Rabbi David Fohrman: Hey, Imu, welcome back. We are here for another look at the Megillah, in light of these very strange statements the Sages make. I am delighted to be able to continue this discussion with you.

Imu: I don't know a joke. I need a joke.

Rabbi Fohrman: We could do that again.

Imu: Welcome to A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. 

By the way, I still can't think of a joke. I'll blame it on the fact that my mind has been buzzing with all these incredibly rich connections. Last episode, we followed the trail from one of our three puzzling midrashim to discover a new understanding of Haman as a latter-day Adam.

But it's not just Haman and Adam who are alike. We stumbled upon this whole cast of characters, with the king in the Megillah playing God in Genesis, Zeresh was Eve, and Mordechai was strangely cast as the forbidden fruit. It's as if Tanach is bookended by two versions of the very same tale, a tale about a man swept up in the delusional desire to enjoy total godlike control.

And we still aren't done with the parallels between these two stories. Rabbi Fohrman left us with an intriguing possibility, and it's that we haven't yet found all of the matching characters between the Megillah and Eden. There are more, and once we see them, we'll be ready to understand the other two midrashim on the table; the one about the sage's fanciful comments about Elijah the Prophet and the one about the angels in the king's garden. And all of that will in turn help us to access even more of the Megillah's richness.

So to identify our next character, to see who else in the Megillah is playing an Eden-like role, Rabbi Fohrman began by sharing with me something that he noticed. It was a phrase that appears both in Genesis and in the book of Esther. That phrase was: יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ — He stretched forth his hand.

In the case of Genesis, we find that phrase in chapter 3, verse 22, after Adam and Chava have eaten from the tree of knowledge. What God says is “Now, Mankind has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil.”

וְעַתָּה  פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדו— What if now man stretches forth his hand, וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים — and takes also from the tree of life? וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם — He'll eat and live forever.

So that's where this phrase appears in Genesis. Now what about the Megillah?

Rabbi Fohrman: So let me ask you this. יִשְׁלַח יָדו, shlichut yad, to “stretch out your hand.” Where do you have that in the Megillah?

Imu: King with the scepter? The king has to stretch out his scepter?

Rabbi Fohrman: That is a very good guess, but no, that's not the language used.

Imu: Oh, oh, oh, oh, hold on. Is it וַיִּבֶז…?

Rabbi Fohrman: That's it.

Imu: It was going to be too small in his eyes to simply eliminate Mordechai.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Back in chapter 3, when Haman first hatches his diabolical plot, what happens? What he's really offended by is the fact that Mordechai didn't bow, but strangely he doesn't just decide to only get rid of Mordechai. He decides to get rid of the entire people.

וַיִּבֶז בְּעֵינָיו לִשְׁלֹחַ יָד בְּמׇרְדֳּכַי לְבַדּוֹ — It wasn't enough for him to be sholeiach yad, to put out his hand and do violence against Mordecai. No, right? כִּי־הִגִּידוּ לוֹ אֶת־עַם מׇרְדֳּכָי — Because he was told about the people that Mordechai comes from (Esther 3:6). So he had to get rid of all of them. He needed to be sholeiach yad against all the Jews.

And by the way, look at when Haman is ultimately killed by the king. The king will talk to Esther about it, and you'll find that language reappearing. Here's what he says, verse 7 in chapter 8:

וְאֹתוֹ תָּלוּ עַל־הָעֵץ — And they hanged him on a tree, עַל אֲשֶׁר־שָׁלַח יָדוֹ בַּיְּהוּדִים, there's that phrase again — Because he has been sholeach yad against the Jews.

Imu: So the same phrase pops up in the Megillah as in Gan Eden, but hold your applause. יִשְׁלַח יָדו isn't such an uncommon expression in Tanach. If this was all Rabbi Fohrman had up his sleeve, I'd think he was losing his edge.

Now, of course, Rabbi Fohrman was seeing more than just יִשְׁלַח יָדו here and יִשְׁלַח יָדו there. To see the deeper connection, we had to think about the context in both stories. As we just saw, in the Megillah, Haman wasn't just reaching for Mordechai. He was stretching his hand out against all the Jews. In other words, Haman starts out with just one target, Mordechai, but then he sets his sights on a second, bigger target.

Well, keep that in mind as we take a closer look at the verse in Genesis and see what Adam is stretching out his hand against.

