Jeremy Rosen
Queen Esther: #MeToo

Jeremy Rosen - Queen Esther: #MeToo

- Hello everybody. I should explain that I am taking a little break this week from the episodes of the two Judean Kingdom, the Judean and the Israel Kingdom of 2000, of 900 years ago, and the hijinks they got up to and all the conflicts with the powers to the north and the south because it so works out, this is the last occasion I have to speak to you before Purim. Purim is roughly speaking three and a half weeks ahead. And so I thought it appropriate to take a break, I’ll come back to the two kingdoms, but I want to talk about the Book of Esther in preparation for Purim. And there’s a big question as to whether the Book of Esther really happened. Was it really history even though the background fits to some extent? But more instinctively, how do we understand the message? And of course you’ll hear the official party explanation on the message is that this was the enemies of the Jews trying to destroy the Jews, and we managed to survive and we celebrated. But there are, no matter whether you regard the book as historical or not, as serious or indeed as humorous. There are some very important lessons that I think are overlooked and particularly relevant for us today, which is why I wanted to look primarily at the women of the Book of Esther, and there are three major characters here and see whether there is anything we can derive from it. But first of all, let me give you a little bit about the historical background. First of all, what we know factually is the historical background. And we know this from other sources. When it comes to Jewish sources, a lot of people are sceptical, but we know this from other sources. What do we know? We know that in 586, before the Common Era, 2,500 years ago, the Northern Kingdom of Israel has been exiled.

And now the Southern Kingdom of Judah is exiled in two phases, two Babylon. There’s a huge debate as to how many were exiled, how many were left, if any were left. But essentially there’s no doubt that there was a Jewish community living in Babylon, no longer called Israel, but called Judah. And that’s where the Judeans and the Jews come from. We don’t know how big it is, but it was definitely there. And not only that, but the second, the penultimate king of Judea, Jehonia, Jehoiachin rather, was sent into exile, lived in jail for 21 years, and then taken out, elevated to the king’s table and put in this position of leadership. Now the Babylonians were conquered in stages and the Persians took over. And Cyrus the Great became the great emperor from India to the Mediterranean in about 550 before the Common Era. And it is Cyrus the Great who in his Cyrus steel, promised that everybody was allowed to worship in any way they wanted. And so there’s no question that under Cyrus, the concept of antisemitism was not a feature. Everybody was allowed to worship how they were, but there was always rivalry, rivalry between the different countries in the empire, the different communities in the empire, the different traders in the empire. There was always competition and disagreement. But essentially Cyrus gave permission for a group of Jews to return to the land of Israel and set up their, reestablish their centre in Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.

Now, that ran into trouble and it ran into trouble because those who had stayed behind, whether they were from the Northern Kingdom Jews or whether they were from the Northern Kingdom as Samaritans, objected to these guys, these Jews coming back and said, almost a modern playbook, “I’m sorry, we’re here now. This is our land. You don’t belong here. Go back where you came from.” Not to the west, but of course back to Persia. The story of Esther has a king called Ahasuerus. And Ahasuerus sounds a bit like Artaxerxes or Xerxes, but there are problems trying to identify who he was. Cyrus was followed by Cambyses, and Cambyses was also a tolerant king. After Cambyses came Darius the Great. And we know from documents that have come from Elephantine in Egypt that there were Jewish mercenaries and Jewish priests with a Jewish temple there at the same time under the protection of the Persians. So there’s no trace there of a Persian who was prepared to tolerate the extermination of the Jewish people. It’s true that there was a stop to the building of the temple in Jerusalem. It was held up and it took two more visits from Ezra and Nehemiah under the protection of Darius before they could rebuild the temple, and they did so. So then who was Ahasuerus? So we might say that after Darius, there was Xerxes. It could be Xerxes, then there was another Darius, and then there was Artaxerxes. And according to the rabbis, it so happened that Darius II, according to them, was in fact the daughter son of Esther and the previous king, which would make that Xerxes, not Artaxerxes. But we have no evidence at all, no record in the Persian documents that there was a Jewish queen and that Darius was the son of a Jewish queen.

And therefore, we’re bound to ask, well, did it happen, and how did it happen? The Book of Esther starts off with Ahasuerus in charge and having a great big feast for all his empire. And a whole debate as to whether he was politically wise in having a feast of which everybody got thoroughly drunk. But this introduces a certain humorous element here, and that is only a drunken king could get into this sort of mess that we’re going to describe as the book unfolds. So the book starts off with Artaxerxes or whoever he was, Ahasuerus, gathering everybody together, having a great celebration, and then inviting the first woman mentioned in the book and this woman is Vashti. We are told very little about Vashti, very little. The rabbis like to say that Vashti was an aristocrat whereas Ahasuerus was just a jumped up soldier who managed to take the throne. But all we know is that Ahasuerus asked Vashti to come and appear in his palace. Well, Vashti was having a feast for her women in her palace to come and appear in the crown of her majesty to show how beautiful she was. Now, there’s no evidence that he asked her to appear naked or that she didn’t want to appear naked because maybe she’d grown a tail or she had some sort of skin disease. But essentially Vashti refuses. And the question is why did Vashti refuse? The rabbis’ opinion is she refused because she was an aristocrat. She wasn’t going to see herself humiliated by having to perform in front of these drunken men. But it does seem that she was fighting, if you like, for her dignity. In this case, you might say that Vashti is the first example of the me too generation. “I’m not going to put myself in a position when I’m going to have you arrogant male chauvinist pigs looking at me and treating me as though I’m a piece of flesh.” So she refused. Now, as you can imagine, whoever it was, Saddam Hussein, whether it’s Xi, whether it’s Putin, nobody refuses an oligarch.

