So why was I more nervous than they? It was the Shabbat before Purim, and the usual combination of mania and merriment had already taken over the household. All the kids were eager to show off what they had studied in school. It should be the perfect time to showcase a typical, traditional family, in the hope that the visitors would learn to love the Jewish way of life.

I knew better. Someone was going to do it. We would share with our guests the background to the Purim story. We would get to the fateful climax of festive activity, when Achashverosh would order his queen to appear in less than decorous attire, and she would refuse. Someone would ask, if only to show that he/she knew the answer: "Why did Vashti refuse to strut out?" And a chorus of happy voices would respond: "Because she grew a tail!"

There is no joy in Mudville... My guests would suppress a sudden need to choke, and politely remain silent. But I would know what they would be thinking. "What are we doing here? Watching Charlton Heston do all those in credible things in The Ten Commandments was hard to swallow. Now you fanatics ruin a perfectly reasonable story about a beautiful queen by sprouting a tail on her. What will you try to get us to believe in next? We really were right all along. Shabbat is a fable, the Torah is a fable. You traditional Jews throw away the rational to perpetuate fairy tales."

When you get right down to it, there is no shortage of passages in the aggada, or philosophical component of Torah, that would raise the eyebrows of the newcomer to Torah study. Even some "insiders" might be taken aback by more than a few selections from the part of our tradition that deals with the philosophical and historical, rather than the strictly legal.

There are a number of different ways of dealing with passages that seem to elude our grasp. The simplest is to ignore the problem. If that's what it says, then that's what it means--and let the chips fall where they may. Many of our rabbis, though, would not concur with such an approach. The twelfth century Maimonides, for instance, wrote about three different attitudes in his day towards the aggada. (1) One group felt it an exercise in piety to simply accept everything in the works of the Talmudic rabbis, no matter how far-fetched. But rather than demonstrate their loyalty and tenacity, says Maimonides, these people cause much harm. Rather than praising us as a "wise and discerning people," the non- Jewish world reacts to this stance by thinking of us as "debased and foolish."

And that they did. In the infamous polemical debates of medieval times, a frequent target of the venom of both the Church and the Karaites was the philosophical aggada. Passage after difficult passage was paraded out to show the foolishness of the Jews in believing in this kind of stuff (or their arrogance in elevating Man above God, or assigning human properties to Him, or, at a later time, to demonstrate from the aggada itself that the Jews should really accept the Christian messiah.) The Jewish reactions to these charges merit another few articles.

Another approach, if it can be called that, is to assert that the rabbis were simply wrong about many things. (2) This creates a frightful schizophrenia in our relationship with the Talmudic rabbis. Is it tenable to see them as incredibly profound when it comes to Jewish law , and incredibly naive and shallow when it comes to the philosophical topics treated in aggada?

There is an alternative, one that accepts without reservation that every syllable of the rabbis resonates with brilliance and profundity. It approaches the words of the Talmudic rabbis with unqualified acceptance and regard. It assumes that every epigram, every passage, every remark flows with the Divine wisdom that is vouchsafed to those who immerse themselves in Torah. At the same time, it refuses to concede any irrationality to the words of these Sages. God himself is the ultimate Source of this wisdom; His Torah cannot be irrational nor even arbitrary.

One figure stands out as a master of this approach. He is Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, usually identified by the acronym MaHaRal. His larger than life statue stands today in the Prague city hall, a mute survivor of the horrors of the Holocaust, erected by a non-Jewish population who regarded him as a legend, hundreds of years after his career in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But what to them is a piece of history is to us a balm for sore spirits. His works are one of the most important resources in making the words of our Sages come alive. He also provides one possible way to set the minds of skeptics at ease, whether they be guests at the table or those who sit at its head.

Take Vashti' s tail. There is some thing very disturbing in the notion that manifest Divine intervention caused Vashti's downfall. Not, God forbid, that such intervention should be impossible for God to accomplish. But it seems radically out of order in the Purim story. The name of God is deliberately absent from Megilah Esther, and God is obliquely referred to only as Hamelech--the King. This is because Megilat Esther is the primary document of our survival in the Diaspora. It' s message is clear. God will continue to protect the Jewish people, even when he acts in a non-miraculous, hidden manner.

