Moses to Esther, we have the capacity to leave that spiritual Egypt in every moment. One might even say—lightly, with a caress—that that’s what our entire tradition is about.