Nobody refuses a dictator who has all the power in his hands and can do whatever he likes. And even governments are frightened to stand up to such aggressive people. So he then decides to depose her. There’s no indication told that he killed her, but there is a tradition that he did, but she disappears off the seam never to appear again. The king Ahasuerus, when he recovers his senses, suddenly realised, “I’ve lost a beautiful woman. What am I going to do?” Now, it’s not as though he’s short of concubines. After all, King Solomon, who lived a couple of hundred years beforehand, had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Potentates in those days didn’t have any problem getting women, but obviously, he needed somebody in this senior position, whether it was to have an heir or whether it was to have somebody on his side, somebody to discuss. And so the young men whom he has dependent on for good advice, and we know from the Bible already this is a bad recipe, because when the son of Solomon was asked to compromise, he asked the young man what to do and the old men what to do. The old man said, “Take it easy.” The young man said, “Go for it and don’t show them you’re a wimp.” And it’s the young men who are now advising to Ahasuerus to gather in all the virgins from across the empire, all of virgins to come in, come to town, and he is going to be able to select. Except of course what it doesn’t mention or what it does mention that nobody seems to notice is they’re going to take a whole year, a whole year of cosmetics and oils and preparation before they get anywhere near the king. So the king’s going to have to survive for at least six months or a year without having anybody. And one wonders why they had to do this, but I suppose in those days, around the Persian Empire, hygiene wasn’t as advanced as it is today and they probably needed cleaning up. Whatever it was, it was a year.

And they were herded into the grand harem, And in the grand harem, they were sorted out and then they had to go and appear before the king. And it does appear that what they did is they went and they spent a night with the king. And they could take in any aphrodisiac, any form of entertainment, anything they wanted to take in to try to attract the king. This girl Esther, Hadassah, happens to be a nice Jewish girl. She is the niece or sometimes say actually the wife of Mordecai, Mordecai the Jew. And where we have an interesting situation where the Jewish community is now caught up with the demands of the Persian community. And the Jewish community, like our communities now, was pretty assimilated. After all, think about it. Mordecai’s name is Marduk. So it’s like somebody being called Christian in our days, or Christopher. Or on the other hand, Hadassah’s name was Astarte. Astarte was a goddess. So she’s named after the goddess, he’s named after a god. They’re living in this world where Mordecai seems already to worry about whether relations are quite as good as they should be. Because when Esther is taken into the harem, Mordecai instructs her not to tell anybody who she is. So she goes into the harem with no Jewish identity outwardly whatsoever. And here we have what seems to be a passive girl being manipulated by her uncle for his own political ends. So whereas Vashti is a strong woman saying, “Nobody’s going to push me around,” Esther seems to be a wimp who is allowing herself to be used. The counterargument, of course, is, they didn’t have much choice. They were gathered together by royal decree. There was no option. And so she really couldn’t rebel unless she wanted her head to be removed.

But anyway, she then is the second woman who is mentioned. You’ve got Vashti number one, you’ve got Esther number two. And in the harem, as she’s being prepared, she attracts the attention of the head of the harem who really thinks she’s special. And she appeals to him not on the basis of all the tricks of the trade, but basically because she seems to be a controlled, intelligent, sensible person. And therefore he advises her what the best way to get to the king is. And as the Book of Esther tells us, she was allowed to take in. Everything she took in, nothing. It was just her. And in fact, the tradition is she wasn’t even particularly pretty. But the expression used by the rabbi is , there was a thread of kindness. She was kind and she was intelligent. And that’s just what any father would want of a daughter-in-law, I suppose. Somebody who is kind and considerate and a good human being. And this is what won, what won the heart of Ahasuerus. And so we have, on the face of it, two models. The tough, aggressive, independent woman and the compliant, passive, but caring woman. Here we are, she’s in the palace, and we’re introduced to this man Haman. Haman is the prime minister, so to speak, an up and rising power to the throne. And he is mightily offended by Mordecai because Mordecai refuses to bow down to him, which the Talmud of course raises all kinds of questions. Why? What’s wrong with bowing down, being polite? And if the king has commanded it, you are flouting the orders of the king by not bowing down and doing what you’re asked to do. So what’s the big problem?

