Let’s jump the track
Famously, God is never mentioned in the Purim story. Unlike the supernatural tale of Passover, adorned with plagues and angels and seas split, Megillat Esther tells of a different kind of miracle.
In this story, God is not visible. In this story, the heroine’s name - Esther - playfully hints at the “hiddenness,” (in Hebrew, “hester”) of any External Celestial Force. Add to her name the very human twists of fate that carry the story’s plot, and this becomes a scroll not of supernatural rupture, but minor gesture. Not of authoritative intervention, but mycelial syncopation. As if the text itself is winking at us, reminding us that sometimes miracles happen not through the salvation of an Outstretched Hand, but the beckoning of an alluringly curled finger. That the Divine Trickster indeed pulses through the world itself, its identity hidden at least as much as its impact revealed.
Writer and ALEPH rabbinical student, Ana Levy-Lyons, describes her own belief in this kind of world: “I believe that there are holy ruptures – moments when the predicted order of our world gets radically upended. I’ve experienced them in my own life and seen them with my own eyes. Some of these moments are fabulous and dramatic, some are subtle and ubiquitous. In other words, I believe in miracles. And that puts me in the embarrassing minority in my social circles.”
She follows that up with two real life examples - “miracles in the public record,” she calls them. Interventions “when so many of us are fearful and hopeless about the dark future into which the real world feels like it’s careening.” In these moments, she continues, “The train jumps to a different track, even when the rules of physics (or politics, power, psychology, or the limits of human benevolence) say it’s impossible.”
Jumping the track. When one thing seems certain, when destiny seems like settled fact, and then all of a sudden facts give way to something totally new and unpredictable - unsettled potential.
That’s what happens in the Purim story. And if we look wide-eyed enough at our own world, as Ana points out, that’s what happens all around us, too.
In her writing, Ana tells of Antoinette Tuff, a bookkeeper at a school in Decatur, Georgia “whose trajectory intersected with that of a would-be shooter who came to the school with an AK47.”
Antoinette was the first person the would-be shooter saw that day, and miraculously, she was able to meet him with compassion and talk him out of his predetermined actions. When Antoinette listened to herself on the 911 call later, she said, “I recognized my voice, but I didn’t remember the words I said. Because they weren’t my words. It was God speaking through me, reaching someone desperate and broken, finding a spark of light in the darkness, with the most powerful weapons of all–compassion and love.”
In another example, Ana tells of a pilot - Chesley Sullenberger, or “Sully” - who, after hitting a flock of geese in the air above New York and losing all power to the plane, miraculously managed to land safely on the Hudson River, ensuring the survival of all the passengers. In explaining his exceptionally difficult landing, the pilot explained, "One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on [that day], the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal."
In Ana’s analysis: “Through Tuff and through Sully, something happened. Some shift in the universe, some glitch in the matrix, the train jumped the track, and the domino chain was broken. They defied destiny. Call it God or not, there is a force in the universe that makes our transformations possible.”
How does this track jumping happen?
Ana writes, “Usually — deliciously — it happens through people, when we’re able to tap into a higher consciousness, see a fuller train track map, and break those rules. Any one of us, and all of us collectively, have that potential.”
Which is a good thing for us, because these days we need a miracle. Not incremental change. Not a slow and steady climb. Not tweaks around the edges. But something so much grander.
We need to jump the track.
Or, in the words of the design-oriented social philosopher, Daniel Schmachtenberger, we need a phase shift, “an epoch shift that is not the continuation of the current curve, but rather a discrete, non-linear phase shift.”
Borrowing from evolutionary biology, Schmachtenberger reminds us that single cells emerge unexpectedly only after 10 billion years without life. That it took another billion years for single cells to phase shift into multi-cells, and that only happened when single cells were at a point of near self-induced extinction that led to the environmental pressures that led to multi-cells. That butterflies only emerge after the caterpillar has died and become goo. That eggs hatch only after all the nutrients in the egg are used up. That the human fetus is born only once the womb is no longer a suitable place for life.
“It’s kind of the nature of Universe to do unprecedented stuff. That is kind of what evolution means - is that new epochs are unprecedented.
“The butterfly phase could not be predicted from the caterpillar phase,” he says. It’s impossible to forecast future curves from the current one. The track we jump to is necessarily and categorically distinct from the track we were on before. And perhaps that jump, that shift, that liminal state - perhaps that’s the realm of miracles. Perhaps that is the premise and the promise of Purim.
Of course, the whole framework of Purim is problematic on a political and practical level in so many ways. And we don’t shy away from that (see Tent of Mourning, Chapter 9 Project, A New Jewish Story, and Christian Nationalism & The Jews).
But if we engage Purim on its own psyco-satirical-mythological plane, today is a day to jump the track. To turn reality on its head. To play the bait and switch from one phase to the next. To leave this curve behind. To become goo and emerge as something altogether different. Not just for one day, but for good.
As the sages teach (Midrash Mishlei 9.1), when the Messiah arrives, all the other festivals will cease, but Purim will continue to be observed. Perhaps that’s because jumping the track is inherent to Moshiach. That “The World to Come” is really only ever “Worlds to Come,” as we continue to jump from one track to the next.
To be honest, I don’t hold hope for incremental change - or the leaders, systems, and structures we currently have - to get us out of this mess. I don’t even have hope that strengthening our pursuits of justice or forms of protest or commitment to advocacy will get us where we ultimately need to go. My sense is that Universe is too complex and Life too promiscuous for some kind of logical linear progress.
But I do believe in the possibility of Purim. I do believe in the possibility that with our humanness, our playfulness, our creativity, and our curiosity, with our sense of magic masquerade and subtle sorcery, that we might just be able to find and catch and ride the wave of YHVH’s Purim hiddenness right onto another track. Call it the Purim portal.
Because, in the words of Schmachtenberger, to get where we need to go, “You can’t just run the instruction manual that was given historically. And the new instruction manual doesn’t exist yet.”
So let’s - you, me, and the hidden hand of God - experiment with designing those new structures together.
Let’s jump the track.
Rabbi Nate