For Such a Time
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
March 8, 2009
Rabbi Greenberg, whose description of the meaning of Purim we used for our reading this morning, says this about the story of Esther:
PURIM IS DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE. On the surface, Megillat Esther (the Purim scroll) is a charming melodrama: We have Hardhearted Haman, the wicked vizier; simple, Addlepated [Ahasuerus], the dotty banker/king who "sells the mortgage" to the scheming villain; sweet Excellent Esther, the beauty (and her family), menaced by Haman's advances; Mild-mannered Mordecai, the good hero who finally saves the old homestead. No wonder the atmosphere of synagogue and the community on this day is all fun and games, masquerade and mummers, drinking, partying, and gift-giving.[1]
The story of the events which give rise to the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrated this coming Tuesday and Wednesday, contains a number of absurdities. First there is the foolish and self-important ruler of all Persia and Medea, Ahasuerus, ruler of one hundred twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia – why, this man rules the entire known world! And yet he can’t even get his beautiful wife Vashti to attend the great feast in which he and his noblemen have gotten themselves roaring drunk. Vashti, for whatever reason, stands up for herself and refuses to be ogled by a bunch of frat party buddies – perhaps, as some of the stories drawn from this by the rabbis suggest, she got the message that she was to do what amounted to a strip-tease, or perhaps she just wasn’t inclined to indulge the whims of the King of the Entire World when he was drunk. Perhaps she didn’t want to be called upon to be shown off as another possession of her Lord and Master. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her associates in their century-old Women’s Bible Commentary take Vashti as their real hero in the story – a woman who refuses to kowtow to a man.
Of course, this act of defiance precipitates a crisis in the exalted royal brain, but poor Ahasuerus, though he can render judgment for all this great empire, can’t quite figure out what to do about his wife and has to consult his advisers, who point out that if he lets this little bit of disobedience pass, the proper order of the family in every home in the entire empire – nay, the entire world! – will be compromised and every woman will refuse to obey her husband in her own home and, and… Well, this must be stopped before it spreads. The advisers warn that “This very day the noble ladies of Persia and Media who have heard of the queen’s behavior will rebel against the king’s officials, and there will be no end of contempt and wrath!” [Esther 1:18] Therefore, Vashti must be put away forever and a new wife put in her royal place, an obedient wife this time, and moreover a law must be passed and proclaimed so that it can never be altered and sent to the far parts of the kingdom “declaring that every man should be master in his own house.” [Esther 1:22] We know by now that we’re in the realm of satire and not history. As the story is read in the synagogue each year, each chapter ends like an episode of a soap opera – our heroes Mordecai and Esther exalted and thrilled, and then just as quickly demeaned and downcast. Haman, the wicked opponent, exalted one moment and in disgrace the next. The whole story is laced with so much melodrama and exaggeration that it’s hard to know which parts were really drawn from the Persian court and which simply represent the story-teller’s craft. If someone is to be hanged, let the gallows be high, so high that it would tower over a seven-story building. If someone is to be exalted, let him be shown through the streets as though he were the great King of the Entire World himself.
Rabbi Greenberg describes the experience of hearing the story read each year in the synagogue this way:
Each chapter is read like another installment of the Perils of Pauline. The Jewish heart spends half the time in its throat, the other half bursting for joy. Chapter 1 ends on a note of buffoonery – the drunken king and councilors have deposed the queen to assert their male supremacy but have shown only what fools they are. Chapter 2 is “up” – Esther wins the contest and Mordecai saves the king. Chapter 3 is a total reversal: Wicked Haman comes to power; Mordecai arouses his anger; the Jews are swiftly condemned to death; the city of Shushan is in total turmoil. In Chapter 4, Mordecai revives and pushes Esther to remonstrate. Will she or won’t she? Chapter 5 is a downer: It ends with Haman building the gallows to hang Mordecai. Chapter 6 is another lightning reversal. The king remembers Mordecai; Haman is forced to honor him; Haman staggers home, bowed and grieving, but is whisked away to the party [with Esther and the king]. Chapter 7 contains the climactic roll of the dice by Esther. She describes the terrible state of the Jews, confesses that they are her people, and throws herself and them on the mercy of the king. The queen wins; Haman is terrified; by royal decree, Haman is hanged on the very gallows he prepared for Mordecai – and so it goes.[2]
During the whole story, of course, the congregation responds with cheering and booing and especially, whenever Haman speaks, appears or is mentioned, erupts in a cacophony of sound to drown out his very name. Now, this is all great fun, but there’s a good deal more to it than that. Having started off by saying that “Purim is deceptively simple,” Rabbi Levin continues by saying:
Yet appearances can be deceptive. Purim, which supports enormous theological freight, may well be the darkest, most depressing holiday of the Jewish calendar. Its laughter is Pagliacci's—a hair's breadth away from despair. While Purim's authenticity as history has been challenged, it is really the holiday that grew out of Jewish history. More than anything else, it is the holiday of the Diaspora; it reflects and affirms the experience of the Jewish people living as a minority outside the land of Israel. In its own way, it offers a special guide to Jews who plan to continue living in Diaspora despite the fact that, after two thousand years, the road to Jerusalem is open to any and every Jew who wants to go there.