So they answer, “Ah, because Haman had some sort of idolatrous image and that’s why he didn’t want to bow down.” But it does look very much as though Mordecai is testing authority. He is challenging authority. Is this because he knows that he has to stand up firm to a man like Haman because Haman has a record, an anti-Jewish record? We’re not told, but that he does stand up. He refuses to bow down, at which Haman is so furious that he goes to see the king. But before he goes to see the king, he comes up for advice from his wife called Zeresh, and Zeresh is woman number three. Zeresh, you might say, is the Lady Macbeth of the Book of Esther. She is the woman who gives the advice, who says, “Don’t put up with it. You deserve better. If this guy is doing something wrong, you’ve got to take him down.” So we have these three models of these three women, which I think is in many respects the most important message here. But I need to elaborate a little bit more. So here we’ve got a situation in which Ahasuerus has agreed to sell out the Jewish people for money. That he might want money, makes sense. All rulers want money. They want as much as they can get, but it doesn’t make any sense to say he was prepared to sell out the Jews. And Haman’s argument is interesting because Haman’s argument is this is a nation that doesn’t abide by your laws. This is a nation that has other different customs and other different laws. They don’t worship your god, they worship another god. But that was no crime under the Persian Empire or indeed under the Greek Empire afterwards. The crime would be they’ve rebelled against you, which in fact was the crime that the Romans attacked the Jews for, not for their religion, but for the rebellion. So maybe there were some hotheaded Jews at the time who were rebelling, but it doesn’t make sense to say they were because the Jews who wanted to stay could stay.

The Jews who wanted to go back to Israel could go back to Israel. They weren’t a threat in any way. And therefore this whole charge seems, in a sense, trumped up. And that’s why in a way, it doesn’t make sense to think of it as a Persian book. It makes much more sense to think of it as a Greek book. Because although Alexander the Great was great to the Jews, no problem at all, those who came after him began to encourage competition between the Jews and the Greeks. And they were the ones who tried to get the Jews to give up on their tradition. So it does look a little bit as though this is a Greek looking back to a Persian era. But even if it was, the message is the important thing, as Marshall McLuhan liked to say. So what has happened is that in this situation, Mordecai is challenging authority. Haman has responded by getting the king to agree for money to get rid of the Jews. He casts a lot, so that’s what Purim is. Purim is a lot to decide what the best time to do it is and the decree goes out. Meanwhile, there was a little side incident. The side incident is this. There were two members of the household guard of whoever the king was, Bigthana and Teresh, who plotted to kill him. Now, that’s not unknown. The Assyrian kings were assassinated, the Judean kings were assassinated, the Israel kings were assassinated. Assassinating kings seems to have been the equivalent of not electing a president back again in some way or another, it happened all the time. And they were plotting in a language that nobody else understood. Mordecai, because of his international background, he was able to discover the plot. He went and he got the message to Esther. Esther then went and told the king, and in a famous phrase, she told the king, “Beshame Mordecai in the name of Mordecai.” And from here the rabbi say, whoever quotes another person, when another person does a good thing, says a good thing, that person brings redemption to the world. Because by reporting this to King Ahasuerus, she opened a crack in the door and got Ahasuerus to realise belatedly that this Jew was on his side.

He didn’t immediately know this, not when he had this conversation with Haman initially. But afterwards, Haman is trying to cement his position in the throne. And when Ahasuerus hears about what Mordecai had done, and the fact that he hadn’t been rewarded, he wants to get some advice and he turns to Haman who’s just come into court. Why is he coming to court? Because Zeresh, his wife, has told him, “You’ve got to kill Mordecai and I’m advising you to put up gallows in your back garden to hang the guy on.” And having pushed him to kill Mordecai personally and not even wait for the official decree, Haman comes happily into the palace in order to get permission from the king to do that ahead of the other declaration. But tables are turned, the king gets him to come in and says, “Tell me Haman, if I really want to satisfy or decorate somebody, make them feel appreciated, what should I do?” And Haman ridiculously says, “You know what you should do? You should take the king’s horse, you should take the king’s clothes. You should dress up. This guy you want to ennoble must be me. Let him ride on the king’s horse through the capitol and say, ‘This is how the king rewards people who he’s happy with.’” Clearly riding on the king’s horse as we see through the Bible, taking the king’s concubines, this is treason. And so for whatever reason, whether his wife intentionally told him to put himself in a different position ‘cause she wanted to get rid of him or whether she was as stupid as he was, nevertheless, he comes in, advises this, and Ahasuerus turns the table and says, “Great, do that to Mordecai.” He does that to Mordecai and Mordecai is the guy in charge. Haman is down in the dumps. The next phase is that the declaration of Haman has come to the attention of the queen.

