#parshah

Something strange and wonderful happens in this week’s Torah portion: We get a combination of trops that appears nowhere else in the entire Five Books of Mosheh, nor in any of the haftarah readings.

For those not in the know, trops are the little symbols that tell you what melody to chant a given word to when reading it aloud as part of the Torah service, both to make the reading more beautiful and to convey aurally information about how different words link together into phrases and clauses — a pause here, a hyphen there, a new thought over yonder. They’re not wholly unlike punctuation you can hear.

The most common trops appear thousands of times, and even most of the rarer ones crop up hundreds. A few show up only a handful of times, but this week we get the only two that only appear once: yéraḥ ben yomo and its partner, qarnei farah. Here’s the verse they appear in, with the words themselves bolded: וּמַדֹּתֶ֞ם מִח֣וּץ לָעִ֗יר אֶת־פְּאַת־קֵ֣דְמָה אַלְפַּ֪יִם בָּאַמָּ֟ה וְאֶת־פְּאַת־נֶ֩גֶב֩ אַלְפַּ֨יִם בָּאַמָּ֜ה וְאֶת־פְּאַת־יָ֣ם ׀ אַלְפַּ֣יִם בָּאַמָּ֗ה וְאֵ֨ת פְּאַ֥ת צָפ֛וֹן אַלְפַּ֥יִם בָּאַמָּ֖ה וְהָעִ֣יר בַּתָּ֑וֶךְ זֶ֚ה יִהְיֶ֣ה לָהֶ֔ם מִגְרְשֵׁ֖י הֶעָרִֽים׃ | Umadotem miḥutz la’ir et pə’at qéidmah alpáyim ba’amah və’et pə’at négev alpáyim ba’amah və’et pə’at yam alpáyim ba’amah və’eit pə’at tzafon alpáyim ba’amah vəha’ir batávekh zeh yihyeh lahem migrəshei he’arim. | “And you will measure outside the city on the east side two thousand cubits and on the south side two thousand cubits and on the west side two thousand cubits and on the north side two thousand cubits, and the city will be in the middle; this will be theirs, the cities’ grazing land” (Bəmidbar 35:5).

This may not have been what you were expecting in terms of the text for a very fancy and rare trop. It’s not a central declaration of faith, or an exhortation to moral living, or even a beautiful line of poetry. It’s a formulaic measurement in a technical description of the Levitical cities, which, having long since been destroyed if they ever existed at all, are hardly a hot topic of conversation in shul these days. In fact, the measurement is so formulaic that it appears three other times in the same verse as the text ploddingly works its way around the four sides of the perimeter. We saved our fanciest trop for this?

Danny Shlian [a] has offered a lovely explanation of this setup: The first time we have the opportunity to perform a mitzvah is often a deeply meaningful occasion, but the next time we do it, it’s a little less special, and the time after that less special still, until eventually it just sort of fades into the uninteresting background routine of our lives. And similarly, each time alpáyim ba’amah crops up in this verse, it’s assigned a less interesting and dramatic trop.

[a] Danny Shlian, “Renewing the Spirit”, Torah Academy of Bergen County, 2010, https://www.koltorah.org/articles/renewing-the-spirit-by-danny-shlian

And yet I can’t help but feeling there’s more to this trop than that.

I said above that these two trops do not show up anywhere else in Torah or in any of the haftarah readings. That’s true, tho there are instances of these trops in a few sections of the prophetic books that we don’t read as part of the annual cycle. There is, however, one other instance where we do read these trops in the usual course of the liturgical year: on Purim. In Ester 7:9, we read: וַיֹּ֣אמֶר חַ֠רְבוֹנָ֠ה אֶחָ֨ד מִן־הַסָּרִיסִ֜ים לִפְנֵ֣י הַמֶּ֗לֶךְ גַּ֣ם הִנֵּה־הָעֵ֣ץ אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂ֪ה הָמָ֟ן לְמׇרְדְּכַ֞י אֲשֶׁ֧ר דִּבֶּר־ט֣וֹב עַל־הַמֶּ֗לֶךְ עֹמֵד֙ בְּבֵ֣ית הָמָ֔ן גָּבֹ֖הַּ חֲמִשִּׁ֣ים אַמָּ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֵר הַמֶּ֖לֶךְ תְּלֻ֥הוּ עָלָֽיו׃ | Vayómer Ḥarvonah eḥad min hasarisim lifnei hamélekh gam hineih ha’eitz asher asah Haman ləMordəkhai asher diber tov al hamélekh omeid bəveit Haman gavó’ah ḥamishim amah vayómer hamélekh təlúhu alav. | “And Ḥarvonah, one of the eunuchs before the king, said, ‘Also, look! There’s the stake that Haman made for Mordəkhai — who spoke well concerning the king — standing at Haman’s house, fifty cubits high!’; and the king said, ‘Hang him on it!’.”

