[Avodah] Vashti's Tail etc...

[Moshe Yehuda Gluck]

R' MB:
*To give context, on Areivim we were discussing the dilemma of how to
*deal with your children coming home with stories like Vashti's tail.
*
*I pointed the chevrah to R' Adlerstein's "Did Vashti Really Have a Tail"
*<http://www.innernet.org.il/article.php?aid=236> where he humorously
*expressed his nervousness about non-frum Shabbos guests coming the Shabbos
*before Purim, and his child bringing this medrash home when discussing
*"So, what did you learn this week?"

To selectively quote from that article:
"MaHaRal does not reject the miraculous. Rather he rejects a superficial
reading of the words of the rabbis, words he is convinced almost always
disguise more than they reveal. (4) When we probe the true intent of the
rabbis, we discover that they saw Divine intervention occurring in ways that
may be more profound than the simple miracle that the text suggests. The
Talmud (5) tells of a man whose wife died, leaving him with an infant to
care for. He had no means of support, and literally nothing to feed the
child. God performed a miracle for him. enabling him to nurse a child.

Parnasa, the wherewithal to support oneself and loved ones does not come
easily. In the natural order of things, this man had no way to earn a
living. His child should have died. What God did for him, says MaHaRal, was
provide him with the ability to find food for his child, although he
couldn't make ends meet for himself. Perhaps this previously unskilled
worker just followed a hunch, and walked into a job interview and was
immediately given a managerial position for a Talmudic period 500 company.
It shouldn't have been. It was-- because God intervened for him. This was
actually no less an overturning of the natural order than if he had actually
begun lactating.

Most would not give a second thought to taking this passage literally.
MaHaRal himself concedes that Hashem may actually have given this father's
body the milk that the child needed. But it is the first approach he favors.
(6)

MaHaRal's approach allows us to explain this Talmudic excerpt to the kind of
skeptic who doesn't react well to overt tampering with God's own natural
law. Most importantly, perhaps, it says something to the rest of us who have
no problem at all accepting what the eighth century Rav Saadia Gaon called a
tradition: that God accomplishes miracles for select people in every
generation."

This is, unfortunately, a poor example. Male lactation is a documented
phenomenon - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation. From there,
"Extreme stress combined with demanding physical activity and a shortage of
food has also been known to cause male lactation." This would certainly jive
with the situation described by Chazal. 

KT,
MYG