Certainty

 Just a quick note before I get started -- this little bit of linguistic silliness only works if one relies on the transliteration in use in most of the world. I'm no xenoethnolinguist to know if the transliteration is accurate so just let's roll with it, shall we?

There is an old Yiddish saying which translates roughly to "it's hard to be a Jew." Why is that? I mean, why do we take it as a given that will be the eternal victims? Why are we perennial targets? I refuse to believe that it is something specific in our collective behavior -- the body of Jews is too large and varied; we don't all walk in lock step nor do we all share rites, behaviors, politics or anything else. The only thing that unites most Jews is simply that they are Jews.

So if it isn't inherent to us individually, and it isn't clearly a single theological argument, a simple issue of contested geography or any specific issue. People don't like Jews because there is, hard wired into some people, the tendency or even the need to be angry and hate others and history has shown the least repercussion for going after Jews so, yay us I guess. But I'm developing a different idea so please, humor we while I cobble this together.

I think that what unites us all as Jews is that, as Jews, we are subject to the divine will. This is, of course, whether we like it or not. I, as an Orthodox man try to profess and pursue a belief and faith that have me accept the Hashem is in control and that there is a plan. I don't know the plan, and heck, I might not even like parts of the plan, but I am a lowly private carrying out his small work as part of a larger army. But I think that Hashem knows that if we don't feel threatened, we lose connection with that force that has historically saved us. I'm not going to try and point to specific events in history and claim that they are punishments for our abandoning religiosity. Instead I'm going to posit that sometimes Hashem works through a system of reinforcement (positive and negative) as he guides us so that we can become better. There must be, for any system like this to work, a down side -- something that threatens us so that we can continue to rally round the metaphorical flag.

In the haggadah, we remind ourselves that in every generation, there are those who rise against us to destroy us but we continue to persevere and this is because of our faith in Hashem. In some generations, that external threat is a plague, or a king, auto da fe, or a war or something else. In some generations, the threat is obvious and in some, we don't necessarily see the challenge as a divine edict. Hashem sometimes has to remind us in very blunt and obvious terms that there is a price to pay for being Jewish.

I know, that sounds, ominous, but it really is true. We are assessed all sorts of costs as Jews -- financial ones when we are required to give the best of one group, a percentage of another...our stuff is not our own. But there are other costs: missed opportunities, public enmity, expulsions and so on. It seems that there is almost a tax on our identity -- a cost we are required to pay, like a membership fee, simply for existing within the group. And that's not a bad thing -- that tax, that external threat can cause us pain and worse, but it can also force us to band together against the external (and this often allows us, for some times, to overlook all the internal strife that is often even more damaging). But like taxes, death has become a staple, equally certain.

At the end of the megillah, Achashveirosh enacts a tax on the people. I don't think it was financial. I think he was reminding the Jews (who had just recently properly affirmed their acceptance of the Torah) that he is still in control and that there will always be a tax for dedicating yourself to Torah. Mordechai knows this and most of the people at the time seem to accept this reality: if you are an observant Jew, there will always be a tax you pay.

I think that right now, we are paying that tax as a people. We can identify the external threat (Hashem has made it easy) as the tax that we are charged as we try to prepare the world for a messianic era in which we will no longer have to be taxed.

Who is the current challenge to us? Who is taxing us with their actions? We are not a generation of scholars like those that came before us but Hashem has made it obvious -- The Tax.