If the passage in Bəmidbar represents one extreme in our sacred texts — redundant, bureaucratic, soporific — this surely represents another. It’s a dramatic plot twist in a vivid narrative, but it’s also a moment where many of us find our values clashing with the text’s. The climax of the story, after all, features a gleeful recounting of massacres, including a roll call of sons killed for no other stated reason than having been born to the wrong father. Over the years, commentators have offered any number of interpretations of these verses — a list of Jews uncomfortable with the end of the book of Ester is not that much shorter than a list of all Jews, in my experience — but at first blush, it’s an ending that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and this verse is where the turnabout logic of it all — we’re going to do to them what they planned to do to us! — starts kicking into high gear. And yet we find these two rare trops stapling these verses together, cubit to Haman. What are we to make of this?

You don’t need me to do any exegetical work to tell you that Haman is an evil character. Two Jews may have three opinions, but not so much about that. His plan is to kill all the Jews and take their stuff; there’s a reason we’re still making fun of his ugly hat. So, there’s the stake Haman made for Mordəkhai, and there it’s being tied to the two thousand cubits of pastureland on the east side of the Levitical cities.

And now, hang on: Where is that pastureland coming from again?

It’s coming from the plan to kill all the inhabitants of Kəná’an and take their stuff.

The language of Bəmidbar 35:5 is tediously bureaucratic; so is the language of many horrors. Here is the requisition form for the ammunition duly authorized by the officer in charge of armory stock. Here is the medical report tabulating the cause of death of unnamed masses, compared against standard actuarial tables. Here is the accounting department’s audit of the tax withholdings from the concentration camp guards’ salaries. A mind-numbing document can still be a record of wild cruelty and unabashed evil. The link between these two verses reminds us of this truth.

A placid, orderly surface does not erase a foundation in genocide. All may seem calm on the face of these cities, but ultimately, they are cities like Haman would make, cities founded on murdering people to take their stuff. There is no escape from this, even in the dull measuring-out of the land for their cattle. This is what Haman makes: open land cleared by merciless bloodshed.

The stake that Haman made to kill others is the stake that ultimately killed him. There is a sense here that violent plans create their own undoing, or at least their own comeuppance. Tonight marks the second Shabbat of Admonition, the second prelude to destruction. There is a sense, then, that Tisha bə’Av fulfills the promise of these singular trops: Accurate or not, the Torah’s narrative is that the cities of Judah were built on a foundation of violent dispossession, the destruction of all the communities living there before. How fitting, then, in the moral framework of these texts, that their end should come in another cataclysm of violent dispossession, the Babylonian and Roman armies doing to the Israelites what the Israelites had done to the prior inhabitants of Kəná’an. Turnabout, Ester gleefully tells us, is fair play.

We have no shortage of cities today built on violent dispossession. From New York to Tel Aviv, our continents are full of cities built on the premise of killing the Other and taking their stuff. Many of them sprawl out for much more than 2,000 cubits in every direction; we would need much more than one bureaucratic verse to mark out all their boundaries. Societally, we pour vast resources into stamping out these pasts or, if that fails, stamping out the possibility of redressing them — what was done may have been tragic, but it’s over, it’s history, there’s no turning back the clock, better to just look forward together into the bright eternal future of the status quo continuing on and on without end. But just as Haman’s name remains in the text no matter how loudly we jeer it, the past doesn’t unbecome no matter how hard we try to drown it out, and there are always other futures available for the making.

The logic of turnabout is a symmetrical logic. You did this to me, so I’m justified in doing the same to you. But symmetry is, definitionally, always reversible. If your treatment of me gave me a legitimate grievance against you, then my doing the same to you gives you a legitimate grievance against me. The players change places, but the game remains the same. It’s a familiar logic, if not always stated so explicitly. In a bitter irony, it’s sometimes even trotted out to justify oppression: We have to keep trampling them down, because if we let them have equal access to power, they will surely abuse it against us the way we’re currently abusing our power against them. You can find it on the other side of the equation, too; I’ve met plenty of trans people who feel their very real experiences of transphobia justify all manner of retributive violence against a cissexist world. The logic has a tidy, self-righteous appeal to it.

The logic is also, ultimately, Haman’s logic. He built a big stake to kill his enemies; we used his big stake to kill our enemies. From the stake’s perspective, nothing has really changed.

At long last, then, this is the admonition we receive from this week’s portion: It is to change. We must stop avoiding the crimes of dispossession that structure our lives, and we must redress them without committing further dispossessive crimes in turn. We must end the cycle of unceasing retribution and build a world of durable justice instead. We must settle the claims the past lays on us without laying new ones on the generations yet to come.

Then we can gird our cities with ample pastureland, and our sacred melodies will not echo anything that Haman made.