This is one of the stories that comes to us as Unitarian Universalists from the Bible, part of our Protestant heritage stemming ultimately from the time when Christians created their Bible from the Hebrew Bible – what then came to be called the Old Testament – with the addition of the New Testament which tells about the life and meaning of Jesus. It is a tragic fact of our religious history that from the earliest days of Christianity deadly conflicts arose between Jews and followers of Jesus and that our gospels themselves were written during a time of struggle between Jews and Christians, so that one can almost read the gospels and forget that Jesus himself was every bit an observant Jew. Each year at this season we recount the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, and the words in Matthew attributed to the Jewish crowd in baying for the death of Jesus – “His blood be upon us and upon our children” – have incited innumerable pogroms and other assaults on Jewish communities. Living as we do after the Holocaust, we can never forget the reality that anti-Semitism gives rise to vicious and irrational hatred and ultimately to genocide.
So how does it happen that Haman conceives of such hatred for the Jews? Why does he wish to destroy not just Mordecai who refused to bow down when he passed – for whatever reason, whether of personal pride or of religious duty – but of all the Jews in the empire? Whence the universality of his hatred? In the story told in Esther, the enmity is traced back to an ancient battle already half a millennium in the past in which Haman’s ancestor Agog the Amalekite was defeated by Mordecai’s ancestor Saul, the first king of Israel. There are stories from a time even earlier than that, in which the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel from the rear during their journey through the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land, killing the laggards, the old and the sick, rather than facing the fighting men of Israel. This is an enmity with ancient roots, indeed.
We must also remember that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in the Protestant tradition. Martin Luther hoped that his Reformation of Christianity would finally lead to the conversion of the Jews, who would recognize their Messiah once he had freed Christianity from the errors of the Catholic Church; when that didn’t happen, he penned a vicious anti-Semitic leaflet, “On the Jews and Their Lies.” One of the risks of even looking for this leaflet is that it is mostly hosted on anti-Semitic web sites these days. Here are a few of his suggestions to the rulers:
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy…. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians….
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.[3]
And so on for a total of seven recommended prohibitions. Not surprisingly, Luther hated the book of Esther and would have excluded it from his translation of the Bible into German if he could have, in particular because of what the book refers to as the fact that the Jews of Persia “killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them” upon the authority of the King of the Entire World. Of course, one has to be a little literal- minded to miss the absurdity of the fact that the King cannot rescind Haman’s decree to kill all of the Jews – which he so thoughtless authorized – but instead must allow the Jews to kill their enemies rather than being killed by them. And in the context of a gallows which must be 75 feet high – so high one can barely imagine how it could even be used – surely 75,000 must be understood as just another “really big” or “a whole lot” exaggeration of the story.
But the story told in Esther, silly and melodramatic as it is, illustrates another troubling reality of anti-Semitism as it has played out through history: the ease with which non-Jews stand aside and allow it to run its course. When Haman arbitrarily condemns the Jews, their neighbors, who had lived in proximity for a century by then, stood back and allowed it to happen. When the Jews of Europe were taken from their homes and denuded of their dignity, their property and their lives, all too many of their neighbors did nothing, claimed powerlessness, stood by and allowed it to happen. Even here, an ocean away, the United States refused to lower the barriers to immigration to allow more Jews to escape from Europe, nor did our bombers make any attempt to actively interdict the shipments of people to the death camps. We can be proud that our Unitarian Service Committee was one of the agencies which fielded staff in Europe help a few to escape; indeed, the chalice which serves as a symbol of our Unitarian Universalist faith and which we light each week was developed in those years as a symbol of our Service Committee as they worked against the destruction of the Jews.
