There is an allegorical story about a luxury passenger ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean that hits an iceberg and begins to sink. On the lower decks, the crew and passengers make a valiant but unsuccessful effort to plug the hole in the ship’s hull. On the upper deck, first-class passengers rearrange the deck chairs, sun themselves and play shuffleboard, seemingly oblivious to the disaster around them. Meanwhile, the ship’s band plays on.
Of course, had more passengers on the ship attempted to plug the hole, the leak would have been sealed.
After the fact, two absurd stories emerge. Some of the upper-deck passengers say they didn’t help because they saw no seeping water and, anyway, the water rushing into the ship’s hull below had no direct impact on their well being. Other first-class passengers said they didn’t bother volunteering because they assumed that the efforts of single individuals could make no appreciable difference on the impending disaster.
Last week we celebrated Purim, which commemorates the only time in Jewish history that all Jews residing in a country were publicly sentenced to die on a certain date with no possibility of appeal.
Can anyone begin to imagine the absolute horror, anguish, hopelessness and despair suffered by the Jews of that time who knew their children, friends and extended families would be killed within one year? There was no forum for judicial appeal that could have saved the Jewish community from this monstrous verdict.
But Mordechai and Esther stood up and acted at risk to their own lives. They were unwilling to sit back and accept the immutability of the royal death sentence. Their heroic actions saved the Jewish community and transformed Purim into a day of rejoicing for Jews for generations to come.
Strangely, the Book of Esther never mentions God’s name. Purim’s emphasis is on the importance of human, not divine, action. Even when daily circumstances overwhelm us, the Purim story teaches that determined people can make a difference.
The Book of Esther is starkly true to life. It does not show Esther acting selflessly and heroically from the beginning. Her first instinct was self-preservation. Only when she understood she was as vulnerable as the rest of the Jewish community did she act.
America, as we know, is a country of individualism. The American hero is the lone, self-reliant soul who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, going from rags to riches, from poverty to the American dream. If we manage to achieve success, we deserve everything we earned and have the right to dispose of it as we wish. If we happen to provide charity to our community, that’s very nice, but it’s certainly not an obligation.
American individualism has been celebrated and analyzed as far back as in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. While individualism and self-reliance can be commendable traits, success for the sake of success alone, without a sense of obligation to the community, is not the Jewish way.
A fundamental pillar of the Jewish ethos is kol Yisrael arevin zeh bazeh – all Jews are responsible for one another and all of our fates are intertwined. We Jews should take pride in our individual achievements and how far we’ve come; we cannot, however, be weak-willed when it comes to fulfilling our communal obligations.
Most of us live in the modern equivalent of a king’s house, but we act like those first-class passengers on that allegorical ocean liner’s upper deck, ignoring the plight of all our fellow passengers.
Everyone recognizes the current existential crisis is Jewish continuity. Study after study and blue-ribbon committee after blue-ribbon committee affirm that a majority of young Jews are walking away from 4,000 years of Jewish heritage and Torah teachings. There is a consensus that Jewish illiteracy and lack of a spiritual connection with God are primary reasons for the mass exodus of our youth.
It is painfully clear that notwithstanding the extraordinary success of Jewish day schools in safeguarding Jewish continuity, high tuition prevents almost all young families from attending. The only children who can get an intensive Jewish education are those from very rich families or those from families willing to make extraordinary financial sacrifices to pay the tuitions.