Post by Rabbi Neil on Apr 25, 2019 16:11:27 GMT
By Rabbi Jenny Goldfried Amswych
This is a sermon that I gave last month at Unitarian Universalist Santa Fe. When they asked me to give the sermon, they explained that each month, they have a umbrella theme for their sermons and services. During February, the theme was ‘trust’, and from that, I used the theme of ‘trusting oneself’ as a starting point for my sermon. Having just started rehearsals for the Purim speil, the story of Esther was on my mind, and the theme and story seemed tailor made for each other. Since this is Shabbat Zachor, the special shabbat before Purim, it seemed fitting to bring this sermon here tonight.
On Wednesday night, we will come together to celebrate Purim, and read the megilat Esther. Even though the book is about Esther and how she saved the Jewish people from the evil plot by Haman, it starts with the words “vay’hi bimei Achashverosh – It was in the days of Achashverosh” and then goes on to boast about the king’s mighty empire. Of course, that sets the scene to show how wondrous Esther’s acts were – the king was no small local monarch – but it also reminds us of something from the very beginning… that this is a male-dominated narrative within a male-dominated kingdom. That makes it all the more remarkable when two particularly powerful women manage to intrude upon and subvert this world of men. These two women are Vashti and Esther, and by looking at the narratives of these two women, we will see two differing paths towards trusting ourselves. These women can also help shed light upon a curious quotation by Hillel, about trusting ourselves, that continues to provide wisdom for us today.
Vashti is the Queen in Shushan, and while the king held a week-long drunken feast, she held a banquet for the women in the same palace. After seven days of drinking, the inebriated king ordered seven of his attendant eunuchs to bring Vashti before him “wearing a royal diadem, to display her beauty to the people and the officials; for she was a beautiful woman.” (1:11). Traditional Rabbinic commentary looks at this demand literally and says that since the text stated that he ordered her wearing the crown, that meant only wearing the crown, and nothing else. Whatever the king says, happens – as Rav Brooks put it so eloquently, “It’s good to be the king!” But Vashti refused the order, so the infuriated king consulted with his advisors. One adviser, Memucan, opined that Vashti had committed a grave offence against the king and all the people in all the king’s provinces because her behavior would make all wives despise their husbands, and they would refuse to do what their husbands demanded. There were immediate and lasting consequences for her decision – she was banished from the king’s presence and stripped of her crown. She gave up everything for one glorious and very public moment of self-identity.
Why did she do this? Surely, she knew the consequences were enormous for disobeying the king! We don’t know if this was the first time that he had asked this or not. Perhaps this was his drunken custom, and she finally had enough. Or perhaps this was the first time he had ever asked, and she was heartbroken to be turned from a wife into the subject of the leery male gaze. Or, maybe she simply realized that it was time to take a stand. Maybe she knew that word of her deed would get out and that she could shatter the patriarchy from within. Certainly, that’s what terrified the king’s advisors. Maybe she was tired of not being a person, of literally being a thing the king used to display the power and glory of his crown. Remember that Memucan said that she had sinned “against all the people in all the provinces.” He doesn’t really mean ‘all the people,’ he means ‘all the men.’ To Memucan, women aren’t people, they’re subjects.
Moreover, it wasn’t enough for him to advise the king to banish Vashti – he told the king to “bestow her royal state upon another who is more worthy than she” so that it would “resound throughout [the king’s] realm, vast though it is; and all wives will treat their husbands with respect, high and low alike.” (1:19-21). This is where we get a little misled by translation. Respect, in English, has various implications. However, the Hebrew –y’kar – has more specific connotations suggesting something prized, something of especially high value. The same root is used elsewhere in relation to rare and precious objects such as gemstones and treasure. Memucan, Achashverosh and, by extension, all the men of the kingdom were not looking for a respect of mutuality, they were looking for a unilateral, unquestioning honoring of the husband, and his whims, by the wife.
