Episode No. 141--Purim

Purim begins after Shabbat ends and lasts until sundown on Sunday. You might think you know all there is to know about Purim. If you do, this episode may show how much more there is to know about the book from which Purim sprung--Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther. This episode runs for about a half-hour but I hope you find it both interesting and informative.

Transcript

Episode No. 141--Purim
Welcome to Keep the Faith, the podcast airing biweekly on Fridays in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

I’m going to skip contemporary issues this week because Purim begins tomorrow night as Shabbat ends—and there’s so much about Purim you may not know, but you should.

Purim is supposedly a minor festival on our calendar—and, technically, it’s also the last festival of the true Jewish year, as you may recall from our last podcast on calendar conundrums. With the start of the month of Nisan on the evening of April 8th, a new year begins—and just two weeks later Pesach, Passover, begins as we sit down to the First Seder. That makes Pesach the first festival of the Jewish year, and Purim the last. We’ll deal with Pesach in an upcoming podcast. We’ll deal with Purim in today’s episode.

Minor though it's supposed to be, Purim quite possibly is the most joyous of our festivals in the sense that it’s loaded with lots of silliness, noise-making, and costume-wearing.

And so the topic for this week is Purim, what it’s about, what it tells us about Judaism’s real view of women, which may surprise many of you, and the very off-key nature of the biblical book from which Purim sprung. We’re probably going to run 25 minutes or so, but I hope you’ll find it both interesting and informative.

There are really only four rituals for Purim: to give food gifts to friends and to give food gifts, as well, to the poor; to have a festive meal, the Purim Seudah; and to listen to the reading of Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther.

Of those four, only listening to the megillah is mandatory. We fulfill the mitzvah of Purim only through listening to the megillah being read—listening to it, not reading it ourselves. My ZOOM kehillah, my ZOOM congregation, will be coming together after Shabbat to do just that, and we’ll do some studying and discussing afterward.

What’s this Scroll of Esther about? On the one hand, it’s about yet another vile creature coming forth to destroy us and being destroyed instead. This, of course, is the recurrent theme of Jewish history. As the Haggadah puts it on Pesach, QUOTE In every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be God, saves us from their hand. UNQUOTE

That’s certainly the case with Purim.

Haman is just one in a long line of oppressors we encounter as a nation, starting with Pharaoh, of course, followed immediately by Amalek, whose deeds we recall in the special reading for Shabbat Zachor, literally the Shabbat of Remember, which we observe tomorrow.

That aspect of Purim is what we celebrate.

But Purim is also about three other things: standing up to injustice without waiting for God to act, how one courageous person can make a difference, and how our sacred texts depict women. Central to these three things stands a young woman named Esther.

The one requirement of Purim, as I said, is to listen to her story being read. And I do mean her story. Even though this is really about our deliverance, it is not called Megillat Ha-y’hudim, the Scroll of the Jews, or even Megillat Mordechai, the Scroll of Mordechai; it’s called Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther. Megillah, as you probably discerned by now, means scroll.

Calling it by her name is deliberate. The Jews of Persia were saved by the decisive acts of a young woman—not by a man, but by a woman. Mordechai, Esther’s guardian and cousin, seems completely at sea when it comes to dealing with Haman’s evil plot. The best he can come up with is to put on dirty clothes, throw some ashes over himself, and probably pray a lot, although there’s no mention of him doing so, but that’s all. Esther is the one who acts, and she does so by putting her own life on the line, or should I say her own head on the chopping block, because that’s where it would have been placed had she failed.

This makes Esther even more remarkable. No one was supposed to know that she was a Jew. Even her name wouldn’t have given her away because Esther is not a Jewish name. Neither is Mordechai a Jewish name, for that matter. We’ll get back to that later.

Many people in the Persian palace probably knew she was Jewish, but they obviously had the sense to keep their mouths shut, considering that she was their queen, and the king was deeply in love with her.

She could have kept quiet. She could have stayed out of it, and she probably would have emerged unharmed even as all the Jews around her, including Mordechai, were killed.

She could have done that, but she did not do that. She did not keep quiet. And she did not waste any time waiting for God to intervene, the way Mordechai apparently was doing. She devised a plan and carried it out.

