The Corpse That Outranks the Miracle

About This Talk

Chapter 1 opens the laws of Purim by ranking the reading of the Megillah above the entire rest of the Torah's obligations, including the Temple service and Torah study itself, and then stopping the ranking dead at the burial of a met mitzvah, a corpse with nobody to attend to it. It rules that one discharges the obligation by hearing, but only from a reader who is himself obligated, so that a minor reading beautifully leaves his listeners with nothing, and it fixes the reading at night and by day with three blessings before the night reading and two before the day. The bulk of the chapter is calendar. Cities walled since the days of Joshua read on the fifteenth of Adar even if the wall is long gone, unwalled cities read on the fourteenth even if a wall stands there now, Shushan reads on the fifteenth because the miracle happened inside it, and the anchor was set at Joshua's day rather than Mordechai's in order to honor the cities of the land of Israel that lay in ruins when the miracle occurred. The old concession that let villagers read early on a Monday or Thursday is laid out in full and then withdrawn, since it applied only when Israel ruled itself and in the present era the reading is only ever on the fourteenth or the fifteenth. The chapter closes on travelers, whose day is decided by what they intended rather than where they are standing, on houses within two thousand cubits of a walled city, on cities whose ancient walls are in doubt, and on the reading that is moved off the Sabbath entirely for fear that one man would carry the scroll four cubits to somebody who could read it for him.