So what, then, really happened to Vashti? Imagine waking one morning with a tail. What would you do with it? Assuming that you were not blessed at the same time with other simian traits, the tail would probably not help you chase bananas up a tree, or even hang from the strap on the F train. Having it trail behind would literally "be a drag," making you move uncomfortably.

This is precisely what the Rabbis meant by the "tail" of Vashti: she felt a fullness that made her slow and lethargic. (3) Perhaps she put on a few pounds, and was unwilling to appear in public without first spending some time at the local exercise club. The results were as efficient as if God had made her sprout a tail. They were accomplished, though, not with an overt miracle, but perhaps only with a box of chocolates that God "inspired" someone to send her.

What the MaHaRal teaches us in passing is that we should not be slaves to the literal meaning of words. The Sages employed a richness of expression, just as we today use our own idiomatic form for a functionless growth. We call it "spare tire." (Will future anthropologists, noting references to "spare tire" but unfamiliar with contemporary usage, assume that people once propelled themselves on two axles?) In explicating the words of the Rabbis, we must always look for symbolism, allegory, idioms, and the clever turn-of-the-phrase that can say so much in so few words.

MaHaRal does not reject the miraculous. Rather he rejects a superficial reading of the words of the rabbis, words he is convinced almost always disguise more than they reveal. (4) When we probe the true intent of the rabbis, we discover that they saw Divine intervention occurring in ways that may be more profound than the simple miracle that the text suggests. The Talmud (5) tells of a man whose wife died, leaving him with an infant to care for. He had no means of support, and literally nothing to feed the child. God performed a miracle for him. enabling him to nurse a child.

Parnasa, the wherewithal to support oneself and loved ones does not come easily. In the natural order of things, this man had no way to earn a living. His child should have died. What God did for him, says MaHaRal, was provide him with the ability to find food for his child, although he couldn't make ends meet for himself. Perhaps this previously unskilled worker just followed a hunch, and walked into a job interview and was immediately given a managerial position for a Talmudic period 500 company. It shouldn't have been. It was-- because God intervened for him. This was actually no less an overturning of the natural order than if he had actually begun lactating.

Most would not give a second thought to taking this passage literally. MaHaRal himself concedes that Hashem may actually have given this father's body the milk that the child needed. But it is the first approach he favors. (6)

MaHaRal's approach allows us to explain this Talmudic excerpt to the kind of skeptic who doesn't react well to overt tampering with God's own natural law. Most importantly, perhaps, it says something to the rest of us who have no problem at all accepting what the eighth century Rav Saadia Gaon called a tradition: that God accomplishes miracles for select people in every generation.

MaHaRal has a way of turning miracles into even greater wonders:

"Rabbi Gamliel taught, "In the future (time of the Messiah), women will give birth every day!" A particular student mocked. "How could this be? Does not the Torah itself say, "There is nothing new under the sun?" Rabbi Gamliel responded "Let me show you a parallel in the present world. "He took him outside and showed him a hen." (7)

Before women decide the Messiah is more than they bargained for they should consider MaHaRal's explanation. (8) There are different reactions to miraculous messianic predictions of our prophets. Some of our commentators take them literally. Others bring allegorical meaning to them. Does this latter group believe that the days of the Messiah may indeed bring only a relaxation of the oppression of governments? (9)

Hardly, claims MaHaRal. Dramatic changes in the way we conduct our lives will certainly take place. God will not have to throw out the old rule book to accomplish them. The Messiah ushers in an age of perfection. God wove perfection beyond imagination into the very fabric of creation. This perfection has remained dormant undiscovered and unutilized. In a perfect society, the perfection of Creation will become apparent.

What Rabbi Gamliel meant to communicate to his skeptical student was that it need not take the miraculous to accomplish frequent reproduction. Chickens do not have a problem laying eggs with enough regularity to keep our cholesterol levels elevated. Do they know something we don't?