It was Esther’s plan, not Haman’s plot, that put her own life at risk because to approach the king without being summoned was punishable by death, the megillah tells us. But she was willing to sacrifice her life for the sake of her people and to oppose a gross injustice. She did tell Mordechai to have the Jews fast for three days, presumably including prayer as well, but when that fast ended, she just went ahead and did what had to be done, without hesitation.

The megillah makes the difference between Mordechai and Esther very clear. When we first meet them, we’re told that QUOTE Esther [always] did whatever Mordechai commanded of her, UNQUOTE but that was before things went wrong. In the story itself, it’s Esther who commands, and it’s Mordechai who obeys.

As opposed to Esther, by the way, the men of the story—all of the men—are shown to be not too bright.

For example, when the king announced his one-night stand tryouts for a new queen, with the losers locked up in the king’s harem from then on, it apparently never dawned on Mordechai that he ought to protect Esther from such a fate, to protect her from being a woman whose only purpose is as an occasional bedtime playmate for a king who might never even ask for her again after their one-night stand.

A comment Mordechai makes later on to Esther suggests that it did finally dawn on him that he should have protected her. He tells her that QUOTE, perhaps it was for just such a moment that you attained your royal position. UNQUOTE That comment, of course, would suggest that Mordechai then assumed that God clouded his common sense earlier. If that’s what was going through his mind, though, he ignored the fact that the Jews of Persia were now under Haman’s threat precisely because protecting Esther never occurred to him in the first place, so God would have had no reason to keep that thought from him.

We see Mordechai warning Esther against telling anyone that she’s a Jew, but then he hangs around the palace every day, to check up on her. It never occurs to him that he’s helping people in the palace to figure it out for themselves: If Esther is related to Mordechai the Jew, as he’s often referred to in the text, then she must be a Jew, too. His name may not be a Jewish one, but everything he says or does makes his Jewishness obvious.

That the king is not too bright is also obvious. Throughout the story, he’s led around by the nose by everyone around him—Esther included.

As for Haman, he devises a plan to kill all the Jews—and then he makes that plan public 11 months in advance. He even includes the date on which the killings will occur, giving the Jews plenty of time to arm themselves and prepare for the assault.

He chose the date, by the way, by drawing lots. He literally drew the date out of a hat. The word for lot, by the way, is pur, so the plural lots is the plural purim, which is how the festival gets its name. Pur, though, is not a Hebrew word, but we’ll get back to that, too.

Back to Haman’s mental dimness. Twice as events unfold, he lets his ego get in the way of his common sense. The first time, he ends up having to dress Mordechai in royal clothes, put him on the king’s own horse, and shlepping this man he hates so much all over town shouting, QUOTE This is what is done for the man whom the king desires to honor! UNQUOTE The second time, he walks right into Esther’s trap. By then, Haman had to know that Esther was something to Mordechai. The only reason he ran up against Mordechai in the first place was because Mordechai was always hanging around the palace asking about Esther’s welfare.

Clearly, the men in the story are slow on the uptake, while the young woman of the piece is quick-witted. Of course, the story is going to be named for her. Of all the earthly players here, she alone is responsible for our being saved from Haman’s plot.

God is obviously present and is the ultimate author of our salvation, but God’s name is never heard. There’s a reason for that: Esther does what has to be done, without kvetching to God first. She clearly trusts in God enough to act on her own, confident that God will be there when needed.

Contrast this, say, to no less a personage than Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our Teacher, when Israel stood with its back to the Sea, and an Egyptian army was on the horizon waiting to attack. What does the Torah tell us? QUOTE And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Speak to the people of Israel, that they go forward.... UNQUOTE

To paraphrase, God says to Moses, “Stop kvetching and start doing; and have enough faith in Me to believe that I’ll do My part if you do yours.”

There are a couple of midrashim that use this scene to make the point Megillat Esther makes about not waiting for God to act. God told Moses to stop kvetching and tell the people to go forward, and presumably that’s what Moses told the people to do. But they wouldn’t budge. “Go forward to where?” they asked. “Into the sea? We’ll all drown.”