And I’m slightly out of sequence here, but that’s to follow my trend of thought. When the declaration comes up that the Jews are going to be killed at this particular date, Mordecai hears this declaration outside, but Esther, who is sequestered in the harem inside has no idea. Now she’s already been appointed the queen. She’s been appointed the queen on the basis of her character, her personality. She’s in this comfortable position and Mordecai therefore turns to her and says, “Look, you know, you’ve got to intercede.” Her reply is, “No, I can’t. Because there’s a rule here. Just as there’s a rule here which says the king’s declarations can’t be overturned, there’s a rule that says you can’t appear before the king without permission. If you appear before the king without permission, he can part out his sceptre and accept you, in which case you can come forward, or alternatively, you are a dead person. If I go there without being called and I haven’t been called for a while now, I could be dead. I can’t risk this.” To which Mordecai says, “Listen, if you don’t, we’re all lost. And if they discover you’re a Jew, you’re going to be lost too. So what’s the difference? You’ve got nothing to lose.” And at this moment, Esther faced with this comes up and she says, “Look, you’re going to have to do something.” So here we have the turning point in which this passive, quiet girl who spent a night with a king but it paid off and she is now the queen, is faced with having to take action. And so the first thing she does is say, “Look, I’m going to fast, but I want you to declare to the whole of the community that they have to fast too.” Now just think of this in terms of the male chauvinism of a culture that a woman is instructing the rabbi, so to speak, on what they should do. “This is what I expect you all to do. Don’t throw at me, I’m only a woman. I’m telling you you’re going to do this.” And so that’s what happens. There is this fast and the fast is called the fast of Esther, just as the book is called the Book of Esther. So Esther is given a unique position here.

Not only is she in with the king, but in addition to that, she has power and authority through Mordecai over the Jewish community. And as a result, the fast goes on, takes place. And then on the basis of that, she risks her life going in to see the king and the king sees her, overjoyed to see her. We don’t know if he’s so overjoyed to see her. Why hasn’t he gone to see her before? Maybe because, like Solomon, if you have 700 wives and 300 concubines, you visit one a night, it takes two years to get round and maybe he was busy with the others. And some of his concubines were there for childbirth, some of them for beauty, some of them for entertainment and so forth and so on so he had choices. But then he was very glad to see her, promised her the whole of the half of the empire if that’s what she wants, and she very modestly says, “No, I don’t want anything other than that you and Haman come to a feast at my place tonight.” So here you have Esther plotting and calculating, how is she going to deal with the king and with Haman? So she’s no fool, she’s no cypher. She is a very bright, clever woman who understands there are different ways of achieving your ends not necessarily coming full on maybe in the way that Vashti did. So she invites Haman. Haman comes to the meal and the king and Esther together and he’s so happy and he tells his family, tells Esther, you know, sort of, so he tells Zeresh, “You know, I’m so happy, but still the trouble is this guy Mordecai still enrages me.” And that’s the moment at which she said to him, “Go and prepare the gallows.” And he says, “You know, the only thing she’s asked me is to come back the following night.”

The following night he comes back. Remember the case of this walk through the city on horseback, but he still has no inkling that he’s ruined his reputation with the king. But he comes back second night. The end of the first meal, she said, “The only thing I asked is come back a second night.” She comes back a second night and it’s at that she turns to the king and she says, “King, you’ve asked me what I want. I’ll tell you now what I want. I want to live, I want to survive.” And king says, “Of course you want to survive. Why wouldn’t you?” And she says, “'Cause this man Haman wants to kill me.” “What?” he says. “This man wants to kill you?” Obviously Haman had no idea she was Jewish, didn’t realise the mess he was in. And she tells him about what’s happened and he stomps out in anger. At that moment, Haman falls on her knees on the couch. When the king comes back in, he sees Haman lying almost on top of Esther. That was the second let’s say majesty. Because as again we know from the Bible, the one thing you don’t do is if you try sleeping with the king’s wife or a king’s concubine, that is treason. And so leaving aside the question of the Jews, the treason has been compounded by this man lying on top of Esther. Anyway, Haman has carried out. He is killed and then we have a slight problem. And the slight problem is that the rule of the land, and there’s no basis of saying this whatsoever, the rule of the land was once a king made a decree, it can’t be overturned. So you can’t stop people wanting to kill the Jews on the date that’s being declared. All that Esther can ask for is that you allow us to defend ourselves. “We want self-defense.” Again, it’s a really unusual situation from every point of view, but that’s what is granted.

The king rewards Esther with Haman’s palace and Haman’s goods and everything like that And Mordecai is now number one in charge and he’s got what he wanted. So he’s risen up the ranks to the top job, not unlike the biblical character Nehemiah. Nehemiah was the cup bearer, that’s to say the top advisor of the Persian king. And he was able, Darius to get his permission if it was Darius to go back and help the Jewish community that was being attacked back in Israel by the people who wanted to prevent them returning. So then what Esther does is she is able to send out messages to the Jewish community around the world, around the Persian Empire, that they’re able to defend themselves. And the first attack comes in Shushan, the capital. And nobody is, or the king has said very clearly in his declaration of everybody, the Jews have the right to defend themselves. So you can see that the king is, although he is not cancelling the decree, he’s saying, “I don’t approve of it, and I want the Jews to defend themselves.” Which means that only those who had a motive and a reason to attack them were going to attack them. And in the capital Shushan, we don’t know what the numbers were, but certainly they were in the thousands and thousands. Only 500 people on the first day stood up and tried to attack the Jews and were got rid of. Esther asked the king again for permission for a second day, another 300 to fight. So there were 800 in the whole of the capital. Throughout the empire, from India to the Mediterranean, there was 75,000. And the text says the Jews only defended themselves. They did not take any of the spoils. They didn’t confiscate anything. They didn’t kill anybody except those who attacked them. It was pure self-defense.

