Soul Force

Purim

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

www.secondparish.org

March 4, 2007

The story of Esther which we told the children today is more or less the familiar version many of us learned as children—a foolish king, Ahasuerus, an evil courtier Haman, a wise and loyal protector Mordecai and, of course, the beautiful Queen Esther. We omitted a few details of the story for the sake of time and propriety (the Bible contains the unexpurgated version). King Ahasuerus—known from the Greek historians of the Persian Empire as Xerxes—is said to have been “merry with wine” when he ordered Queen Vashti to appear before him “wearing the royal crown;” the Rabbis suggest that this meant she was to appear before all the drunken noblemen wearing only her royal crown. In the story as told in the Book of Esther, the King needs to consult with his wise men to know what to do in response to her disobedience. Here’s how the story goes according to the first chapter:

[Esther 1:¹⁵ The King asked]" According to the law, what is to be done to Queen Vashti because she has not performed the command of King Ahasuerus conveyed by the eunuchs?" ¹⁶ Then Memucan said in the presence of the king and the officials, "Not only has Queen Vashti done wrong to the king, but also to all the officials and all the peoples who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. ¹⁷ For this deed of the queen will be made known to all women, causing them to look with contempt on their husbands, since they will say, 'King Ahasuerus commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, and she did not come.' ¹⁸ This very day the noble ladies of Persia and Media who have heard of the queen's behavior will rebel againstthe king's officials, and there will be no end of contempt and wrath! ¹⁹ If it pleases the king, let a royal order go out from him, and let it be written among the laws of the Persians and the Medes so that it may not be altered, that Vashti is never again to come before King Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal position to another who is better than she. ²⁰ So when the decree made by the king is proclaimed throughout all his kingdom, vast as it is, all women will give honor to their husbands, high and low alike." ²¹ This advice pleased the king and the officials, and the king did as Memucan proposed; ²² he sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house.

This was, if you will, one of the earliest instances on record of an anti-feminist backlash. The fact that the King had to issue an edict to enforce his authority after he had undermined it with a foolish command only made his subjects regard him as foolish and diminished their regard for his subsequent commands.

There are some other elements of the story we played down as well. The search for a new queen didn’t involve a simple beauty contest—there were tryouts for the position, in the King’s chambers. Of more concern today, as suggested by Chancellor Schorsch in this morning’s reading, this story is the first instance we have of a threat to the continued existence of the Jewish people in the kingdom of Persia and hence their very survival as a people; the text says that, under seal of the King’s signet ring,

“[3:13] Letters were sent by couriers to all the king's provinces, giving orders to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods.”

The story ends with a spasm of violence carried out by the Jews of the Persian Empire, a massive slaughter of their enemies—almost 80,000 in all, followed by a raucous celebration of their delivery from certain destruction as a people.

Now, in fact, the story in Esther has no apparent basis in fact. The only link to history we can find is in the King himself. Every attempt to anchor the story in real events has failed. It seems to be one of those stories that’s true but didn’t actually happen. It’s probably best to read the story as a comedy in which all of the characters are caricatures and the events improbable coincidences, ribald humor, and outrageous exaggeration. For example, Haman proposes to hang Mordecai on a stake seventy five feet high—higher than even the palaces of the realm! Chancellor Schorsch, in another section of this morning’s reading, notes that many rabbis might have preferred to exclude Esther from the Hebrew Bible, and suggests the irony that

[I]t is evident that resistance to Esther and Purim persisted for generations [among the rabbis], only to be resolved in the end from the bottom up by popular acceptance. But by then the day had become one of "licit levity" to match the "mock serious vein" of the book, a minor holiday without benefit of Hallel.[1]

Purim is a wild celebration something like Fat Tuesday; they generally fall within a few weeks of each other. Perhaps every culture needs a holiday to just break loose after being cooped up all winter. To get a sense of a real Purim celebration, think of Mardi Gras in New Orleans in your mind and move it up a notch. I didn’t ask the kids to hiss whenever the name of “Haman” is mentioned as is customary when the story is read in synagogues each year; some congregations hiss, others write the name “Haman” on their shoes and stamp every time the name occurs in the story, others carve the word on pieces of wood and clap them together hard enough to displace the carving—all to fulfill the command to wipe out the name of Haman, enemy of the Jews, from the face of the earth. Then there are the other traditional elements in the festival, as for example that celebrants should drink until they are unable to distinguish between Haman and Mordecai—merry with wine, indeed!