Rabbi Fohrman: וַיֹּאמֶר  יְקוָה אֱלֹקים— The Lord God said, הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע — Gee, now Mankind has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. וְעַתָּה — And now, פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ — lest he stretch forth his hand, וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם — lest he also eat from the Tree of Life and eat it and live forever.

Now, whatever else is going on in this verse, there is a fundamental relationship being described here between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. It's like, Man is eating from the Tree of Knowledge. That was bad, right? But what needs to be stopped at all costs? Eating from the Tree of Life.

It's almost like eating from the Tree of Knowledge is one thing, but  in order to make sure that the ultimate catastrophic thing of Man eating from the Tree of Life doesn't happen, we've got to go and banish him from the king's presence. So, interestingly, you've got the same sort of situation, right?

Imu: Meaning, the same sort of situation as with Haman. Both Haman and Adam started out with a single target in mind, but the fear was that they wouldn't stop there, that things would escalate with catastrophic results. Haman had targeted Mordechai, which was bad enough, but then he does something even worse. He stretches out his hand against the entire nation. 

Meanwhile, Adam had targeted the Tree of Knowledge, which was bad enough. But God seems worried that Adam might go a step further and do something which is apparently even worse, to stretch out his hand against the Tree of Life. 

Now that you're seeing how the situations line up, are you starting to see where our new cast member might be hiding? Play out the algebra. What do we already know?

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, we've got this vast cornucopia of connections that seem to be unfolding between the Megillah and the garden in this way. There's an Adam character and it's Haman; there was a Tree of Knowledge forbidden fruit character and it's Mordechai. So is there a Tree of Life character? 

Imu: What you’re suggesting is kind of wild, if I understand where you're going. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Go ahead.

Imu: Well, you're basically saying that what God is worried about at the end of Genesis 3 is this idea of shlichus yad, of extending your hand against the tree itself. So if you just follow the algebra and you see who in the Megillah is Haman sholeiach yad against, right, who is he extending his hand against, every time it's the Jews.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Imu: Not only is Mordechai the Tree of Knowledge, the Jewish nation is the Tree of Life. Of course, it would be the Purim story where we find two characters dressing up as trees. But at this point, I was really geeking out, because I realized that there's even more support for this idea. To appreciate it, there's something you need to know from back in Season 1 of A Book Like No Other.

So, spoiler alert, if you haven't yet listened to Season 1 and you don't like spoilers, just cover your ears for about a minute.

What we talked about as sort of the punchline in our first season of A Book Like No Other is that the difference between Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life…they're the same tree, but they refer to two different parts of the same tree. So the Tree of Knowledge is the fruit, and then the trunk, the thing that feeds the fruit, is the Tree of Life.

Well, in the Megillah, isn't that interesting, it kind of works the same way algebraically. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is Mordechai. So if you're looking for the Tree of Life, you know, it's funny, you didn't even have to go through this algebra. It would have been intuitive, right? What is the body that feeds? What is the trunk that would have produced a Mordechai? It would be his own people, it would be the Jewish people. Lo and behold, the evidence in the text also points you in that same direction, right?

Rabbi Fohrman: Seemingly, if Mordechai is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, where Mordechai comes from, the nation, is the Tree of Life itself.

Imu: I know, I know. The Tree of Knowledge really being the fruit of the Tree of Life? It sounds wacky. We spent seven episodes on it. Don't judge it until you listen to the season. But whether you accept this claim or not about the trees in the Garden of Eden, our discussion had brought us to a powerful image.

It's not enough for Haman to pluck Mordechai off the branch and be rid of him. He has to dig up the whole tree that bore that fruit and destroy it at the roots.

By the way, does uprooting trees remind you of anything? Maybe one of our weird midrashim? Remember how the Sages said that after Esther waged her accusation against Haman, the king went for a stroll in the garden and encountered angels uprooting all of his trees? 

Well, now that we had added this character to our cast, the Jewish people as the Tree of Life, Rabbi Fohrman was ready to revisit this very midrash. He had a wild theory that maybe that midrash was related to these Megillah and Gan Eden connections that we've been seeing, and that maybe the Sages wrote this particular midrash, the one in the king's garden, almost as if they were riffing off the Torah's cast of characters and adding in some supporting characters of their own.