In those days, whoever you attacked, you killed, you got them, killed their family or captured 'em, took them to slavery, took on their goods, everything, they didn’t. It says that in black and white. So 10 sons of Haman, up on a tree or gallows or whatever it was. The enemies were removed. And at this moment, the megillah ends, the story of Esther ends with Esther taking the lead religiously and declaring that now we’re going to have a religious festival. This is the first example of an innovation of a new festival after the Bible, Purim, the first and the only Jewish festival that celebrates what goes on outside of Israel. So in other words, this was a diaspora celebration and it’s a celebration of the Jews’ right to be free in the diaspora. And in celebrating this festival, this festival of joy, she insists on two commands. These two specific commands is that we must give charity, charity to the poor. We must celebrate our release by charity to the poor and gifts to your friends. So there’s internal friendship within the community and responsibility for the poor everywhere within or without. This is our command. There’s another command that you have to come, and maybe this comes from Mordecai, that you have to recite the story of this to remember that there are people out there who are always trying to get back at us. The name of Haman is Haman ben Hammedatha. Haman from Hamadan. Agagite. Agagite is a name that occurs only once in the Bible outside of this, and that is the Amalekite King Agag who lived at the time of King Saul. Now you’ll know that the Bible specifies that Amalek is a very particular kind of foe because Amalek attacked the Israelites coming out of Egypt. So the story goes when they were weak and tired, just escaped from slavery, had no time to organise themselves. And they were not challenging the Amalekites.

They were not going through Amalekite territory. They were going down into Sinai. They were going to head towards the Canaanites but not the Amalekites, but the Amalekites attacked them and attacked ‘em from behind, the weak, the women and the children not head on. And the Torah says never forget what Amalek did. They are your enemies. That is to say they hate you for no good reason. Some hate you for a reason. Fair enough, you’ve given them cause. But somebody who hates you for no reason, this is what we would call anti-Semitism. So Amalekites were the anti-Semites. Haman is described as an Amalekite. Now it’s interesting because we also know from other sources that the Assyrians who conquered the northern tribes, who conquered the whole of the area and then followed by the Babylonians totally mixed up all the different tribes. So we no longer know who was Amalekite, who was not. So by this time, we don’t know that Haman actually was descendant from Amalekite. But merely the fact they call him Agag means this is typical of this kind of person no matter where they come from. So this is a story about, in a sense, anti-Semitism because of this baseless hatred as opposed to having a good reason if you want to defend your land or something like that. There are people to this day, particularly in this era, no trace of it before, who have accused the Jews of being violent, aggressive people who killed people for no good reason in the Persian Empire but that’s not the case. They were given a choice. They didn’t have to fight the Jews. The Jews didn’t want to fight and they fought to defend themselves. Nothing wrong with self-defense. So then we have to return to what are the core themes of this whole narrative.

We start off with the fact that Babylonian jury was largely assimilated and we know this from other sources. When they came back, those who came back to the land of Israel had married out or disappeared in different ways and were, if you like, we’ll call 'em secular Jews or one of another word but they were still defined as Jews. But people did. After all, just think about it. What Mordecai is prepared for Esther to do is to spend the night with the king, if you like, on approval. If he liked to find, but if he didn’t, she’d go back, she’d be stuck in a harem for the rest of her life and she’d have done it for nothing and gain nothing. On the other hand, there was this huge big risk but this risk really is a sort of risk that I think somebody who is more attuned with secular values would be happy to take than somebody who’s living in a very, very religious ghetto. So we have the theme of a Babylonian community, which on the one hand seems to be assimilated, but on the other hand has kept Judaism alive. Without the Babylonian community, Judaism would not have been kept alive. There’d been no second temple, we wouldn’t be here today. They kept Judaism alive. And not only did they kept Judaism alive, but they kept Judaism alive by being innovative 'cause they had to find an alternative way of worshipping to the temple. There was no temple there. And this is where you begin to have this alternative stream in Judaism. It eventually is going to be the mainstream which says let’s focus more not on the temple for sacrifices, but on the community centre, on the synagogue, on studying our holy texts and of being the scribes of being a nation of education and this is what will help us going and we mustn’t be afraid to innovate.