Vashti had to trust her intuition that this was wrong. She had to trust that even though standing up, alone, to the inequality of society would cost her dearly, it would be worth it in the long run. She could not have imagined how long. The Rabbis who wrote down the ‘traditional’ commentary – all men – painted Vashti as wicked and vain. They said that she was embarrassed to appear before the king because she had a disfiguring illness, possibly leprosy. That midrash, clearly opposes the text of Esther, which says that “she was a beautiful woman.” It took over two thousand years before Rabbis – now joined by women - started openly voicing their appreciation for Vashti’s sacrifice. That really is a long run! That’s self-confidence. That’s real trust in your own ability to affect change, even change you know you won’t see in your lifetime.
Esther’s trust in herself is different, nowhere near as overt and confident as Vashti’s. The name Esther comes from the Hebrew root meaning “hidden.” There is a brief, forgettable mention that Esther isn’t even her real name – it is actually Hadassah. So from the moment she is introduced in the story, she is not allowed to be herself. She is introduced in the midst of a paragraph about Mordecai. Mordecai is given a lineage, a history of his exile from Jerusalem, and then we are told “He was a foster father to Hadassah – that is, Esther – his uncle’s daughter, for she had neither father or mother. The maiden was shapely and beautiful; and when her father and mother died, Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter.” (2:7). We are not given her lineage or any other biographical information about her, only that her name is a secret and that she is stunning. She is almost a blank slate, her true self hidden beneath a usefully pretty veneer upon which the desires and needs of the men around her can be placed.
Esther eventually takes Vashti’s place as queen. When Mordechai, learns of Haman’s genocidal plot against the Jews, he tells Esther that she has to go to the king. Her reply is filled with fear and denial – she says, “All the king’s courtiers and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any person, man or woman, enters the king’s presence in the inner court without having been summoned, there is but one law for that person – that they should be put to death.” (Esther 4:11). Esther does not trust that she, the queen whom Achashverosh chose personally of all the women in the kingdom, has enough worth to the king that he will accept her into his presence. She does not trust that speaking up to the king will bring any positive effect. She is scared for herself. Her fear is met by a very blunt, unsympathetic response by Mordechai, which essentially boils down to “You either die by his hand, or by the plot to kill all the Jews. At least this way you have a chance save your people.” He has a good point for sure, but he’s missing something fundamental to Esther’s character and personal journey.
The story of Esther is a story of a woman coming out of her shell, coming out of a life of hiding her true self passively behind her beauty, learning to trust herself, her opinions, her intrinsic value. Because not all women can be Vashtis. Not all of us, female or male, have the innate courage to stand up against the crowd, because too many of us been taught by someone in the past that we shouldn’t trust in ourselves, that maybe the crowd is right, or that maybe our voice, or even our self as a whole being, isn’t really important. Esther has to go through a huge amount of growth very quickly in order to learn to trust in herself enough to walk through the king’s door and enter his chamber. She has to learn that she is more than “shapely and beautiful”, the winner of a beauty contest. She has to reach down into herself and find Hadassah, the hidden woman whose strength and ancestors are known to her alone.
Hillel, who lived a few hundred years after the events suggested in the Book of Esther, once said (Pirke Avot 2:4), “…Do not trust in yourself until the day you die….” Had Vashti heard this, and had Vashti listened to this, she would never have become the feminist icon that she has today. Had Esther listened to this, Haman’s plot would never have been foiled! Vashti trusts in her own intuition, in her own innate self-worth, despite the negative consequences. On the other hand, Esther doesn’t initially trust in herself, but learns to.
So, how could Hillel say this? Rashi explains it this way – that a good person can always become an evil person – so we should never trust while we are a good person that we will always be so. To Rashi, Hillel is saying “Don’t believe in an immutable sense of self. Every righteous person can become evil and every evil person can become righteous. You are not bound by the past.” That is enormously liberating, and that is what Vashti knows and what Esther learns. Vashti knows that the past dictated that she should appear naked before the king, but she knew not to trust that custom because it was not in accordance with her innate sense of worth. Esther was worried that the past dictated that she should not demand an audience with the king, but she had to learn to trust that her unique position gave her a unique opportunity to change the present, and not have it be bound by the past.
