The Day After

I, for one, am in. Here's my half-shekel, whatever I have to do, just count me among the righteous. I want to be with the people who really want to do it, and I'm ready to give whatever it is that I have to make it work. And the truth is, this half shekel which atones for our souls, you know what really atones for our souls? Counting yourself in… We all know you have a sordid past, sometimes you don't get up for davening, sometimes you really want to hit people. We all got our hang-ups. That's fine, we'll work on that later, all right? For now, are you in or not? We need you, and the truth is, you need us.
Why did it take us until Purim to really accept the Torah? Because we really didn't want a light show, we didn't want a big to-do. We're saying to Hashem, wow, nice lights and all, neat thing with the seeing the voices thing, but where are you in our everyday? What happens the day after, when the smoke clears, when the mountain is just a mountain? Hashem shows us on Purim, look, every single thing I have done, every detail, is totally necessary, so know it, be aware of it, because I'm gonna use these same details later on to tell you your own story. Pay attention. And then in a peak moment, like Purim, we see it's true. If only we could hold on to that moment of seeing how Hashem is designing every detail of every detail specifically for each one of us. But we forget, the day after. Or at least the week after. Come on, Hashem, we're so human, our memories are so frail. We grab on to the shells and peels that once contained truth and we try to find You in them; our intentions are good but we just fall prey to a simple need - for something solid, something we know will be there tomorrow in a way that we can find it, in a way we can know our relationship to it. But O the melancholy of our fate, the tragic comedy of this life is that we ultimately do not know. I'll tell you what, though; hear like this. Moshe Rabeinu puts his hands in the air and we win, right? What's he doing? He's throwing his hands up in the air and saying "Hallelu-yah I don't KNOW but I believe!!!" And everyone says "Amen, brother, I don't know either!!" It is so good not to know. "Tov l'hodot L'Hashem - It is good to admit to Hashem" - Hashem, I don't know, but You do, and I trust you. Haman wanted to know everything. His name is from the root "to count" - he wants to "take stock". He wants to "know where he stands". Well everyone knows that blessing does not rest on something that's counted. If you know how much you got, then you know how much you got, and that's all you got. But you let go of the numbers and the adjectives and Hashem can renew it every day. You say "This is who I am" then that's how Hashem will create you tomorrow. You say "I have no earthly idea who I am" then Hashem can make you, can help you surprise yourself.
So why did Hashem give us the Torah the way he did, blowing our minds wide open? He must have known we didn't have the vessels to take it. But he wanted to break us, he wanted to break us to the very core and plant something there in the shards and dust, and then He puts us back together (or we put us back together) and we think we're whole but there's something nagging us, each cell in our body has this itch we cannot ever scratch, it bothers us and we don't know why, some kind of unsettled feeling that creates longing in us on the deepest level. That desire will always keep us moving, restless. "That night, sleep evaded the king" - things have been good, he's been working hard but there's something else bothering him beyond his whole cycle. Something more, deeper. A wise man pointed out, what does he do when he can't sleep? Looks in the books, goes deeper. I need to know more. I don't know anything. Halleluyah!! The world is deeper than I am! The books speak to that itch, they nourish that seed. I heard from a wise man that the Megillah is a letter from Hashem to your soul, and if I heard him correctly, he said the whole Torah is a letter to your soul, from Hashem specifically to you. He's trying so hard to tell you who you are. On the outside we're servants of the king, in our avodah we're servants. But in studying Torah we are Hashem's children, princes and princesses. Hashem's trying to tell you who you are, where your piece in Torah is, where is your kingdom, how can you scratch that primordial itch. This time, at Purim, we accept the Torah because we see that Hashem and our story, as individuals and as a nation, are the same thing. The story of the Jewish people is the story of Hashem in the world. And we accept the Torah this time because it's not about someone else called Hashem, it's about us. He's telling us our story. I want to do this Torah thing because I want my story, our story, to have a happy ending.