And so this was an innovation. This was a new law, a series of new laws. And it was a woman who took these laws and led the charge, so to speak, for innovation and for change. So I think in terms of where we are in the Jewish community, at this particular moment, the challenge of getting rid of this old male chauvinism that has been part of the world for so long, we’re no worse than anybody else for so long. This is something that is being led in one sense by the appreciation that if we don’t value enough 50% of our population, we’re going to end up on the rubbish dip of history if we’re not careful. So this is one very important theme that comes out of this. The idea of innovation, the idea that innovation can come from outside of Israel, the idea that innovation can be led by a woman. But then you have the question of, okay, but how? And that’s why I think this other theme is significant of the three women because you’ve got three examples. You’ve got the example of a woman who says, “I’m fighting for my rights and to hell with you and to hell with the consequences.” That’s the Vashti position. Head on. You have the Zeresh position which is aggression, “Kill the lot of 'em, get rid of them. Impose our will on everybody.” And then you get the Esther compromise which says, “I want to achieve something but I’ve got to get people on my side. I’ve got to win people over and I’ve got to do it in stages. Not the first feast, the second feast. I’ve got to be diplomatic about how we bring about change.” And this interestingly is why the rabbis say, you know, it’s interesting, there’s no mention of God in the Book of Esther. No mention of God. God doesn’t appear anywhere, which is strange given how the fact that God is behind everything supposedly. Why isn’t God mentioned? And one of the answers they give is just think, Esther, the name Esther comes from the word s-t-r, hidden. Things are hidden. The course of history is hidden.

We never know exactly how it works and God is hidden. We drive God into hiding and therefore God was there all the time, so to speak, pulling the strings, but was hidden. That is to say that there are always elements that we can’t predict. We don’t know. We don’t know what’s in the mind of our enemies all the time. We don’t know how what looks black one moment might be bright the next and vice versa. So we have to be prepared for the unknown. But meanwhile, while we are preparing for the unknown and no idea how things are going to work out, whether it’s in Israel, the United States of America, South Africa, Australia or wherever it is, we have to enjoy life, get on with it. Have feasts, celebrate, be charitable, be caring, have friends, be good human beings. And so this story is a story about me too, but about different ways of achieving me too. It is a universal story, not just a story about, “They hate us, they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” It is, and that I think is why it is included in the Bible. It is a book with a very profound historical and spiritual message even if the facts are totally up in the air and we’ve no idea if it ever happened. It’s still a very good story. So with that, I will open up for discussion and questions to see where we go from here.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: You say that she was part of the harem, had to wait for many months for her turn. Was Mordecai one of the ministers that Haman deposed? Why wait 11 months for executing the population? Was it to raise Jewish tax or was their tomb advertised for political purposes as they’re supposed to be another one in Israel?

A: Well, there’s tombs to rest Mordecai in Persia to this very day, but whether they’re the actual ones or not, we don’t know. You never can tell after it was so long ago. They might have been put up at a later date, but yes, that’s true, there are the tombs there. But then the question what you’re asking is, this whole story about getting everybody in for a year. I heard an explanation from the head of my yeshiva. The head of my yeshiva in Israel said, I want to explain to you what happens. The young men want to gather all the beautiful women in the empire into the capital. These are the young men who are driving around the capital in their Ferraris, clubbing all night long, living it up, enjoying the alcohol and the drinks and getting drunk, and what do they want? The same thing as drunk young men want today in the United States of America. So their idea is get all the women. And the more you can get, the better. And not only that, if you go on gathering, that’s even better still. Now of course when Esther heard about what happened and there was this declaration and she said, “I can’t go to the king without being asked.” Mordecai said, “You might not be king tomorrow because you might not know but the king is still continuing to gather other virgins.” The head of my yeshiva said, “How is this possible? Why was he doing this?” He said there are two reasons. Reason number one is this. Here in Israel where he is sitting at the time, we have such a bureaucratic system that the government sets up government offices to do a particular task. And even if they’ve completed their task, they never get rid of the government offices 'cause they don’t want to lose the jobs for the boys and the political influence. So they keep all these bureaucracies going even though they have absolutely no function whatsoever. So these guys had set up this bureaucracy for bringing women into town. They weren’t going to stop it just because it would fulfil their function. And besides, they were hoping that there would be, if you like, pickings, my guess. So in one way, you can turn around and say, “That’s a humorous way of explaining what was going on.” In another, it’s trying to explain, if you like, the whole bureaucratic system of an empire where you have all these different interests, all these different people, all of them trying to get their oar in. There are seven wise men. There were seven people closest to the king. There are all these councils whispering in his ear. Meanwhile the king is drunk, he’s blotto and so they are doing things without referring back to central office. This is not unlike bureaucracies everywhere in the world to this very day.