Just then, Nachshon ben Aminadav, the leader of the Tribe of Judah and Aaron’s brother-in-law, understood that God actually was trying to teach the Israelites something important—that God helps those who help themselves. If they wanted God’s help, they first had to help themselves. And so Nachshon jumped into the sea, others followed him, and the sea parted. Nachshon didn’t join the kvetching; he acted. He had enough faith in God to believe that God would then take over.

And so it was with Esther. She didn’t kvetch; she acted. She, too, clearly had that same faith in God. All Mordechai did was put on sackcloth, throw ashes over himself, and presumably pray for deliverance.

Does this make Esther unique in the Bible? Not really. Beginning with the Torah, it’s the women, not the men, who are the more faithful and more trusting in God. It’s the women, not the men, who act decisively at every turn.

Rightly or not, Sarah acts decisively to protect Isaac from any possible threat from Hagar and Ishmael. We may not like what she did, but at least she did something, her husband being clueless about any potential trouble. When she makes her demand of Abraham, all he can do is be indecisive about what course to take. QUOTE The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his. But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says.’ UNQUOTE

Later on, Rebecca, Rivkah, keeps God’s plan on track when Isaac seemingly tries to thwart God by passing the torch to Esau, instead of Jacob. Again, we may not like what she did, but at least she did something when it appeared, at least, that Isaac was about to do the wrong thing and Mama’s boy Jacob was fresh out of his own ideas. He actually wasn’t going to do what she feared, but that’s for another time.

Then there are Rachel and Leah. Rachel puts aside her pride to protect her husband and her family by stealing her father Lavan’s household idols, presumably because in that society whoever possesses those idols is the real head of her father’s clan. Jacob knew nothing about the theft.

Her sister Leah puts aside her pride to be the best possible wife to a man who hates her and the best possible mother to all his children, all of his children, including Rachel’s two boys after she dies so young.

And why did she die so young? It was because Jacob rashly and unwittingly uttered a curse on her. When Lavan demanded to know why Jacob stole the idols, Jacob professed his innocence and then said: QUOTE Anyone with whom you find your gods shall die. UNQUOTE Lavan didn’t find the idols, Rachel outsmarted him too, but Rachel did die a short time later while giving birth to Benjamin.

Miriam stood beside her brother Moses in Egypt and in the desert. Moses dealt with God; brother Aaron was concerned with the cult; Miriam, on the other hand, ministered to the people.

What courage the midwives Shifra and Puah showed in defying the mighty Pharaoh when he ordered them to kill all the newborn male Israelites!

What courage Yocheved, Moses’ birth mother, showed in devising a plan to save her baby boy, even though it meant possibly never seeing Moses again!

What courage the daughters of Zelophead showed in standing up to Moses, the elders, and God and demanding the right to inherit their father’s estate!

And even before any of these women there was Eve, who comes off as much nobler than Adam, despite how her role has been so twisted out of shape. The serpent—according to Genesis QUOTE the shrewdest of all the wild beasts UNQUOTE—had to use all his powers of persuasion to convince Eve to break God’s law; Adam, on the other hand, who was standing right there while this was happening and never even uttered a sound, happily took a bite of the forbidden fruit when offered. Also for another time is why it was Adam who caused that sin to happen, and why Eve was blameless because of what Adam did.

The women of the Bible continue their heroic ways after the Torah, as well. Barak, the great general, is completely lost on his own. The enemy is getting ready to attack, yet he’s unable to act. QUOTE And Barak said to [Deborah], If you will go with me, then I will go [into battle]; but if you will not go with me, then I will not go. And [Deborah] said, I will surely go with you; however the journey that you take shall not be for your glory; for the Lord shall give Sisera[, the enemy commander,] into the hand of a woman. UNQUOTE

And that’s how it turned out. It’s because of a woman’s courage, Deborah’s courage, not his own, that Barak is able to go up against Sisera. And it’s not by the hand of the mighty Barak that Sisera dies but by the hand of the gentle Yael.

Yael is yet another woman who doesn’t waste any time acting decisively. She tricks Sisera into going to sleep, and then she hammers a nail into his brain.

