Yom Kippur Comes Close (3:7)

The mystics inform us that Yom haKippurim (the Day of Atonement) is so called because it is a Yom k’Purim, “a day like Purim. ” This indeed sounds bizarre as one could hardly find two more dissimilar days in the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is a most solemn day of soul-searching and repentance; a day on which we connect with the inviolable core of purity within us; a day on which we transcend our very physicality in order to commune with our spiritual essence. Thus we are commanded to “afflict ourselves,” to deprive the body of food and drink and all physical pleasures. Purim, on the other hand, is a most physical day celebrated by lavishing money on the poor, sending gifts of food to friends, eating a sumptuous meal, and drinking oneself to oblivion.

On Yom Kippur we fast and pray, on Purim we party. Yet the Zohar sees the two days as intrinsically similar. And yet, as one delves beneath the surface diversity, similarities emerge. Purim means “lots,” so named after the lots cast by Haman to determine on which day of the year the Jews should be slaughtered, G-d forbid. The casting of lots is also a central theme of Yom Kippur. In one of the most dramatic moments of the Yom Kippur service in the Holy Temple, the High Priest stood between two goats and cast lots to determine which should be offered to G-d and which should carry off the sins of Israel to the desert.

A lottery expresses the idea that one has passed beyond the realm of motive and reason. They are resorted to when, in the final analysis, there remains no reason or impetus to chose one option over the other, so that the matter must be left to forces that are beyond one’s control. Therein lies the significance of the lots cast by the Kohen Gadol. After all is said and done, we each stand before G-d with our faults and iniquities, and by all rational criteria, should be found lacking in His judgment. So we impel ourselves beyond the realm of convention. We disavow all the accouterments of physical identity. We cast our lot with G-d, confident that He will respond in kind and relate to us in terms of our quintessential bond to Him rather than by the existential scales of pro and con.

Similarly, Haman’s lot-casting was his attempt to exploit the supra-existentionality of the divine, but to an opposite end. The Jewish people, said Haman, might be the nation that accepted His commandments, thus meriting favor and protection. But surely G-d in essence, is above it all, above our earthly, and most often inadequate attemptsn to please Him. Perhaps, Haman thought to himself, he just might divine the day when we have angered Heaven.  Why not give it a shot? Why not roll the dice a possibly catch the supernal caprice running in my, Haman’s direction. As the Talmud relates, “when the lot cast by Haman fell on the month of Adar, he greatly rejoiced, saying: ‘The lot has fallen upon the month of Moses’ death.’”

“This is my lucky day,” exulted Haman. “Moses might have given Israel the Torah, but he too is mortal. No reason he should die on that day, just luck. Bad luck for him, good luck for me.”

Yom Kippur is indeed “a day like Purim”. Both transcend the very laws of physical existence. Both point to the fact at which we rise above the rational structure of reality and affirm our supra-rational bond with G-d, a bond not touched by the vicissitudes of mortal life: A bond as free of cause and motive as the free-falling lot.
But there is also a significant difference between these two days. On Yom Kippur, our transcendence is expressed by our disavowal of all trappings of physical life. But the very fact that these mundane activities would interfere with our spirituality indicates that we are not utterly free of them. Thus Yom Kippur is only “a day like Purim.”

The ultimate mark of transcendence however is Purim. No seas split on that day and no oil burned eightfold its natural capacity.  Indeed, G-d’s name is not once mentioned in the Book of Esther! But it is for this very reason that Purim is the greatest of miracles, a miracle in which the natural order is not merely circumvented or superseded, but in which nature itself becomes the instrument of the miraculous.

The same is true on the individual level: the ultimate transcendence of materiality is achieved not by depriving the body and suppressing the physical self, but by transforming the physical into an instrument of the divine will.

So Yom Kippur may be the day that inspires the Jew to rise above the constraints of physicality and rationality. But Purim is the day that empowers the Jew to live a physical life that is the vehicle for a supra-physical, supra-rational commitment to G-d.