Foolish analogy, you say. Hens are not women, and never the twain shall meet. Rabbi Gamliel argues that this is irrelevant. Somehow the know-how regarding quick production of viable offspring is already part of our world. If women do not reproduce this way, it must be that the proper precursors and substrates are not naturally available to them, are not standard equipment in their present physiological configuration. The knowledge, the information, the organizing principles of matter to accomplish the task however, are already out there. They are waiting to be utilized. This will happen to be the times of Messiah. There need be "nothing new under the sun" to make this happen.

Where MaHaRal thought the "organizing principle" of life resided is not clear. It is abundantly clear to us that the information content of life has a very definite residence in the double helix of a molecule known as DNA. We can already take its revealed information, and produce enzymes in bulk, far beyond the imagination of the little microbe-critters that we persuade to do the work. All we have to do is find a way to bring the right substrates in the right order to the correct sequences of genetic information. We cut, splice, and set up genetic assembly lines. If this isn't part of our present day reality, then Genetech had better go out of business.

We cannot today mass produce human babies, nor would we want to. We can already take several fertilized ova, those smart little libraries of the DNA information we need, and incubate them in vitro. We could theoretically then entrust them to multiple surrogate mothers. Nine months later, the genetic mother can turn out to be the initial cause of seven babies in as many days. If we have access to the information, the "principles," we can already jury-rig the proper environment of materials. You can breathe easier, women. Rabbi Gamliel's promise may perhaps not be intended literally. It may have less to do with non-stop midnight feedings, than with our ability to control more of the wisdom already locked into nature.

MaHaRal had great regard for the power of science. He had infinitely greater regard for the power of Torah. He believed, though, that they did not conflict. There are many, many examples of tension between the two that MaHaRal revolves in one consistent manner.

Science deals with the laws that govern phenomena in this world. Torah deals in part with the Laws that govern those laws. Consider the following Talmudic incident, a favorite here in California:

Rabbi Katina was walking past the house of a particular necromancer, when the earth began to shake. He asked the necromancer if he knew the cause of such rumbling. The necromancer turned to him in disbelief. "Don't you know? When God considers the plight of the Jewish people suffering in exile among the nations, He lets two tears drop. When they hit the sea, the rumbling causes earthquakes." (11)

Remarkably, MaHaRal (12) seems more concerned with the scientific implications of this passage than with the attribution of crying and tears to God. Could it really be that our rabbis held such an unenlightened view of the cause of earthquakes?

The rabbis were undoubtedly aware that earthquakes are natural phenomena. They also had a tradition. however, that we recite blessings upon witnessing "natural" phenomena. We thus recognize God's role even in the unfolding of the natural order. We refuse to allow the apparent reality of a lawful, insensitive Nature to mask what we know to be a higher reality: the fact that all phenomena of this world are accomplished by the Will of God alone. Nature is merely the way He gets some things done.

But why should God create a world in which earthquakes occur? We have a bit of a handle on other natural events, and understand their role. For example: we can readily appreciate that wind is invaluable to us, to transport moisture evaporated by the sun over the oceans. When winds are whipped up a bit more than we like, we can still contemplate in awe the forces designed by our Creator. We might not enjoy a destructive hurricane, but there is no gainsaying the necessity for wind in general. If God decided that the natural events he presides over should distribute themselves like a bell curve, we have to expect some periods of fierce storms as well as eerie calm. Why, however, couldn't the world be the terrafirma that the ancients imagine it to be, instead of the group of shifting, sliding geological plates that it is? What good do earth tremors ever do the world?

The answer is that the world is not quite the place of symmetry and harmony that the ancients thought. Law exists, even the laws of nature themselves, only to further the objectives of the Lawgiver. Those objectives are inextricably bound up with the fate of the Jewish people, His sole vehicle for bringing His message to history. When the flow of history gets sluggish, so does the conduct of natural law. Physical law expresses itself not in a monolithic manner. but is fine-tuned to the conduct of man. Man' s actions determine how "perfect" a natural world he finds himself in.

When the Jewish people is oppressed and thwarted from its Divine mission, the world is an incomplete place, out of synch with the telos, the goal it should be moving towards. When humans are struck by a sense of incompleteness, of loss, they cry. God doesn't "cry," of course. His "tears" are symbols of the disturbances of His plan for history. There are two tears. because the deficiency He notes within the world order is maximal, coming from as many different places, as it were, that insufficiency can be observed.