To show me what he had in mind, Rabbi Fohrman began by recapping the midrash.

Rabbi Fohrman: The king hears Haman accused of wanting to destroy all the Jews. He immediately runs in the garden to calm down. Along come the Sages and say, well, guess what happened in the garden? He met all these workmen and they were really angels dressed up as people and they were uprooting all the trees of the garden. And then the king said, “What are you doing?” They said, “Well, Haman told us to do this.”

Now the question is, what in the world are the Sages saying? Maybe the Sages were trying to extend the cast of characters just a little bit further. Because, Imu, if Mordechai is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, if the Jews are the Tree of Life, then who are all the other trees in the garden?

Imu: I would imagine the rest of the Persian Empire.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, all the other nations of the Persian Empire. What are the Sages really saying about what happened to the king when he was in the garden? What statement were these angels coming to make, to try to goad the king into saying, “You can't let him take the Tree of Life?”

Imu: He's after the whole garden. He's going to destroy your empire.

Rabbi Fohrman: He's going to destroy your whole empire. How would he destroy your whole empire? Imagine a debate between us. What if I said, hey, he doesn't want to destroy the whole empire. He only wants to destroy the Jews. What do you mean he's trying to uproot every last tree in the empire? How's he going to destroy everything?

Imu: My first impulse is to basically say that maybe I'm going to take a power grab. Like, he doesn't stop. It's not just, “Give him this one guy, Mordechai.” Because he couldn't get Mordechai, he's going to take out an entire people.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, good. So in other words, let's say there is a genocidal day in which an entire people is destroyed, one of the 127 provinces, all in a single day, as Haman wants. Let's say you are the lieutenant governor of Azerbaijan, right, in the king's empire. How does it make you feel when you pick up the Shushan Gazette and you read about this?

You go, “Well, gee, I wonder what these guys did.” Well, then you read and it says, “Well, before lunch one day, Haman came to the king and said, ‘You know, there's a nation that's not so good at keeping the king's laws. I don't think it's worth it for you to keep them around anymore.’” How do I feel if I am the President of Serbia? If I'm the Queen of Monaco?

Imu: I would probably be a little hot under the collar and be like, “Whoa, whoa. What exactly warrants wiping out the people? Is this something that can be done to me?”

Rabbi Fohrman: This could happen to me! And before you know it, the king who started the whole thing with a grand party trying to get everyone together to see the great glory that is Persia, right, now you have fear being the only thing that binds allegiance.

Well, fear is a pretty weak reed to bind allegiance, and along with that fear comes disgust at an empire that could simply turn on one of its people for no good reason. All of a sudden, loyalty evaporates.

So, in essence, what Haman is doing is threatening… 

Imu: Oh, interesting. He's undoing the fabric of what holds this new kingdom together. Because they are a federation of many different peoples. And that seems to be Achashverosh's challenge. How do we think of ourselves as one people and basically root out someone who you don't like.

If you think about it, the worst thing you can do to a family is to cast someone out of that family, right? If the whole idea of blood is that, whether I like my brother or I don't like my brother, he's my brother. That's what makes family so powerful. But if you could possibly kick someone out of your family, do violence or get rid of that one person, it really, really threatens the whole idea of family.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. There's a family of nations here, and that's what Haman is trying to get the king to do. The angels are saving his kingdom, and in essence, what they're saying is, “Look at what we're doing. We're uprooting every tree in the garden. Haman told us to do it. That's what's going on here.”

Imu: On a simple level, the Sages are making an observation about geopolitics. It's hard work to maintain an empire. Haman's suggestion to kill off the Jewish nation was bad politics. If Achashverosh wanted to stay in power, he would be well advised to put an end to Haman's plan. But I think there's an even deeper insight that the Sages are hinting at, and it's one that goes beyond geopolitics.

It's about how Haman is even more dangerous than we'd maybe realized, how his willingness to order genocide on a whim could inspire violence that upends far more than he ever intended. It could be enough to dissolve all the bonds of goodwill and brotherhood between the king and his subjects, and bring down the entire kingdom and Haman on with it.

It's essentially political suicide. The chaos that it would create would be self-defeating in the end. If Haman were a rational actor, he wouldn't dare. He would be bound by certain shared expectations, shared morals, however thin. Above all, he'd be bound by his own need for self-preservation. But instead, he seems to be so blinded by his god complex, he just can't see that what he's doing is going to bring down himself and everyone around him.