One peculiarity of the Book of Ester is that it is the only book in the Hebrew Bible which does not mention God—a circumstance which has generated endless commentary; here is the one place where there’s a glancing reference to God or to providence:

[Esther 4:^13] Mordecai … to Esther, "Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. ¹⁴ For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

“From another quarter” or “from another place;” perhaps this is a glancing reference to God providing rescue directly rather than through Esther. In fact, however, the story makes the point that the Jews in exile are dependent on their own ability to influence events around them. As Professor Raymond P. Scheindlin puts it,

The allusions to God's name and His intervention that generations of commentators have forced into the text obscure the author's real intention: to teach us--through the inner development of the characters--that we Jews are responsible for our own fate, as we are responsible for one another.[2]

So the book of Esther seems to exist primarily to justify the festival of Purim, a festival like the Feast of Fools, Fat Tuesday or Saturnalia which may have been borrowed from Persia or another part of the Diaspora but which in any case was in need of scriptural justification. The story is comic, melodramatic and wildly caricatured and barely made it into the Hebrew Bible. There’s a bit more to it, as noted in The Jewish Study Bible:

The book does have a serious side, and an important function as a Diaspora story…. As such, it promotes Jewish identity, solidarity within the Jewish community, and a strong connection with Jewish (biblical) tradition…. It addresses the inherent problems of a minority people, their vulnerability to political forces and government edicts, their lack of autonomy, and their dependence on royal favor and on the sagacity of their own leaders. More specifically, Haman's false claim about the Jews is a prototype of anti-Semitism, which must have been familiar enough to resonate with the book's original audience. In the end, though, the message is positive: Good triumphs and evil is eradicated; the threat of Jewish annihilation is averted and the Jewish community is assured of continuity and prosperity…. The book succeeds in putting a serious message in a comic form.[3]

All of that is very well and good, but how does it lead to Rabbi Goldstein and the massacre in a mosque in Palestine in 1994? What does this story have to say to us today as the Feast of Purim is being celebrated by our Jewish brothers and sisters? As I said before, this is one of those stories that is true but didn’t in fact happen. It is true because it tells the story of a threat to the survival of the Jews, one of many such threats which have occurred over millennia. The ancient enemies of the Jews—the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Amalekites from whom Haman sprang—have disappeared into the dust of history while the Jews have survived as a distinct people. They have survived in part because they have had stories re-told every year of their journey as a people: delivery from slavery in Egypt at Passover, survival of the assault of the Greeks at Chanukah, escape from the edicts of the anti-Semite Haman at Purim. They have survived, if you will, because God has intervened on their behalf and because they have learned over the years to help themselves and each other, and this celebration of Purim is a reminder of the ability of individuals through wit and charm to change the course of history.

Today, though, Israel is more than an ancient memory with morality tales to tell our children. Israel is a nation of significant importance on the world stage, revived to take an active role in history almost two millennia after its utter eradication by the Romans about forty years after Jesus was crucified. Today Americans play a crucial role in supporting the state of Israel diplomatically, militarily, and economically. Israel is one of our closest allies with deep political support from many sectors of our population, especially from among Evangelical Christians and Jews, but also deeply motivated by nationwide revulsion against Hitler’s demonic bid to destroy all of the Jews and a determination that never again should a people be subject to genocide. This domestic political support has been important in shaping American policies since the founding of Israel after World War II. Harry Truman noted in supporting the establishment of Israel in a land occupied by Arabs that he didn’t have a lot of constituents on the Arab side of the question.

Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid every year since 1973 and the largest overall recipient since World War II, continuing to this day at a rate of $3 billion per year, roughly one-fifth of our foreign aid budget, or about $500 for every Israeli per year—this to a country which is now a developed industrial country with per capita income roughly on a par with South Korea or Spain. This aid has enabled Israel to become militarily superior to all of the states around it. The problem is that Israel has not been able to make peace with its neighbors and remains endangered by threats from the West Bank and Gaza, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, from Iran, and from militants in other parts of the Middle East.

