The One Thing That Has to Be Whole

The Hook

A man reading the Megillah who keeps nodding off has fulfilled his obligation. The Rambam says so plainly: he read while dozing, and since he was not soundly asleep, he is finished and may go home. A second man, wide awake, fully attentive, reading every word aloud with the explicit intention of discharging the mitzvah, has not fulfilled anything at all. His failure is that he was copying a Megillah at the time and meant to be discharged by the reading of the scroll he was writing, and a scroll that is being written is not yet a scroll.

Put the two men next to each other and the ordinary assumption collapses. We assume the mitzvah is measured in the reader. The Rambam is measuring something else, and once you see what it is, the whole chapter reorganizes itself around it. He is asking whether the thing being read is complete. The man may be half asleep, mispronouncing, standing or sitting, understanding nothing whatsoever. The scroll may not be missing so much as its last letter at the moment he reads.

Chapter two is eighteen halachot long, it never once relaxes that arrangement, and by its last line the Rambam has taken the principle somewhere no one saw coming.

The Verse You Went Back For

The chapter opens on sequence. A man reading the Megillah out of order has not fulfilled his obligation. The Rambam illustrates it with a case so small it is almost cruel. A man is reading, forgets a verse, reads the next one, realizes, goes back and reads the one he forgot, and then continues with the third. He has not fulfilled his obligation, and the reason is that a single verse was read out of place. What should he do instead? Begin again from the verse he forgot and read forward in order from there.

Notice what that instruction quietly concedes. He does not have to start from the beginning; everything he read before the gap still counts. What he cannot do is stitch the missing piece in from the outside and carry on as though the line were whole. The correction is not repair. It is resumption from the break.

The second halacha makes the same point from the other side. A man arrives at a congregation already halfway through. He should not say, I will read the second half with them now and go back for the first half afterward, because that is reading out of order. Nothing is lost in such a plan. Every verse gets read, every word gets heard, the total is identical. And it fails, because the total was never what was being asked for.

Then the release. If a man reads a portion, stops, and later goes back and continues from where he stopped, he has fulfilled his obligation even if the pause was long enough to have read the entire Megillah twice over. A single verse in the wrong place costs him everything. Duration is not the measure. Sequence is.

Reading From Something That Is Not There

The middle of the chapter takes up the reader. A man who reads the Megillah by heart has not fulfilled his obligation. A man who speaks no Hebrew and hears the Megillah read in Hebrew from a scroll written in the holy script has fulfilled it completely, though he did not understand one syllable of what was said to him. If the scroll happens to be written in Greek, even a Hebrew speaker who understands no Greek fulfills his obligation by hearing it.

Then the reversal. If the scroll is written in Aramaic, or in any other gentile tongue, the listener is discharged only if he understands that language and only if the scroll is written in it. And if the scroll is in Hebrew and a reader translates aloud into Aramaic for a man who understands Aramaic, nobody is discharged, not the listener and not the reader, because the reader is reciting from memory. He is looking at a scroll and speaking words that are not written on it. The listener understood every word and gained nothing, because his reader had nothing to give him.

Set that beside the Greek case and the logic is exact. Comprehension is worth nothing on its own and comprehension is required when the scroll is in Aramaic, and the difference is entirely a fact about the scroll and never a fact about the man. The Rambam is not indifferent to understanding. He refuses to let understanding substitute for the presence of a written, finished text in front of the person reading.

Which is why the intention rulings land where they do. A man reading without the required intent has not fulfilled his obligation, and the Rambam gives three examples of men who might read the whole Megillah without meaning to be discharged by it: one writing it, one expounding it, one proofreading it. If any of them meant to be discharged, he is. And then he adds that a man reading while dozing has fulfilled his obligation, since he was not soundly asleep, which tells you how little the required intent demands. It is not concentration. It is a single decision that this reading is the reading.

Only then does he return to the scribe and draw the line. The scribe fulfills his obligation when he means to be discharged by reading from the scroll he is copying from. If he meant to be discharged by the scroll he is producing, he has not, because a man is discharged only by reading from a scroll completely written at the time of the reading. And a few halachot later the Rambam says that if the scribe left out letters or entire verses and the reader supplies them from memory, the reader is fine. Gaps in a finished scroll are survivable. A scroll that has not been finished is not a scroll.

Sinews, Three Stitches, and Whoever Stretches Out a Hand

The material laws are severe. Ink only, on gvil or klaf, like a Torah scroll. The parchment must be ruled, though it need not be processed with the mitzvah in mind. The sheets must be sewn into one scroll with animal sinew, and thread of any other kind disqualifies it.

And in the middle of that severity, two large concessions. You need not sew the whole seam as you would in a Torah scroll; three stitches at one end, three in the middle, three at the other end, and it is fit, and the Rambam gives the reason, that the Megillah is called an epistle. A letter, not a book. And a man who errs while reading, who reads inaccurately, has fulfilled his obligation, because we do not read the Megillah with precision. The parchment must be ruled and the reading need not be exact.