I think this really elevates the stakes of everything we've seen up until this point, because we talked about how delusional it is for Haman or Adam or anyone to think that they are God, that they get to say what's good or what's evil, who lives and who dies.

But with this midrash, the Sages seem to be demonstrating in their cryptic but powerful way how playing God is not merely delusional or disobedient. It's not just a bad character trait. It's dangerous. It has the potential to unleash chaos in the world, with ripple effects of destruction that are hard to contain.

And to think, we got all that from one little midrash. Whew! The Sages certainly are pithy. But there was something about this midrash that I was still wondering about - why angels? Why did it need to be angels uprooting the trees?

Little did I know that my question was going to bring us face to face with that final unanswered midrash, the one about Elijah. Rabbi Fohrman would end up unriddling that midrash, answering my questions about why the palace gardeners had to be angels, and further deepening our understanding of the downfall of Haman, all in one fell swoop.

Why do you think that they’re angels? Why not, in that story, just have, you know, a bunch of local workers? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Good question. I think it's because the Sages saw one last thing, which brings us to the very last of how far we can take Cast of Characters in this paradigm.

So far, we've seen a whole bunch of characters. We've seen Adam becoming Haman. We've seen Eve becoming Zeresh. We've seen God becoming the king, a forbidden fruit becoming Mordechai, a Tree of Life that becomes the Jews, all the other trees becoming the other nations.

Let me ask you one last question. Back in the garden, there was something that guarded the Tree of Life when people couldn't guard it anymore. There had to be angels that guarded the Tree of Life, cherubs. Now, the question is, do the cherubs appear in the Megillah?

Imu: There are no angels in the Megillah, but it's like we turn away from the Megillah for five seconds and the Sages are putting angels everywhere.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, but they saw something that made them put angels everywhere. I think what they might have asked themselves is, one second, if all this stuff is true, who are the cherubs?

Now go back to the original story in Eden and look at how the cherubs are being described as Mankind is banished from the garden. God places cherubs to guard the path of the Tree of Life, and the language there is: God sets up, east of Eden, אֶת־הַכְּרֻבִים — these cherubs, וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת — this strange, fiery, revolving sword, this overturning sword.

Strange thing, הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, right? Those words, חֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, I think, caught the Sages’ eye and suggested to them that, one second, maybe there really were cherubs, back in the Megillah. What did the cherubs do? The cherubs guarded the Tree of Life. Who guards the Tree of Life ? The Tree of Life is the Jews.

Now, we went through chapter 7 in the Megillah in slow motion, and as I did, I showed you, isn't it strange? There's all these moments that you would expect the king to jump and destroy Haman, but he doesn't. The queen says: אִישׁ צַר וְאוֹיֵב — This terrible guy! Right? You would think, impetuous king, off with his head, but he doesn't. He just decides to go for a walk in the garden to cool down. And when he comes back, he sees Haman on the couch, but he still doesn't get rid of him. He says, “You're trying to commit adultery with my wife?” and you'd think that's it for him. He still doesn't do anything.

It's almost like nothing can be done. It's almost like Haman is Teflon. Nothing sticks to him. So what are you going to do? Who's going to be the ultimate guardian now of the Tree of Life when all the people took their best shot and Haman's still standing?

Cherubs holding a sword that's מִּתְהַפֶּכֶת. Isn't that interesting, Imu? The word מִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, does that appear in the Megillah anywhere?

Imu: I can't think of anything revolving. There's no revolving swords.

Rabbi Fohrman: Think of the root of mit’hapeich; ה-פּ-כ. To turn over, to turn upside down.

Imu: Oh my gosh.

Rabbi Fohrman: וְנַהֲפוֹךְ, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ. It's the word that describes the Megillah. Everything in the Megillah gets turned upside down.

Imu: That's so funny. In Eden, there was a sword that turned upside down, right? A revolving sword. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. Everything gets turned upside down and the ultimate “turner-over” of all the upside down that matters most is, on the very tree that Haman meant to hang Mordechai, he is hanged. And guess what? At this moment, that's exactly the argument that Charvona makes. “Let's have a turnaround.”

He says, “By the way, King, remember Mordechai, the good guy, the guy who saved you from the assassins? Turns out there's a tree in Haman's backyard that he made to kill Mordechai. What do you think we should do?” King says, “Hang him on it!”