Thank you, Jennifer. That’s very sweet. Vashti was Belshazzar’s granddaughter. Yes, that’s one of the Midrash in that says that she was Belshazzar’s daughter. Belshazzar’s unite with the intermediary. There was Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was the guy who took the Jews from Judea into exile in two phases. Nebuchadnezzar was overthrown by the Medes and Belshazzar was, as Belshazzar’s feast, the man who saw the writing on the wall, , your end is coming by. And he was soon got rid of and in comes Cyrus and appoints a Persian dynasty. So the trouble with that Midrash is that if she was from noble stock, she should have been from the stock of Cyrus, not from the stock of a king Belshazzar who was a not very much impressed, not much light. And this is again one of the problems when you have the Midrash of the rabbis, each one coming up with his or her own theory. And you have another big problem here. And the big problem is in the Jewish calendar, which is another issue altogether, in Babylon, there was Babylonian calendars, which are all based on months. Not years, but months. Years went by, the year of the rule of the king, the seventh year of the reign of King Cyrus, the seventh year of the reign of King David, whatever it was, but it was always by months. Nobody bothered to go back in time to the beginning of the world. That sort of thing only happened when Christianity set up a new calendar, had adopted the Ptolemy calendar into a Julian one to begin with, but then Gregorian, and it dated back to what they believed was the birth of Jesus. Now along come the Muslims and say, “We’re not going to have a calendar going back to your religion. We’re going to have one going back to Muhammad.” And when Muhammad went, transferred to his major capital, at that stage, the Jews came along and said, “Well so much of you lot, we’re going to do better than both of you and we are going to go back to the beginning of the world.” And so they try to calculate backwards according to the chronology of the Torah, back to when the second temple was destroyed, then back to the exile, then back to the first temple, back to Solomon, back to David and so forth and went back. But there was a lot of disagreement about their calculations. This is why some people say Rebecca was three years old when she came out with a pitcher of water and some said she was 12. Some say that Isaac was 40 years old when his father was 100, lifting him up probably and put him on the altar to kill him. So there were in addition some couple, almost 150 years in their chronology in which the Jewish chronology of the Persian Empire differs from the non-Jewish chronology of the Persian Empire. And for that reason, again, we can’t be certain which king they’re talking about. Is it Cyrus or Cambyses or Darius I or Darius II or Xerxes I or Artaxerxes II and where she might fit in because as the text doesn’t tell us, we can only speculate and this is speculation.

Q: So, Joe, at what point did Ahasuerus marry Zeresh?

A: No, it wasn’t Ahasuerus who married Zeresh. It was Haman who was married to Zeresh. You mean when did Ahasuerus marry Vashti? That was before. So no, I must have confused you. It’s Zeresh who was Haman’s wife. Vashti was Ahasuerus wife one, Esther was wife two, Zeresh was Haman’s. She was the nasty one who told him to hang the Jews in his back garden.

Q: Is there any mention of literature of existence of Haman and Zeresh?

A: Not outside ours. Outside our Bible, there is no other direct reference to them. , you tell the story of the megillah where we’re not sure it really happened.

Q: Is it just a legend?

A: It may be a legend. It may be true. It’s very difficult to tell. It’s so difficult to tell. Archaeology is the archaeology of the victors. But where is archaeology written down? We are lucky when we find bits of stone lying around in the Middle East from going back thousands of years. But a lot of stuff isn’t there and so archaeology gives us background. It can’t tell us a great deal. Although, as I say, by the time you come to the kings of Judea and the kings of Israel, they are recorded and mentioned in other texts. But that’s when they beat them in battle. When they don’t beat them in battle, nobody puts down their defeats. We, I think, are not aware of China or Mesoamerica. But I believe this is the only case where you have an ancient history that records its defeats. Otherwise, other people record their defeats. So you wouldn’t expect to find any evidence anywhere else. The decrees were not black and white. They were wedged in clay. Yes, probably they were. Could have been parchment, could have been leather too because you know if they’re running on their horses, carrying tablets of stone’s a bit heavy. But either way, it definitely wasn’t in black and white.

Q: Thank you, Abigail. Is it said Persian Jews are called Esther’s children?

A: Yes, actually, there’s a book called “Esther’s Children,” a very good book as it happens about Persian Jews. And they were called the Jews of Esther because Esther had to hide, her name means hidden. And the Jews of Persia were the only Jewish community living under the Shia. And although Jews living under the Sunni had a much better time, not always, often they were attacked, and they were second-class citizens, they were dhimmis. Nevertheless, the Shia persecuted the Jews far more. The Shia of Persia persecuted the Jews consistently right through into the 21st century more than any other community did. Even though ironically today Persia is the only Arab country that has, well now we’ve got Dubai and the Gulf States, which has a Jewish community. So long as they didn’t say anything about Israel, they were allowed, I think there are something like 20, 25,000 Jews still there. And Ahmadiyya actually gave money to their Jewish school. So the question therefore of why were they called Esther’s children was because for so long they had to remain hidden. They had to dress outwardly like everybody else. They had to disguise like Esther, the hidden. That’s why they’re called the Jews of Esther in this particular book.

Q: What about the little oil lasting seven days?

A: Well first of all that’s Hanukkah. Hanukkah happened in Israel. It happened in Israel during the Maccabee period, which was under the Greek period, which was after the Persian period.

Q: Since it became a mess in Babylonia, to change union’s code of temple, why do we pray daily since we want the temple to be restored?

