So it turns out I sorta drunk-dialed Zaide on Purim.

I think I wished him a Freilichen Chanukah. He was not amused.

After a few minutes, though, he calmed down. And left me with this highly relevant quote that more or less encapsulates a good bochur’s Purim.

“There are two people that I hate.

A drunk man when I’m sober and a sober man when I’m drunk”.

And that’s the Purim ma’amar for this year folks.

A recent Twitter conversation reminded of the excerpt I’ve pasted below. It comes from the sefer “Letters to a Buddhist Jew” by Akiva Tatz. It is a fascinating book that deals with a rather unusual subject- the similarities and discrepancies between Judaism and Buddhism- but covers a lot of the basics of Jewish faith on the way.

In this particular exchange, Tatz is dealing with an issue that us frum yidden encounter only all too often- the countering of an intellectual argument by Judaism with an emotional one by those arguing against it. That is, Tatz had previously made his case for the Sinai event, but was countered here not by an intellectual argument, but an emotional one. And when intellect isn’t repudiated by intellect, but by the heart, one must speak back to the heart. Tatz does so here powerfully, and it is worth the short read it is.

Below, David Gottlieb is addressing Tatz with his question re the Sinai event:

“Akiva:

Concerning the Sinai experience: we are a skeptical, stiff-necked people. All I can say, with all due respect, and wishing it were otherwise, is something many American Jews would say, using the ugly vernacular: I just can’t buy it.

David,

It is not for sale. It is yours already. And as for the price, that has already been paid. Your grandparents paid for it when they were dispossessed in Berlin and exiled from Barcelona; your great-grandparents paid when they were cut down in York and Cracow; their parents paid when they were hounded in Bavarian forests and Polish streets, watched their scrolls burned in Paris and their homes in Madrid.

Your grandmother paid more than enough when she sold the family stove in a Russian winter to have enough to give her children a Torah education. And she overpaid with her pain when she watched her American grandchildren walk away from that Mountain in whose shadow she had lived with the graceful strength of a conviction that came naturally. Walk away without looking back, mind you, unwittingly exchanging the indescribable richness of Torah for the self-help literature of a neurotic society that has forgotten what is real, or the literature and practice of exotic philosophies that cannot offer more than what they are supplanting.”