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On Reading Megillat Esther
Ta'anit Esther
13th of Adar, 5761

Of all the texts we Jews use to explicate our tradition, the book of Esther is probably the least distant and most accessible. Our modern notions of literature, complete with Hitchcockian suspense, political intrigue, comedic errors, odd plot twists, all are part of megillat Esther without any overt reference to the supernatural. It's the type of book we could sit down for an evening and enjoy, without racking our minds. Certainly it is an old book, and as readers we'd have to balance against the literary conventions of its antiquity, but we do no less than that when we read, for example, Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare.

This remarkably modern work also carries themes that echo with the painful history of the 20th Century: determined enemies pressing to use the state apparatus to meet an eliminationist agenda; Jews hidden and open working a resistant political system; Jews depending on a suspect political order for survival.

Purim is the quintessential holiday of inversion, akin structurally, as we all know, to Mardi Gras. Most traditional cultures have some holiday that inverts the normal social structure. Think of Quasimodo's election in the opening of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Some public schools occasionally have a "teacher-student" reversal day.

All too often though, both as a consequence of our focusing on Jewish observance almost exclusively as a pediatric pedagogical device and on Purim for its exuberance, we loose track of the serious and necessary adult lessons laid down not only in the text but in the telling.

There are plethora of interpretive approaches to Esther. It can be read as a handbook for Jewish survival as a minority amidst a potentially hostile Gentile majority; as a guide to court intrigue; as a philosophic allegory about G-d's hidden acts through unsuspecting agency; as a philosophic allegory of Jewish history. It can also be read, and in our synagogues should be read, as a comedic retribution. When the bad guys finally get it in the end, when the ten are hung from the tree, it is meant, on a slapstick level, to be funny. We needn't recoil at that: death and violence express comic catharsis even in our sacred Jewish literature.

But in our focus on the humor, the inversions, the joy, we all too often forget that this holiday is as much for adults as it is for the children. Think of the lessons, if we would attend to those lessons, that children (and adults) need learn from Megillat Esther: the world can be an unfriendly, dangerous place; be careful about picking one's friends, and even more so about one's enemies; sometimes we need to hide who we are; revenge can be sweet.

These are not the childhood lessons we have been told in our parenting classes to impart to our sweet ones as we struggle to insure the full blossoming of their self-esteem. These are the bitter lessons that many adults can only learn in the full bloom of cynicism. These are not lessons we really want to learn, nor do we really want to teach.

We have to teach them, and we have to learn them. So, the pedagogical issue, which too often gets lost in the carnivals and costumes, is how to teach our children, and ourselves, the painful lesson of real politics, without destroying innocence.

Perhaps Esther, Queen Esther, is a model of that learning without destroying. Consider what our popular idea of a queen is: haughty, imperious, demanding, domineering. This is not our text's Queen Esther.

In the denouement, Esther's speech is a model of political modesty. When asked by the king what she desires, Esther replies: "If I have won Your Majesty's favor, and if it please the King, let my life be granted me as my wish, and my people as my request. For I and my people have been sold-to be destroyed, killed and exterminated! Had we only been sold as slaves and maidservants, I would have kept silent, for the trouble would not have been worth the king's damage." (Esther, 7:3-4)

This speech is a speech made under great duress, and perhaps is extreme in its suggestion to the King. One would doubt that Esther really would be content with enslavement. But the matter here is potential genocide, and Esther needs to deflect the approaching evil. Embedded in this deeply political drama, however, is also a startling personal message: Esther does not convince the King by histrionics, by making non-negotiable demands, by striking an overbearing pose.

Her appeal is modest, and retiring. She doesn't even confront Ahasuerus, rather she sets the stage, and allows him to raise the matter. Even when confronted by the evil planned against her people, she retains both modesty and a kind of innocence. It is odd to think that when requesting from the King the death for her enemy, Esther still has about her an air of innocence. It is innocence, not naivetŽ, which we all too often confuse. Is that not what we would wish for our children, particularly in an age that extols the exposure of every intimacy? We do not wish them na•vete, but we do wish them to hold on to those precious moments of innocence.

This slim, modest book, a model of political drama as Esther, Mordechai and the others negotiate their way through a political system to attain their goals, reflects the brilliance of Jewish traditional thought. Even inside as an intense drama is played out, with the lifes of the Jews of Shushan at risk, the text comes to teach us a personal lesson: walk in the halls of power with modesty. Esther's modesty helped saved the Jews-perhaps then we as adults need to reclaim some of that modesty in our own Purim celebrations.

Purim Sameach

Dennis