A: Excellent question, David. Excellent question. You know, I’m not all sit together certain we want either the temple to be rebuilt or to return to the house of David. I’m not in favour of monarchy. I don’t think they did such a very good job. We remember this because we remember our history. We remember our culture. Unlike the woke culture, we do not believe in removing. We believe in adding, in recognising what needs to be changed and what needs to be altered. Now it’s quite true there are some rabbis who hope and think and pray that the Bible will be rebuilt someday, we will have sacrifices, but at the same time, not everybody does. There’s one opinion in the Talmud that, you know, sort of, if the temple is rebuilt, we’re only going to have vegetarian. We are not going to have meat sacrifices. There’s another which says we’ve got to wait for Elijah to come and tell us how we’ll build it, if we’ll build it, whether we’ll build it, what we’ll do about it. All these things are in the realm of speculation, not in the realms of the law. I personally don’t like seeing animals killed for food so I don’t want to see animal sacrifices back. A lot of people do. But I think the point is, and why even though I don’t want to see David back or I don’t want to see sacrifices back, I still pray every day for it because it’s part of our tradition and our heritage. And whereas, shall we say, Christianity said, sacrifices ended with Jesus, we’re another way of saying ours carries on as part of the original system and that’s how we manage. Teddy, yeah, okay fine, I get your point.

Q: Did the story of the three-cornered hat of Haman come into being?

A: Interesting, this three-cornered hat. Certain no evidence of three-cornered hat in Persia. The first evidence of three-cornered hat is in Europe. In Europe, in Italy, and then was moved. The tri-corners it was called and then adopted. And I think this was another way in Europe at the time of representing the local anti-Semitic police and the anti-Semitic rulers by using the hats that they wore as opposed to off round fur hats or something like that.

Q: How did Esther get Haman on top of her?

A: I missed that, very clever. No, what happened was that when Ahasuerus heard this, he ran out of the house in a fury onto the balcony, into the garden. And at that moment, Haman went to beg on his knees. But when the king came back, all he saw was the back of Haman on top of his wife looked begging. He thought he was trying to seduce her. That’s my speculation, but he was furious. Thank you, Valerie.

Q: Rosalyn, how can justify Mordecai’s actions sending his niece to a prostitute?

A: Yeah, you can’t justify it other than saying he had no option. The Hebrew word was . She was taken by order of the king. He had no option. That’s one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it was Mordecai was assimilated. He was living in California. He thought that if his wife or his girlfriend or his niece or his daughter was invited by the president to Washington, it may well be, she could be very useful to him in the future. You can take it either way. I’m leaving your options open.

Q: Who are the people the rabbis who included the book in the Bible?

A: It’s a very good question. The Talmud discusses who wrote what books. They don’t say Esther wrote this book. She says actually the men of the Great Assembly who were the leaders of the Jewish community when they came back to Israel from Babylon, they were the ones who wrote the book. But the fact was there was a debate as to which books should be included in the canon. There were some arguments that the Book of Ecclesiastes should not be included in the canon because it is too cynical, that the Song of Songs should not be included in the canon because it is too sexy. And this was included in the canon because they felt it made a very important statement. And also I think because, at that time, the Babylonian community was the most important, the most powerful, the most wealthy community in the Jewish world, and they wanted to, shall we say, appease them or at any rate they wanted to please them.

Q: Could rabbis have removed names of God from the megillah because they discounted a story where a woman was the hero?

A: They discounted the story was true. They wanted to regulate the story second class because of the story located outside Israel, not to mention Tanakh to be less serious. All these things, Myron, are speculative. You might be right, but my view is that generally the rabbis wanted to include those books they thought had an important message for future generations. An important message both about the nature of God and the nature of history 'cause history was important for them. They were looking forward in history. They looked back and forward. Some people look back and say, “Ah, those were the good old days.” Some people look forward, got to be better in the future. King Solomon himself said, “It’s not very wise to say the days of yore are better days than ours.” And so you’ve got the options and that’s what I love about the books of the Bible. They allow for the options. Esther could not have been the only Jewish queen to be looked over by the king. Probably not. Logically you are right. Logically she was not. I guess only those girls who were either not favoured physically, or, if you like, went into hiding for whatever reason managed to escape.

Q: Is there any connection between Esther and Astarte?

A: Yes, there is indeed, just as there’s a connection between Mordecai and Marduk. They adopted Persian names which showed the acculturation of them at the time.

Q: Can you explain the different size letters in the column the names of Haman?

A: Yes, it’s the 10 sons of Haman and they have different letters. These are scribal emendations normally that were in different versions of the Book of Esther when finally the Masoretic text almost a thousand years later decided to include all the different variations. The others is to say that each one symbolises one was worse than the other. They weren’t all quite as bad as each other. Some were worse. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Lynn.

Q: If Esther means hidden, what’s the meaning of Hadassah, which also is apparently hidden?

A: Well, Hadassah literally means willow. The willow trees that we take on Passover are called the hadassim. And that’s why we say that she was called Hadassah 'cause it’s like the mouth, the willow leaf is like a mouth. She spoke gently, she spoke kindly. She was pliant, flexible like the hadassim, like the willows that draw, live by the book.

So thank you very much. Happy Purim to everybody, although I’m going to be back in due course on other subjects too. Thank you.