When God notices the world in this grossly deficient form, He relates to it differently. A disordering of the Divine plan means a disordering of the bylaws of creation. If natural law operated rigidly, without flexibility, the world order would crack under the stress. (Ever notice how the smallest crack in a rigid automobile windshield never stays small?) The fact that this does not occur shows the world not to be arrayed as some perfect crystal. There is plasticity and flexibility built into the design of things.

Water, like any liquid. takes the shape of its container. It is a veritable symbol of disorder, chaos, lack of order relative to the structure of solids. This is why God's "tears" are depicted as striking the ocean. The ocean is a symbol of the vast amount of unstructure that God purposely built into His natural scheme of things. Perturbations of His plan for history can be "absorbed" by this physical uncertainty, and can generate an inelegant Nature appropriate to a morally inelegant world. The earth isn't as perfect a place as we might wish. (13) There is even room for earthquakes, because what we stand on geologically resembles toothpaste more than bedrock.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein teaches Jewish Studies and directs outreach at Yeshiva of Los Angeles (YULA) and is a Contributing Editor to Jewish Action Magazine.

FOOTNOTES

1. Commentary to the Mishna, Sanhedrin (10:1).

2. "We only learn from the aggada what is reasonable." This pithy statement of Shmuel HaNaggid of Spain (9th century) cited in Mavo HaTalmud, s.v. Haggada, is often cited to support this approach. Some infer that what is not reasonable to us we reject.

This is almost certainly not what Shmuel HaNaggid meant. Michtav MeEliyahu, Vol. 4, p. 354 gives a more likely reading. The rabbis had their reasons for couching profound thoughts in obscure language When we attempt to unravel what they put together, but all we come up with is something unreasonable then we understand that we have failed to grasp their true intent. It follows that we should not follow a flawed understanding. We do not reject it, but rather set it aside until we achieve more complete comprehension.

3. Ohr Chadash on Esther (1:12) If they meant a few pounds why didn't they say a few pounds instead of confusing the matter with the reference to the tail? One reason is to make the point hit home, especially on impressionable children. Let them learn that God acted firmly and decisively to set the stage for His people's future redemption. When they grow older and learn to question, they will realize that Vashti did grow a tail of sorts and that from the vantage point of God there is precious little to differentiate the tail from the pounds. God is the direct cause of each.

There are several other reasons but they exceed the scope of this article. The reader is referred in particular to Maamar al HaAggadot, by R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto.

4. It is a mistake to think of MaHaRal as someone to turn to, to explicate difficult passages in Chazal. He just as often finds deeper meanings in passages that seem perfectly straightforward.

5. Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 53B.

6. Chidushei Aggadot, ad loc.

7. Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 30B.

8. Netzach Yisrael, Chapter 50.

9. Shmuel in Tractate Sanhedrin 91A.

10. The Hebrew terms that MaHaRal uses are "chomer" to describe the substrates, and "tzurah" to describe the organizational principle. The reader will note the similarity to the "substance" and "form" dichotomy of classical times. MaHaRal uses these terms quite extensively but in an idiosyncratic manner that can only be understood by comparing many examples of his writing.

11. Tractate Berachot 59A.

12. Be'er HaGolah, Judaica Press ed. p. 63.

13. Taken against the backdrop of secular thought, MaHaRal's interpretation is an astounding prediction of the chaos and uncertainty assumed by twentieth century thinkers. Aristotelian cosmology, with its neat surrounding of the earth by "perfect" spheres fell in the Copernican revolution. Notions of the perfection of the natural universe persisted, though. Galileo champion of a heliocentric world nonetheless preferred circular orbits because they were more perfect. Kepler, who figured out that they were elliptical nonetheless thought that God created the world following some perfect geometric principles. Even Newton, whose mechanics helped so many later to deny chas v'sholom, the need for a Creator, wrote that God to this day is engaged in conserving the order He Created against chaos.

MaHaRal understood that the real culprit wasn't physical chaos but moral. Man stood not so much at the center of the physical universe but squarely in the middle of the moral one that really counts; his actions determining the quality of existence itself.