Women, not men, are the ones who act first and pray later in the Bible.

The men hesitate, seeking reassurance from God that the promise still holds. The women simply take God’s word and then do what has to be done.

The Jewish people owe a great deal to women. Our survival would not have been possible without them.

For far too long, however, Jewish men rewarded their women by treating them as second-class citizens, often ignoring God’s laws in order to do so. In some communities, women are still treated as little more than glorified slaves and baby machines.

Purim was supposed to be the equalizer, the one time during the year when we celebrate a woman, her faith in God, and her own personal courage.

I often wonder whether that’s not why Purim was always treated by the men who made our laws as something of a joke, a time to get drunk and to act silly.

The Purim theme is a serious one, after all; so serious, in fact, that we start off with a fast—known, by the way, as the Fast of Esther, because she thought that one up too, although we only fast from sunrise to sunset, not for the three days she came up with.

With all the noise and merry-making, Esther’s role is drowned out. In all the silliness and carrying on, Esther’s role is trivialized.

Purim is Purim. It should be celebrated the way we celebrate it. But it’s long past time that we also honor the real hero by giving women the equality in Jewish life God always intended them to have.

That said, Purim is almost upon us. So all hail Marduk. All hail Ishtar. 

And let’s all say, “Oy vey.”

As I mentioned at the beginning, there are some very Jewishly off-key elements regarding Purim (aside from the fact that while the word pur does mean lot, as I mentioned, not only is it not a Hebrew word, it’s not even a Persian word; it’s Akkadian). Uppermost among these Jewishly off-key elements are its heroes, Mordechai and Esther.

Esther wasn’t the good queen’s Jewish name, as I said earlier. Her Jewish name was Hadassah. I sometimes call her Myrtle, because Hadassah derives from the word hadas, which means myrtle.

The myrtle, by the way, is a symbol of righteousness and Esther/Hadassah was certainly that.

The name “Esther,” on the other hand, has nothing to do with myrtles or righteousness. It derives from the Semitic deity, Ishtar, a/k/a Astarte, she whom the Greeks and later the Romans adopted, calling her Aphrodite and Venus respectively.

In other words, Esther is the personification of the pagan goddess of love, and she plays the role to perfection in Megillat Esther. First, she goes out on one date, and next morning she’s queen of the Persian Empire.

Next, she defies the rules of the Persian court, yet has the king blubbering about giving her whatever she wants, up to and including half of his empire.

These things didn’t happen because she was better at Scrabble than he was.

As for Mordechai, we do find that name twice elsewhere in the Tanach, in the Bible, both referring to the same person, but that Mordechai couldn’t possibly be this Mordechai. And the fact that it appears in the Tanach as the name of a returnee from exile in Persia doesn’t prove that the name is a Jewish one. We Jews tend to adopt names current in the lands in which we live. Nearly all of us have secular names to go with our Hebrew names. Many Jews, in the United States at least, sadly either don’t have Hebrew names or don't know that they were given one.

In the case of “Mordechai,” that name comes from the Babylonian god of war, Marduk, and the name Mordechai itself actually means “follower of Marduk.” Our Mordecai, our “follower of Marduk,” leads a war of sorts when he joins with Esther in thwarting Haman’s genocidal plan and obtaining the king’s permission for the Jews to take up arms against their attackers.

So the two heroes of the story are named for pagan gods, no less.

The Jews ended up killing nearly 76,000 attackers in just two days of fighting. I need to point out that this is yet another minus for the men of the story. The attackers undoubtedly were all men. By the date Haman had set for the attack, everyone in the kingdom knew the Jews were armed and ready for them—and that they had the king’s permission to fight back. Everyone also knew that Haman had been hanged on the gallows on which he intended to hang Mordechai, and that Mordechai, in fact, had replaced Haman as prime minister. Given all that, you’d have to be pretty stupid to attack the Jews, yet attack they did, and nearly 76,000 of them died.