It's the ultimate turnaround. What engineers that turnaround? Back in Eden, there was a חֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת. What's the guy's name who says this? Charvona. And how do you spell that? ח-ר-ב.

Imu: He's the sword guy.

Rabbi Fohrman: He's the sword guy, the חֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת, the sword that turns everything upside down. And hence the Sages come and say, “You know who Charvona was? He was Eliyahu HaNavi. Who was Eliyahu HaNavi? The one who went up to Heaven. In what? In a chariot of fire, in a rechev aish. What else do we know about the חֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת? It was a fiery sword, a לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת. Enter the Sages: “Oh, fiery angels. We know fiery angels - Eliyahu. Eliyahu must have been Charvona.”

And then the Sages extended that to, yeah, and he had a little band of co-angels who hung out with the king in the garden and said, “What do you think the end product of all of this is? You're just getting rid of all the trees. You're just getting rid of the entire empire. What Haman's doing is he's destroying everything. He's the ultimate destroyer.”

Imu: I think that this is pretty epic; the fact that there's a guy who happens to be protecting the Tree of Life, which is, you know, the Jews, and he is the one who finally is the facilitator of the נַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא, and his name happens to be Swordsy? Swordsy Turnaround-Man? Like, the Sages aren't implanting something, right? It seems like Mordecai and Esther implanted this hint themselves. It's almost as if they saw the angelic force at work here, protecting them at this moment. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, and it's as if this is God coming out of the clouds in some way, and God finally shows His hands in the form of these cherubs that are dispatched to do a duty, which is to guard the Tree of Life, and in the end they do.

And so this, I think, concludes this extension of Cast of Characters, of how the Sages saw the Megillah and that's a unified vision of how the Megillah, one of our very last stories in Tanach, relates back to one of our very first stories.

Imu: Put together all the pieces from our last two episodes, and what we're seeing is that the garden story is replayed almost one-to-one in the Megillah, but the Megillah seems to be a more exaggerated version. The Adam character, Haman, he's more sinister. He's more devious in actually playing God and taking good and evil into his own hands. He comes very close to actually causing the widespread destruction that's only hinted to in Gan Eden.

And the response from God in the Megillah is more epic, more damning. Adam is only exiled. Haman? He’s executed. And finally, in the Megillah, God's strategy is more clear - the turnaround. Yeah, in the garden, the angels had these swords that are strangely called revolving swords. But in the Megillah, we see God much more robustly turning everything on its head. 

I know, it's kind of a wild thought to say that we can see God in the Megillah at all, let alone doing something more robustly than in Eden. God is an actual character in the Eden story, whereas the Megillah famously doesn't even mention God's name. But if we accept the reading which is offered to us by the Sages, well, God is ever-present in its pages. 

Now that we'd seen all this, Rabbi Fohrman and I stepped back to reflect a little more on what it all meant.

Rabbi Fohrman: You know, one of the things I always said about the Megillah, Imu, is that…years ago, before I even met you, there's a line about Chekhov.

Imu: There was a time pre-Imu?

Rabbi Fohrman: Believe it or not. Back when you were just a little boy and I was starting to teach Tanach back in Baltimore, I remember thinking of the Megillah in terms of the statement that Anton Chekhov is reputed to have made about short stories, which is that if you've got a rifle above the mantle in Act One, the rifle’s got to go off by Act Three. Like, everything's got to be used.

One of the things that makes the Megillah satisfying is that everything gets used. But what's interesting about the Megillah is that, though everything gets used, it doesn't get used in the way that its protagonists think they're going to be used. The horse that Haman thinks he's going to ride on himself ends up being the horse that he has to ride Mordechai around on. The gallows that he makes in his own backyard, it's going to get used, but you can't control how it's going to be used. It may well be used for the opposite of what you actually think.

Imu: The people he sought to destroy end up destroying their enemies.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, and the theological meaning of that, I think, is that that's the space where God resides. There's this fascinating interplay in the Megillah between human action and divine action, and what's so satisfying about it is that God, the Great Playwright in the sky, you know, Chekhov-style, makes use of everything we do. So nothing doesn't matter. Everything we do matters, but not necessarily in the way we think. It can be reversed. And in the overturning of it, there lies God. And that's maybe the חֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת of the Kruvim.

