Esther, how revealing...

As I was sitting in megillah reading this evening, one line really jumped out at me (like off the page and into my face). For those familiar with the Lauffers' tune, pleease sing it loud enough so the rest can hear. We're at the point where Haman (louder) has just been invited to an exclusive party with the king and queen. Quite pleased with himself he's heading home when he sees Mordechai sitting by the gate of the king's palace, and he (Haman) fills with rage, because Mordechai won't acknowledge him in submission. So he goes home and summons his family to tell them how great, rich, and powerful he is, and then this line,
וְכָל-זֶה, אֵינֶנּוּ שֹׁוֶה לִי: בְּכָל-עֵת, אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי רֹאֶה אֶת-מָרְדֳּכַי הַיְּהוּדִי--יוֹשֵׁב, בְּשַׁעַר הַמֶּלֶךְ.
And all this, it's all worthless to me so long as I see the Jew, Mordechai, sitting at the gate of the king!
This is the part that fascinates me. You were just bragging about all the stuff that you had, right? you can do practically whatever you want, you have the king's signet, you have all the power and money and a big family, and you're upset because some Jew is sitting by the gate???

Haman's vitriol, I think, is unfortunately all too familiar. Anyone who has been angry or irritable, or by the same token, happy or joyful, knows that our mood affects the way we interpret and experience our environment and our interactions, which is why somebody who's upset may very readily violently kick or lash out at whatever object is in his path. Haman, filled with vitriol, takes this to the extreme. But what is the origin of this deep-seated hatred?

The sages of the Talmud ask a helpful question. They inquire: 'Haman min haTorah minayin?' (Where can Haman be found in the Torah?) and answer 'ha'min ha'etz achalta?' (quoting the verse (whose first word is spelled the same way in Hebrew as 'Haman') in which God asks Adam, did you eat from the tree? Of course, Adam ate from the tree, which event marks the fracture of paradisiacal reality and relation and the beginning of dualistic, judgmental consciousness (separating between me and you, between mind and body, between us/world and God) and self-centered orientation (this is useful for me, that I don't want, etc). In Hasidut this theme is elaborated upon where Haman is understood as representing ego, or small-mindedness, or identity derived from external factors.

When we live from a place of ego, we are necessarily anxious, insecure, we feel separate from others and from the Divine, and most of our actions are unconsciously directed by the need either for approval or for the assertion of power over others, for when we are not aware enough to experience our inherent value and self-worth, we try and compensate by controlling others. We try and fill the inner void by amassing wealth or power, trying to increase our status in the eyes of others, as if we can make up for our own lack of confidence by commanding the respect of others. Haman's vitriolic antagonism towards Mordechai shows how well that works. It is the quintessential example of the Baal Shem Tov's mashal hamarah* (parable of the mirror), the idea that the way we see others is actually a reflection of ourselves, or of our perspective. After all, Mordechai is just sitting. In fact, he has been doing good, saving the king's life and whatnot. What kind of an orientation leads us to be jealous of those who are doing good?

The revelation of Purim (Megillat Esther can also be translated as 'the revelation of the hidden') is not exogenous. It is the illumination that happens when we let go of ego, when we move from mochin d'katnut to mochin d'gadlut, from the small-minded, constricted egocentrism to the expanded consciousness where compassion and connectedness characterize our lives. The sages said that there are only two things that keep us from tikkun olam b'malchut Sha-ddai (the Kingdom of God), the overcoming of one of which- shiabud l'malchut (or enslavement to a foreign power), we celebrate on Purim. If the case is as above, then the only thing keeping Us/Divine from paradise is, well, us. and the shift that must occur, the shift from Haman to Mordechai, is the shift from me to We.
Who knows, maybe it is for this that we are here?




*I dressed up this year as a mirror, so I was 'you'.

existential statistics/the statistics of wisdom

the statistics of wisdom
we're working on simple regressions in stat class, trying to fit a function to the data of a population. of course, often we can speak only theoretically about a perfect fit line- in reality, we deal with paramaters concluded from limited data, and a certain amount of 'disturbance' or 'noise' or 'randomness' which accounts for/causes the deviation of our data points from those that would occur/that our model would predict.

(to see a picture, go to http://rchsbowman.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/042809-2355-1.png)

It strikes me that this is a good metaphor for the way we mature and develop wisdom, defined as an understanding of how life works.
The two simple paramaters that we endeavor to determine are slope and intercept (in linear regression). Starting from the y-intercept the best slope attempts to run the closest path to the data points. I think as we go along life's path we make little adjustments in trying to navigate that best fit line; sometimes, however, perhaps after considering a new outlying data sample, we make radical changes, as if to change the intercept, change our whole point of departure. As we grow wiser, we decrease the significance of disturbance factors and internalize more parameters, ie determining factors. The result is gradual improvements and an occasional paradigm shift that models the data much more lucidly. Perhaps moments of greatest enlightenment represent a perfect understanding of all data points.