So, Hillel’s maxim of “Do not trust in yourself until the day of your death” actually means, “Do not think that you are unchanging. Trust that you can learn and grow. Trust that you have the strength and power to act. Trust that the present is not bound by the past, and the future can be changed by our actions in the present. Trust that doing the right thing will have long-term consequences, even if it takes thousands of years for those consequences to bear fruit.”
Vashti and Esther, then, are powerful feminist examples of self-trust. One trusts her instincts immediately because she knows that objectifying women is wrong. The other is initially afraid but learns to trust a wise voice that tells her that she has nothing to lose – that she’s going to die anyway, so she may as well do so after having tried to saved lives. Esther learns to trust that self-sacrifice can change the world.
At the end of the day, it isn’t the Book of Ahasuerus. It’s the Book of Esther. It’s not the book of the alcohol-riddled king in drunken control of massive territories, it’s the book of the woman who learns to trust herself. Specifically, it’s the book of a woman who learns to trust herself just like the woman who came before her. Had it not been for Vashti, there would have been no Esther. So, that is a message to us. In a society that breeds self-doubt, that thrives on self-doubt, that makes money off self-doubt, trusting in oneself is an act of rebellion. And if we can learn to trust in ourselves, in our enormous power and potential, then we can be the Vashtis to the next generation of Esthers.
When I gave this sermon at the Unitarian Church, this is where I finished. And yesterday, this is the same place at which I was going to wrap the sermon. But time moves on and, once again, we are faced with another horror, and we aren’t the same as we were yesterday, and my sermon can no longer the same as it was a month ago.
When I first thought about the topic of trusting oneself, I had a thought nagging at the edges of my mind – what about the times when maybe we shouldn’t trust ourselves? What about the times when our thoughts, our convictions, are coming from a place that isn’t righteous and may be leading us down a dark path? After all, even though we know that the name of the ‘wicked wicked man’ was Haman, would Haman have agreed? Or did he genuinely think he was doing the right thing? There’s a more difficult questions, which comes in chapter 9, a lesser known chapter at the end of megilat Esther, and one that many who do know it would prefer to forget. It is what happens after the celebrating and the feasting. Because, for some strange reason, the king could declare an edict, but he couldn’t override it. Achashverosh couldn’t just say that the Jews could no longer be put to death on the 13th of Adar. So, instead, Achashverosh sent letters all over the kingdom saying “the king has permitted the Jews of every city to assemble and fight for their lives; if any people or province attacks them, they may destroy, massacre and exterminate its armed force together with women and children, and plunder its possession – on a single days on all the provinces … the 13th day of … Adar.” (8:11-12). And make no mistake, they did. We read that fear of Mordecai spread and ‘the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” (9:5). They also killed Haman’s 10 sons. When the King told Esther that whatever her wish was, it would be granted, she told him to “let the Jews in Shushan be permitted to act tomorrow also as they did today; and let Haman’s ten sons be impaled on the stake.” (9:13) The Jews killed 300 more men in Shushan and in the provinces, they killed 75,000 of their enemies. 800 within the walls of Sushan, 75,000 without, and Haman and his sons impaled on spikes. Even if it is possible to rationalize part of this as a day of the Jews defending themselves, remember, the text specifically says that there was fear of Mordecai throughout the land, lessening the strength of the attack. And then, truly, is there any way to justify the second day of slaughter? How does Esther go from asking the king to save her people to asking for a day of unrestrained bloodlust? Maybe, by that point, all Esther could see was ‘us and them’, ‘kill or be killed’.
In our world, we encounter many shades of gray before coming to the black and white choice of playing god with people’s lives. Do we support this or that policy. Do we share this or that article or meme on social media. It is unfortunate but true that each of these choices, large and small, have cumulative effects, large an small, seen and hidden. Sometimes choices are as clear cut as the ones faced by Vashti and Esther – allow oneself to be objectified or not, or stand up against genocide or not. Sometimes the choices are nuanced and murky and difficult to wade through. I wish I had easy answers. I wish that I had a kumbaya epiphany that would allow us all to see beyond religion, skin color, gender identity, political party, ice cream flavor, and stop hating on one another and stop killing one another. But I don’t. All I have is this plea. I am just asking us all to trust ourselves enough, to trust in our own innate worth enough, to be willing to listen. Because your worth does not come from being right. Your worth does not come from having the answers. Your worth does not come from being better than, from punching down, from knowing more. Your worth comes from being made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. You are holy because God is holy. And so is the person you are disagreeing with. So what might we gain by opening ourselves to the possibility that our positions might change a little? Or allowing in new information, even if that is information that we may not agree with? Or by genuinely, honestly, trying to understand someone’s potentially disturbing point of view?