Almost as if God says, you know, “You want to be God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? You can't be God. You can control what you do, and what you do can be meaningful, but that doesn't mean you're God. You can't control how what you do ends up turning out. That's in the realm of the divine. The ultimate significance of what you do, how it plays out in this grand vision I have for world history, that I'll be the Decider of.”

Because there's cherubs there that are just a little bit more godly than you, and they're the ones that guard the tree. You know what they guard it with? They guard it with that which overturns, right? And that is the province of God to be able to say, “I'll take what you do seriously, but the ultimate effect of it can be exactly the opposite of what you imagine.”

Imu: I thought what Rabbi Fohrman was saying was powerful. That our sense of control, it's an illusion. That to be human means that we are not God, and that it's an essential spiritual truth that shines through Tanach, starting in Gan Eden and ending with the Book of Esther, the close of the Biblical Age.

I could understand why the Sages, when reading the Megillah, saw angels everywhere. It almost felt like, in our own lives, maybe there are angels everywhere. And that's a really poignant and beautiful thought, it gives me the chills, honestly.

But I also felt something else, too. I became aware of a creeping feeling that what we had done wasn't wholly satisfying. Let me give voice to that dissatisfied feeling. We arrived here by following the hints in the midrashim, by sketching out this whole elaborate cast of characters between the Megillah and Eden. But if we're right about the cast of characters, if there's truth to what we've done, well, there's one character who is conspicuously absent from our cast.

Where is Esther in all of this? Esther, the heroine of the Megillah! How could it possibly be that she just doesn't fit into this whole Megillah-Eden picture? It's the Book of Esther! How could our cast of characters be complete without her?

There was something else about our study thus far which felt incomplete. Think about the big, grand lesson that we're taking from the Megillah so far, that God is in control of everything, acting behind the scenes. Well, isn't that exactly what Rabbi Fohrman said we wouldn't be looking for? It's funny, before Rabbi Fohrman invited me to sit down and learn the Megillah with him, I was perfectly satisfied with that being the message of the Megillah. That's what I've heard my whole life.

But Rabbi Fohrman said there was more. He said the Megillah was offering a profound moral about human action. And once he promised it, I started to get excited about it.

What we've uncovered thus far is a meaningful theological meditation, but it doesn't tell me but it doesn't tell me much about how to act. All it really tells me is what not to do. “Don't think that I'm God. Don't think that I have control.”

Well, if our study thus far felt incomplete, I wasn't going to get any argument from Rabbi Fohrman. He had no intention of stopping here. He still had a great deal up his sleeve. In fact, you might call it a turnaround of sorts.

I'll let Rabbi Fohrman explain.

Rabbi Fohrman: The next thing I want to do with you is a kind of a וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא in and of itself, a kind of turning everything on its face in our discussions; which is, literally, take the tablecloth and absolutely yank it away and turn all the cutlery and silverware completely upside down and to argue to you that we have to forget everything we've seen thus far. Because there is another Tree of Knowledge story in the Megillah, almost a competing Tree of Knowledge story in the Megillah. The Sages were right that the Megillah resonates with the Tree of Knowledge, but it resonates very, very deeply.

What I want to show you is that if you look at the Megillah carefully, you can construct another edifice, another cast of characters in opposition to this one, where there's a different Adam, a different Eve, a different God, a different forbidden fruit. All these different characters that we've met will reappear in the Megillah, but in different guise. I want to go through a different kind of cast of characters, try to argue that it's as valid to see the Megillah that way as it is to see the Megillah as we've seen it, and then I'd like to undertake the mind-bending exercise of trying to see how these two competing visions might actually integrate with one another.

Imu: You heard right - another cast of characters. We hadn't yet arrived at our big grand takeaway, but we were on track. What remained was to uncover this second cast of characters, to confront the tensions between the first and the second and ultimately to integrate them. 

And in that integrated picture, we would finally see what the Megillah is teaching us about how we're meant to act - not just not to be God, but how to be human.

Credits

This season of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev.

It was produced by Tikva Hecht and Beth Lesch, with additional editing done by Sarah Penso.

Chai Hecht was a consulting producer.

Our audio engineer is Hillary Guttman.

A Book Like No Other's managing producer is Adina Blaustein.

Our senior producer is Tikva Hecht.

Thank you so much for listening.