Esther 8:16:

לַיְּהוּדִ֕ים הָֽיְתָ֥ה אוֹרָ֖ה וְשִׂמְחָ֑ה וְשָׂשֹׂ֖ן וִיקָֽר׃

The Jews enjoyed light and joy, happiness and glory.

The gemara (Megillah 16b) explains that each item on the list refers to a mitzvah. Orah means Torah, Simcha is Yom Tov, Sason is Beris Milah, and Yeqar – Tefillin.

So then I had to ask: Why doesn’t the pasuq just get to the point and say, “ליהודים היתה תורה, יום טוב, מילה ותפילין”? Why use code words?

I came up with an explanation a while back, and later found R Tzadoq miLublin says something similar but with a different basis than this next gemara.

An enigmatic gemara (Nedarim 81a) says Israel was laid waste because we weren’t making Birkhas haTorah before learning.* We were learning Torah, though. The prooftext is from Yirmiyahu (9:11), which would indicate they are talking about when the first Beis haMiqdash was destroyed.

It seems Jews didn’t lose Torah when Yirmiyahu wrote this, since they were learning it albeit without a berakhah. Implying that Torah was studied like any other intellectually interesting pursuit. We lost the notion that Torah is Light, that it is how to find our way in life. And thus, that it is berakhah-worthy.

Megillas Esther happens to the generation that rebuilds the land of Israel and the Beis haMiqdash. And therefore what they needed to recover wasn’t Torah, as Torah wasn’t lost. They had to recover the the light of Torah, not just Yom Tov, but the joy of Yom Tov, the happiness of making a beris, and the glory of tefillin..

And that makes all the difference.

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* To fit the gemara in Nedarim with others, and to lessen the enigma, I take it that Nedarim is saying that without taking the Torah to heart, they slipped into the sins of idolatry, sexual immorality and bloodshed, the proximate causes of the destruction.

Not that such a slight flaw as learning Torah but not making a berakhah first is what merited such a major punishment.

Art credit:
Jewish Dance of Light, Alex Levin