Recently, Rabbi Neil and I were watching a fascinating documentary about the flat earth movement (yes, there is an entire movement) called Behind the Curve. In it, a Physicist from Caltech called Dr Spiros Michalakis said the following, which struck at the very core of my being, because I don’t think it applies only to science, but to all areas of life:
The problem I see is not actually from the conspiracy theorists, it is actually from the side of science. Very often it is difficult not to look down. My friend said sometimes the only way to change somebody’s mind is to shame them. And I say, I don’t think that is the last resort, ever. This is the same as saying that if a kid doesn’t get a particular subject, it’s not your fault as the teacher, it is their fault. I don’t believe that. It is just that you haven’t developed your empathy to see from their point of view where they are getting stuck. The worst case scenario is you just completely push these individuals at the fringe of society and then society just lost them.
Once we lose people with the fringe ideas, they fall into their echo chambers. When they live only in their echo chambers, that’s when fringe ideas truly become dangerous. So let’s learn to trust our own value enough to develop our empathy to be open to other’s points of view. Let’s trust in our ability to engage in others in a way that keeps them in relationship, no matter what their ideas may be. Let’s trust in our voices and use them to speak up for those who continue to get talked over, shouted down and silenced. Let’s trust in our community to work together for positive change towards positive values that we are continually examining and evaluating and ensure that we are on our intended path working towards our intended goal. Let’s trust in our ability to hold ourselves and our leaders accountable for our decisions and our actions, allowing for mistakes if remorse and corrections are made. May we all help each other find our unique strength and value so that we can be able to trust ourselves, which can be indescribably difficult for some. May the day come soon when all trust in ourselves for good, and let us say, Amen.
This is a sermon that I gave last month at Unitarian Universalist Santa Fe. When they asked me to give the sermon, they explained that each month, they have a umbrella theme for their sermons and services. During February, the theme was ‘trust’, and from that, I used the theme of ‘trusting oneself’ as a starting point for my sermon. Having just started rehearsals for the Purim speil, the story of Esther was on my mind, and the theme and story seemed tailor made for each other. Since this is Shabbat Zachor, the special shabbat before Purim, it seemed fitting to bring this sermon here tonight.
On Wednesday night, we will come together to celebrate Purim, and read the megilat Esther. Even though the book is about Esther and how she saved the Jewish people from the evil plot by Haman, it starts with the words “vay’hi bimei Achashverosh – It was in the days of Achashverosh” and then goes on to boast about the king’s mighty empire. Of course, that sets the scene to show how wondrous Esther’s acts were – the king was no small local monarch – but it also reminds us of something from the very beginning… that this is a male-dominated narrative within a male-dominated kingdom. That makes it all the more remarkable when two particularly powerful women manage to intrude upon and subvert this world of men. These two women are Vashti and Esther, and by looking at the narratives of these two women, we will see two differing paths towards trusting ourselves. These women can also help shed light upon a curious quotation by Hillel, about trusting ourselves, that continues to provide wisdom for us today.
Vashti is the Queen in Shushan, and while the king held a week-long drunken feast, she held a banquet for the women in the same palace. After seven days of drinking, the inebriated king ordered seven of his attendant eunuchs to bring Vashti before him “wearing a royal diadem, to display her beauty to the people and the officials; for she was a beautiful woman.” (1:11). Traditional Rabbinic commentary looks at this demand literally and says that since the text stated that he ordered her wearing the crown, that meant only wearing the crown, and nothing else. Whatever the king says, happens – as Rav Brooks put it so eloquently, “It’s good to be the king!” But Vashti refused the order, so the infuriated king consulted with his advisors. One adviser, Memucan, opined that Vashti had committed a grave offence against the king and all the people in all the king’s provinces because her behavior would make all wives despise their husbands, and they would refuse to do what their husbands demanded. There were immediate and lasting consequences for her decision – she was banished from the king’s presence and stripped of her crown. She gave up everything for one glorious and very public moment of self-identity.