And so we come to Gaza. It is remarkable that this ancient story, this tale of a people threatened with extinction, this tall tale narrated in Esther, resonates so well more than two millennia later. I felt drawn to consider the story of Purim again this year because I was troubled by the assault by Israel on Gaza and thought of the parallels between the destruction of their enemies recounted at the end of Esther and what seemed a disproportional response by Israel to rockets from Gaza. Like Luther, I was shocked by the killing of the 75,000 and troubled by the civilian deaths and injuries in the recent war. It’s easy to forget the risks which Israelis living near Gaza face every day from rocket attacks. On one particular day, the mayor of one of the southern cities decided not to have the children come to school. That day a rocket destroyed their school, where a thousand children could have died. No country in the world could tolerate daily rocket attacks on its territory, much less from enemies whose declared purpose was to wipe out that country.
Nevertheless, I am troubled. I know that when faced with existential threats our reaction is to drop every other consideration and to strike back with everything we’ve got. I know this is true in our personal lives and in our collective lives. After 9/11 we allowed our government to undertake actions which we would never have supported if we had not experienced ourselves as being under deadly assault. At the same time, we recognize that an existential threat – a threat to our very existence – can be used to justify actions which we would otherwise condemn in ourselves and in our nation. Killing in self-defense is an almost instinctive response to mortal danger. But what, then, of our gathering here “in the spirit of Jesus”? What of his teaching that we should love our enemies, turn the other cheek, do more than we are ordered to do? Sometimes the church has used those teachings as a way of encouraging those who are powerless – battered wives, abused children, peasants in developing countries, poor people everywhere – that suffering as Jesus did on the cross without complaint is virtuous, an example to be emulated. There is a tension between a necessary degree of self-preservation and a willingness to suffer for others or for a greater cause. Martin Luther King, Jr., recognized that suffering came to him as a result of the work he did, but he insisted that such unmerited suffering was in fact redemptive. Of course, his response was never to simply accept the evil around him and stop agitating, nor did he lash out and let loose the righteous anger his frustration might have warranted. Instead, he confronted the evil but always without violence. Perhaps that is, at least sometimes, a more excellent way. Indeed, if more people in German had been willing to resist non-violently, as did the people of Denmark, the slaughter of the Holocaust could perhaps have been prevented or at least significantly lessened. Esther herself faced the choice of risking her own life for her people: no one could go before the king unless summoned, and at the critical moment she made the choice and told her uncle Mordecai, “I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.” [Esther 4:16]
Finally, let us consider the characters in this wonderful story. Perhaps you recognize yourself in some of them. Are you, like the King of the Entire World Ahasuerus, a little proud of yourself and your position once in a while? A little impetuous at times, certain that you are entitled to having your way? Or perhaps Queen Vashti, self-respecting but a little defiant at times? Esther, nervous when deciding but bold when acting, intelligent, a bit seductive, faithful to a larger commitment? Haman, holder of ancient animosities, masterful schemer, jealous, puffed up, self-aggrandizing? (No, no one would be anything like Haman, ever!) Or perhaps Mordecai, a little provocative on occasion but faithful and diligent and determined to save his people, recognized at last as having the qualities to rule the empire in the king’s name?
And so we have the story of Esther, itself written to justify the feast of Purim which sprang perhaps from pagan roots but was given justification and a Jewish setting by this wonderful melodrama. Purim celebrates the coming of spring in the same way as Mardis Gras in the Christian tradition, a feast of fools just before Passover or Lent. But it retains a deeper meaning, a caution and a triumph which speaks in particular to the Jewish people but also to us as inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition and indeed to each of us in our relations with each other. It reminds us that there is evil in the world and that it must be faced, even at the risk of our own lives, and it also reminds us not to get too full of ourselves. Like so many stories in the Bible and elsewhere, it is a story that never happened but is, nevertheless, as true today as when it was written.
Amen.