Another off-key element is the date for Purim—Adar 14 for most of us, Adar 15 for anyone living in a city that had a wall surrounding it during the days of Joshua (meaning Jerusalem, at least in current times). In Mordechai’s day, Adar 14 was a holiday in Persia, and it was called, of all things, “Marduk’s day.” And the next day, Adar 15, was also a holiday—a solar festival, in fact. Because Marduk was the creator god of Babylonian myth, he had a central role in that, as well.

All of this suggests that the Purim story probably is an adaptation of pagan mythology. The trouble with that is that Marduk and Ishtar never appear together in ancient pagan texts, which seems to work against such a theory. If anything, the story would be a combination of pagan myths.

Such a combination isn’t out of the question. Megillat Esther has two separate ancient literary motifs—a court intrigue involving Mordechai, and a harem intrigue involving Esther. Each of these motifs could have drawn on separate Marduk and Ishtar legends.

Such things did, in fact, trouble our sages of blessed memory. We see this in a discussion in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Megillah—a tractate dedicated to the rites and rituals of Purim.

In the discussion, we find remnants of a debate about whether Megillat Esther should even be included in the Tanach.

Other problems entered into this debate, as well. There are, for example, several glaring omissions in the book. God, as mentioned earlier, is nowhere to be found, except indirectly; prayer is never heard, although it’s suggested by the three days of fasting; the Jews party hearty after their victory, but we don’t see them thanking the God who delivered them, not to mention that partying after you just killed 76,000 people isn’t the Jewish thing to do; “the Jew Mordechai,” as he’s called, refuses to bow to Haman because of a Jewish law that doesn’t exist; and he appears to have no qualms about turning over his cousin and ward, Esther, to the harem of a non-Jew. All of these things troubled our sages, but they included the book in the Bible anyway. I guess it was too good a story to leave out.

There are also several indications that the pagan motifs in Megillat Esther were borrowed to retell biblical tales.

The story of Joseph comes to mind, for one. Joseph is imprisoned on a false charge; the Jews in Esther are endangered by a false charge. Joseph’s life turns around because his king’s sleep is disturbed; the fate of Esther’s Jews turns around because their king’s sleep is disturbed. Joseph is “dressed in fine linen” after his elevation to prime minister of Egypt and schlepped around the capital city in a royal chariot, with a shouting runner before him; as also mentioned earlier, Mordechai QUOTE left the king’s presence in royal robes of blue and white, UNQUOTE and is shlepped through the capital city on a royal steed, with a shouting Haman running before him.

Another story that comes to mind is that of King Saul and Agag, king of the Amalekites, in I Samuel 15, which we’ll be reading tomorrow as the haftarah, the prophetic addition to the weekly Torah readings.

Mordechai’s ancestor is someone named Kish; Saul’s father was named Kish. Haman is called an Agagite, suggesting that he's descended from King Agag. In the original, Saul is ordered to kill all the Amalekites, but he spares Agag, and loses his kingdom because of it. The Esther story thus would seem to be a replay of the original Saul-Agag encounter, with the intention of rehabilitating King Saul’s reputation. This time, a descendant of his got it right.

In the end, though, none of this matters compared to the message of Megillat Esther, and it’s that message we celebrate, not the story. That message is a simple one:

The God of Israel keeps the promises God makes, including this one. No matter what they out there in the world throw at us, we’re here to stay.

There were Hamans confronting us throughout our history, including the Haman known as Adolf Hitler, and the one known as Josip Stalin.

All of the Hamans are gone. We’re still here.

There's much to unpack here, I know. As we celebrate tomorrow night and Sunday, let’s consider the legacy of Esther, and how to apply it to our lives.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.o-r-g—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email, please.

E-mail me, as well, before Shabbat if you’d like to join us tomorrow night for our ZOOM Purim service and the discussion that will follow.

If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. My latest column focuses on the threat posed by Donald Trump to our First Amendment-guaranteed Freedom of Religion.

Shabbat Shalom, stay healthy, keep wearing N95 masks in crowded situations no matter who tells you otherwise, have a happy and healthy Purim 5784, and, above all, stay safe.

Shabbat Shalom. Stay healthy, and stay safe.

And, come next Thursday night, remember to give gifts of food to friends and gifts to the poor, as well, and then have a happy festival of Purim, a Chag Purim sameach.

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