Why did she do this? Surely, she knew the consequences were enormous for disobeying the king! We don’t know if this was the first time that he had asked this or not. Perhaps this was his drunken custom, and she finally had enough. Or perhaps this was the first time he had ever asked, and she was heartbroken to be turned from a wife into the subject of the leery male gaze. Or, maybe she simply realized that it was time to take a stand. Maybe she knew that word of her deed would get out and that she could shatter the patriarchy from within. Certainly, that’s what terrified the king’s advisors. Maybe she was tired of not being a person, of literally being a thing the king used to display the power and glory of his crown. Remember that Memucan said that she had sinned “against all the people in all the provinces.” He doesn’t really mean ‘all the people,’ he means ‘all the men.’ To Memucan, women aren’t people, they’re subjects.
Moreover, it wasn’t enough for him to advise the king to banish Vashti – he told the king to “bestow her royal state upon another who is more worthy than she” so that it would “resound throughout [the king’s] realm, vast though it is; and all wives will treat their husbands with respect, high and low alike.” (1:19-21). This is where we get a little misled by translation. Respect, in English, has various implications. However, the Hebrew –y’kar – has more specific connotations suggesting something prized, something of especially high value. The same root is used elsewhere in relation to rare and precious objects such as gemstones and treasure. Memucan, Achashverosh and, by extension, all the men of the kingdom were not looking for a respect of mutuality, they were looking for a unilateral, unquestioning honoring of the husband, and his whims, by the wife.
Vashti had to trust her intuition that this was wrong. She had to trust that even though standing up, alone, to the inequality of society would cost her dearly, it would be worth it in the long run. She could not have imagined how long. The Rabbis who wrote down the ‘traditional’ commentary – all men – painted Vashti as wicked and vain. They said that she was embarrassed to appear before the king because she had a disfiguring illness, possibly leprosy. That midrash, clearly opposes the text of Esther, which says that “she was a beautiful woman.” It took over two thousand years before Rabbis – now joined by women - started openly voicing their appreciation for Vashti’s sacrifice. That really is a long run! That’s self-confidence. That’s real trust in your own ability to affect change, even change you know you won’t see in your lifetime.
Esther’s trust in herself is different, nowhere near as overt and confident as Vashti’s. The name Esther comes from the Hebrew root meaning “hidden.” There is a brief, forgettable mention that Esther isn’t even her real name – it is actually Hadassah. So from the moment she is introduced in the story, she is not allowed to be herself. She is introduced in the midst of a paragraph about Mordecai. Mordecai is given a lineage, a history of his exile from Jerusalem, and then we are told “He was a foster father to Hadassah – that is, Esther – his uncle’s daughter, for she had neither father or mother. The maiden was shapely and beautiful; and when her father and mother died, Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter.” (2:7). We are not given her lineage or any other biographical information about her, only that her name is a secret and that she is stunning. She is almost a blank slate, her true self hidden beneath a usefully pretty veneer upon which the desires and needs of the men around her can be placed.
Esther eventually takes Vashti’s place as queen. When Mordechai, learns of Haman’s genocidal plot against the Jews, he tells Esther that she has to go to the king. Her reply is filled with fear and denial – she says, “All the king’s courtiers and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any person, man or woman, enters the king’s presence in the inner court without having been summoned, there is but one law for that person – that they should be put to death.” (Esther 4:11). Esther does not trust that she, the queen whom Achashverosh chose personally of all the women in the kingdom, has enough worth to the king that he will accept her into his presence. She does not trust that speaking up to the king will bring any positive effect. She is scared for herself. Her fear is met by a very blunt, unsympathetic response by Mordechai, which essentially boils down to “You either die by his hand, or by the plot to kill all the Jews. At least this way you have a chance save your people.” He has a good point for sure, but he’s missing something fundamental to Esther’s character and personal journey.