Then the chapter changes register and spends its last six halachot on the day itself. Eulogies and fasting are forbidden on the fourteenth and the fifteenth, for everyone, everywhere, in both Adars of a leap year. Villagers who read early on the Monday or Thursday before Purim may eulogize and fast on the day they read and may not on the fourteenth and fifteenth, though they do not read on them. If those villagers distributed money to the poor on their early reading day, they have fulfilled that obligation. The feast and the rejoicing may not be moved; held early they do not count, and a Purim feast conducted at night does not count either.

The feast is meat and wine and as fine a table as a man can manage, and he drinks until he is drunk and falls asleep. Two portions of food to one friend, and a man with nothing to send should trade meals with his neighbor so that each has sent something. Two gifts to two poor people, at minimum. And then the halacha that governs the whole day: we do not scrutinize the recipients of Purim money, whoever stretches out a hand is given, and money set aside for this may not be redirected to any other charity however worthy. It is better, the Rambam says, to be lavish with gifts to the poor than with your own table, because there is no greater or more splendid joy than gladdening the heart of the poor, the orphan, the widow and the convert, and one who gladdens those hearts resembles the Divine Presence, which revives the spirit of the lowly and the heart of the broken.

The Unifying Principle

Every ruling in this chapter distributes strictness and leniency along the same seam. Whatever is being received must be whole and continuous. Whoever is receiving it may be as partial as a human being actually is.

The scroll must be ink on prepared hide, sewn with sinew, written by a believer, complete at the moment of reading, and read in unbroken order. The reader may be dozing, inaccurate, seated, ignorant of the language, or reading beside a child. The obligation of gifts to the poor is fixed to a number and a day and its money may not be spent on anything else. The recipients are not examined at all; whoever puts out a hand is given, and no one asks what he did with the last coin.

The Baal Shem Tov built a great deal on the verse where God says that on that day I will surely hide My face, and on the tradition that hears Esther's name inside the word for hiding. His reading was that concealment is not absence. What is hidden is entirely present and merely unavailable to the eye, which means the task is never to produce the presence but to stop requiring the evidence. That is precisely how this chapter treats the man who understands no Hebrew. Nothing reached his understanding. Everything reached him.

The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that when a person is looked at from the body, differences are all you can see, and when he is looked at from the soul, the differences are real and no longer decisive. That is the instruction not to scrutinize the outstretched hand, stated as procedure rather than as sentiment. And the Sfat Emet, reading the obligation to drink until one no longer distinguishes, understood it as the collapse of exactly the faculty that sorts people into deserving and undeserving.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe often noted where this chapter ends and how strange the placement is. After ink and sinew and stitches and portions of food, the Rambam declares that all the books of the Prophets and Writings will be nullified in the days of Messiah except the scroll of Esther, which will stand like the five books of the Torah and the halachot of the Oral Law, and that though the memory of every trouble will be forgotten, the days of Purim will not pass. The book with no divine name in it is the one that does not expire.

Modern Application

Take the man at the back of the shul who arrived halfway through. Every instinct says to catch the second half now and the first half later, because the goal is coverage and coverage is a total. The Rambam says the total is not the object. This is the shape of most of what we do with the things that matter, and it is why a life full of every necessary component can still fail to be a life. Order is not an inefficiency in the arrangement. It is the arrangement.

Take the scribe. He is the most impressive person in the chapter, awake and attentive and intending, and he goes home without the mitzvah because he was reading from something that did not exist yet. Everyone knows the version of this. You are waiting to have the thing before you can be nourished by it, and the thing you are waiting for is the thing you are in the middle of making. His remedy is not to work harder. It is to lift his eyes to the old scroll on the table beside him, the one somebody else finished, and read from that.

Take the villagers who moved their reading and then tried to move the feast. Their gifts to the poor traveled with them and their rejoicing did not. Some obligations belong to you and go wherever you go; others belong to the day and stay in it, and confusing the two is the ordinary mistake of a person trying to be responsible on his own schedule. And take the outstretched hand, the hardest instruction in the chapter for anyone who thinks carefully about giving. We do not investigate. The Rambam is not naive about fraud and knows exactly what he is authorizing. He is ruling that on this one day the cost of turning a needy person away is higher than the cost of being deceived, and he says the number out loud: better to give more here than to spend it on your own table. Everyone would rather host.

The Closing

This falls on the twelfth of Elul, in the week of Ki Tavo, where a man walks to the Temple with a basket of fruit and must say aloud what happened to him and to his father before him. Elul asks a person to take an accounting, and the reflex is to audit the reader: was I attentive, was I sincere, did I understand. This chapter suggests the accounting is aimed elsewhere. Not at how awake you were, but at whether the thing you were holding was whole, and whether you took it in order, and whether you gave without checking.

The Rambam ends the laws of the Megillah by saying that when every trouble has been forgotten, Purim will still be here. Not the deliverance, which will be superseded by better ones, but the day and its four obligations, one of which is to give money to anyone who asks and to ask him nothing. It is a small enough thing to survive the end of history. It is also, as this chapter has been arguing for eighteen halachot, the only kind of thing that ever does: complete in itself, taken in order, and requiring nothing of the person receiving it except that he put out his hand.