We had a discussion at a recent Friday Night Soup and Salad here about Jimmy Carter’s recent book Palestine Peace or Apartheid; I don’t want to rehearse that discussion here, but I found it striking that many of the attacks on Carter’s book in the media focused on the notion that Israel faces an existential threat at every turn. The stakes were said to be so high that either you had to be in favor of every decision of the current government of Israel or you wished to see Israel destroyed. The latter, in turn, meant that you were an anti-Semite. This is the Purim story writ large, a caricature in which there are only dear friends and deadly enemies out to destroy us from the face of the earth. The problem, of course, is that there’s always another side to that equation. Golda Meier famously said “There is no Palestinian people,” and for several decades after the 1967 war Israel operated as though that were the case. Not surprisingly, opposition and denial breeds a reaction, and Palestinian political organizations also take the position that there ought not to be a Jewish state. And so the two sides find themselves, locked in mortal combat, unable to find their way to any accommodation with each other. Once again we have the Purim story: either all of the Jews throughout the kingdom of Persia will be slaughtered, or Haman and 80,000 Persians will be slaughtered.

This is not, of course, only about Israel and Palestine, the Jews and anti-Semites. I remember standing just south of the World Trade Center in 2002 at a time when we were only at war in Afghanistan and wondering aloud to a friend if we had by that time killed 3,000 civilians in that country, and whether at some point we would recognize that more killing would not bring back our own dead. Of course we were furious at this attack on our people; of course there was a deep thirst for revenge against the attackers. But we New Yorkers were closest in to the catastrophe and many of those whose relatives died in the World Trade Center aligned themselves against the deepening military response to that attack, declaring that wars of revenge ought not to be waged in their name or in the names of their loved ones. In response to attacks in New York and Washington we Americans have created a Global War on Terror and have developed an ideology in which our very civilization is under existential threat. We must mobilize, we are told, to avoid destruction. We must sacrifice the historic liberties of a free people to avoid destruction. We must accept new rules of warfare and allow torture—even glorify it on TV shows like “24”—in order to root out enemies who are determined to destroy us utterly. Too often, the alleged plots have collapsed when examined more closely. Worse, we have become inured to the notion that there are people out there who want to kill us, we have become fearful instead of generous, we have come to desecrate sanctuaries and holy books, mosques and Korans; we have come to hate our enemies. The Buddha said, “Hatred never ceases by hatred; love alone can do that.” Jesus said “Love your enemies.”

Jesus, of course, never had to rule a nation under attack. It was three hundred years after his death before Christianity faced the need to modify itself to rule a state, in that case the Roman Empire. Private rules of religion don’t define proper approaches for statesmen. Nevertheless, justice and mercy are a wiser policy in international affairs than revenge and hatred. These are not only matters for nations, of course. As individuals, we also have friends and we have enemies. When we store up treasures in our homes, we become more and more defensive and need to surround ourselves with burglar alarms, gated communities, private security guards, and our own guns. In turn we lose touch with our neighbors as we come to fear anyone outside of our personal armed camps. Is that any way to lead a life on this earth?

In our families, too, we accumulate hurt feelings and we say unforgivable things to each other. We have enemies in our families to whom we would prefer not to speak. Would we prefer to live our lives with those rifts growing wider and wider, or might we have the courage to take a little more risk and heal the divide?

The story of Esther is a lovely story, but it is only a story. It simplifies realities in ways which minimize the risk and maximize the thrill of revenge. Underneath its surface we find an ancient enmity between Amalek and Israel which comes to the surface over and over and finally, in a mythic purge of Haman (may his memory be blotted out from the face of the earth) and 80,000 more. Sometimes we would love to do the same in our personal lives, to blot out all opposition and frustrating circumstances. In fact, it is in standing up to opposition that we grow; it is in finding resolutions to conflict that we create societies, workplaces, and families which can incorporate diverse insights and engage in new discoveries.

It’s fun to break loose once in a while and have a Purim celebration, but living well calls for a different kind of discrimination than simply drawing lines and putting friends on one side and enemies on the other. It calls for finding the neighbor in the one we regard as utterly unlike us, the Samaritan, the Palestinian, the Muslim. It calls for us to love our neighbor as ourselves, even as we would be loved.

Amen