The story of Esther is a story of a woman coming out of her shell, coming out of a life of hiding her true self passively behind her beauty, learning to trust herself, her opinions, her intrinsic value. Because not all women can be Vashtis. Not all of us, female or male, have the innate courage to stand up against the crowd, because too many of us been taught by someone in the past that we shouldn’t trust in ourselves, that maybe the crowd is right, or that maybe our voice, or even our self as a whole being, isn’t really important. Esther has to go through a huge amount of growth very quickly in order to learn to trust in herself enough to walk through the king’s door and enter his chamber. She has to learn that she is more than “shapely and beautiful”, the winner of a beauty contest. She has to reach down into herself and find Hadassah, the hidden woman whose strength and ancestors are known to her alone.
Hillel, who lived a few hundred years after the events suggested in the Book of Esther, once said (Pirke Avot 2:4), “…Do not trust in yourself until the day you die….” Had Vashti heard this, and had Vashti listened to this, she would never have become the feminist icon that she has today. Had Esther listened to this, Haman’s plot would never have been foiled! Vashti trusts in her own intuition, in her own innate self-worth, despite the negative consequences. On the other hand, Esther doesn’t initially trust in herself, but learns to.
So, how could Hillel say this? Rashi explains it this way – that a good person can always become an evil person – so we should never trust while we are a good person that we will always be so. To Rashi, Hillel is saying “Don’t believe in an immutable sense of self. Every righteous person can become evil and every evil person can become righteous. You are not bound by the past.” That is enormously liberating, and that is what Vashti knows and what Esther learns. Vashti knows that the past dictated that she should appear naked before the king, but she knew not to trust that custom because it was not in accordance with her innate sense of worth. Esther was worried that the past dictated that she should not demand an audience with the king, but she had to learn to trust that her unique position gave her a unique opportunity to change the present, and not have it be bound by the past.
So, Hillel’s maxim of “Do not trust in yourself until the day of your death” actually means, “Do not think that you are unchanging. Trust that you can learn and grow. Trust that you have the strength and power to act. Trust that the present is not bound by the past, and the future can be changed by our actions in the present. Trust that doing the right thing will have long-term consequences, even if it takes thousands of years for those consequences to bear fruit.”
Vashti and Esther, then, are powerful feminist examples of self-trust. One trusts her instincts immediately because she knows that objectifying women is wrong. The other is initially afraid but learns to trust a wise voice that tells her that she has nothing to lose – that she’s going to die anyway, so she may as well do so after having tried to saved lives. Esther learns to trust that self-sacrifice can change the world.
At the end of the day, it isn’t the Book of Ahasuerus. It’s the Book of Esther. It’s not the book of the alcohol-riddled king in drunken control of massive territories, it’s the book of the woman who learns to trust herself. Specifically, it’s the book of a woman who learns to trust herself just like the woman who came before her. Had it not been for Vashti, there would have been no Esther. So, that is a message to us. In a society that breeds self-doubt, that thrives on self-doubt, that makes money off self-doubt, trusting in oneself is an act of rebellion. And if we can learn to trust in ourselves, in our enormous power and potential, then we can be the Vashtis to the next generation of Esthers.
When I gave this sermon at the Unitarian Church, this is where I finished. And yesterday, this is the same place at which I was going to wrap the sermon. But time moves on and, once again, we are faced with another horror, and we aren’t the same as we were yesterday, and my sermon can no longer the same as it was a month ago.
When I first thought about the topic of trusting oneself, I had a thought nagging at the edges of my mind – what about the times when maybe we shouldn’t trust ourselves? What about the times when our thoughts, our convictions, are coming from a place that isn’t righteous and may be leading us down a dark path? After all, even though we know that the name of the ‘wicked wicked man’ was Haman, would Haman have agreed? Or did he genuinely think he was doing the right thing? There’s a more difficult questions, which comes in chapter 9, a lesser known chapter at the end of megilat Esther, and one that many who do know it would prefer to forget. It is what happens after the celebrating and the feasting. Because, for some strange reason, the king could declare an edict, but he couldn’t override it. Achashverosh couldn’t just say that the Jews could no longer be put to death on the 13th of Adar. So, instead, Achashverosh sent letters all over the kingdom saying “the king has permitted the Jews of every city to assemble and fight for their lives; if any people or province attacks them, they may destroy, massacre and exterminate its armed force together with women and children, and plunder its possession – on a single days on all the provinces … the 13th day of … Adar.” (8:11-12). And make no mistake, they did. We read that fear of Mordecai spread and ‘the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” (9:5). They also killed Haman’s 10 sons. When the King told Esther that whatever her wish was, it would be granted, she told him to “let the Jews in Shushan be permitted to act tomorrow also as they did today; and let Haman’s ten sons be impaled on the stake.” (9:13) The Jews killed 300 more men in Shushan and in the provinces, they killed 75,000 of their enemies. 800 within the walls of Sushan, 75,000 without, and Haman and his sons impaled on spikes. Even if it is possible to rationalize part of this as a day of the Jews defending themselves, remember, the text specifically says that there was fear of Mordecai throughout the land, lessening the strength of the attack. And then, truly, is there any way to justify the second day of slaughter? How does Esther go from asking the king to save her people to asking for a day of unrestrained bloodlust? Maybe, by that point, all Esther could see was ‘us and them’, ‘kill or be killed’.
In our world, we encounter many shades of gray before coming to the black and white choice of playing god with people’s lives. Do we support this or that policy. Do we share this or that article or meme on social media. It is unfortunate but true that each of these choices, large and small, have cumulative effects, large an small, seen and hidden. Sometimes choices are as clear cut as the ones faced by Vashti and Esther – allow oneself to be objectified or not, or stand up against genocide or not. Sometimes the choices are nuanced and murky and difficult to wade through. I wish I had easy answers. I wish that I had a kumbaya epiphany that would allow us all to see beyond religion, skin color, gender identity, political party, ice cream flavor, and stop hating on one another and stop killing one another. But I don’t. All I have is this plea. I am just asking us all to trust ourselves enough, to trust in our own innate worth enough, to be willing to listen. Because your worth does not come from being right. Your worth does not come from having the answers. Your worth does not come from being better than, from punching down, from knowing more. Your worth comes from being made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. You are holy because God is holy. And so is the person you are disagreeing with. So what might we gain by opening ourselves to the possibility that our positions might change a little? Or allowing in new information, even if that is information that we may not agree with? Or by genuinely, honestly, trying to understand someone’s potentially disturbing point of view?
Recently, Rabbi Neil and I were watching a fascinating documentary about the flat earth movement (yes, there is an entire movement) called Behind the Curve. In it, a Physicist from Caltech called Dr Spiros Michalakis said the following, which struck at the very core of my being, because I don’t think it applies only to science, but to all areas of life:
The problem I see is not actually from the conspiracy theorists, it is actually from the side of science. Very often it is difficult not to look down. My friend said sometimes the only way to change somebody’s mind is to shame them. And I say, I don’t think that is the last resort, ever. This is the same as saying that if a kid doesn’t get a particular subject, it’s not your fault as the teacher, it is their fault. I don’t believe that. It is just that you haven’t developed your empathy to see from their point of view where they are getting stuck. The worst case scenario is you just completely push these individuals at the fringe of society and then society just lost them.
Once we lose people with the fringe ideas, they fall into their echo chambers. When they live only in their echo chambers, that’s when fringe ideas truly become dangerous. So let’s learn to trust our own value enough to develop our empathy to be open to other’s points of view. Let’s trust in our ability to engage in others in a way that keeps them in relationship, no matter what their ideas may be. Let’s trust in our voices and use them to speak up for those who continue to get talked over, shouted down and silenced. Let’s trust in our community to work together for positive change towards positive values that we are continually examining and evaluating and ensure that we are on our intended path working towards our intended goal. Let’s trust in our ability to hold ourselves and our leaders accountable for our decisions and our actions, allowing for mistakes if remorse and corrections are made. May we all help each other find our unique strength and value so that we can be able to trust ourselves, which can be indescribably difficult for some. May the day come soon when all trust in ourselves for good, and let us say, Amen.