Turning Esther on her head
The Academy for Jewish Religion offers a book looking at Purim after October 7
The Book of Esther is not for children.
That’s not to say that Purim isn’t. The costumes, the carnivals, the noisemakers (both mechanical and human), the running around being silly — all that is kid-oriented, and it can be small-child heaven.
But the Book of Esther is complicated.
Its story includes themes of betrayal and manipulation, of masking and unmasking, of ritual humiliation, of power unfairly and blindly exerted, of hatred, even of sex trafficking — that’s not a straightforward child’s story. Even with the Jews’ eventual victory, even with hope springing ever eternal, even with the demand that we be joyful, as if it were possible to mandate joy, parts of it are grimmer than Grimm.
So we start with a tradition that’s part just plain fun, and part far darker — and now we have to figure out what to do with it, in this time of great darkness for the Jewish people, and of confusion and realignment for the outside world. How can we feel joy, with the memory of October 7 still fresh, the return of the bodies of the Bibas babies and their mother even fresher, and the knowledge that Hamas still holds hostages in Gaza, in what have been confirmed to be horrendous conditions. We are supposed to celebrate, and it is important not to live in darkness. But how can we?
It’s a dilemma.
What to do? We’re Jews! We need a book!
So Ora Horn Prouser of Franklin Lakes, the CEO and academic dean of the Academy for Jewish Religion, the pluralistic, nondenominational rabbinical and cantorial school headquartered in Yonkers, put one together.
Working with Rabbi Menachem Creditor, scholar in residence at UJA-Federation of New York, she put together “An Upside-Down World: Esther and Antisemitism,” a collection of essays, poetry, and art received in response to a call for submissions. (See box.)
The book is the third is a series that Dr. Prouser and Rabbi Creditor have created since October 7, “figuring out how to think about holidays in this difficult time,” Dr. Prouser said. The first book, a Haggadah, “was specifically about how to deal with a festival of freedom, when we had so many people still held hostage.” The truth — that Hamas still would hold hostages, nearly 11 months after Pesach — was unthinkable then, and still hard to make sense of now, she added.
“Then we had a supplement for the Yamim Noraim” — the High Holy Days — “which again was about how we can make sense of the holidays, particularly when we are confronted with the anniversary of October 7, on both the Hebrew and the secular calendars.
“And now we’re putting out a supplement for the Book of Esther, for Purim, because once again we are in a situation that feels discordant. We have a festival when we are told to be joyous, but at the same time Esther carries a story about antisemitism, and there is a darkness to it.
“We often treat it like a humorous story, a story of exaggeration that takes something difficult and turns it on its head, and makes everything work out perfectly, with a happy ending, which includes the Jews basically wiping out all their enemies.
“I remember that many years ago, a student told me that he thought that Esther is the darkest book in the Bible,” she continued. “No one was saying that at the time, but he said it was ‘because we all came this close’ — she pinched her fingers together — “to all being destroyed.”
And of course the book ends with all the Jews’ enemies being killed; that might be a happy ending, but it’s a bloody one nonetheless.
This year, antisemitism is more blatant than it has been in a very long time, Dr. Prouser said. “The supplement is not primarily about October 7, but about the antisemitism, which is more acceptable than it has been in a very long time. That means that our approach to the holiday is much more complicated.” The antisemitism that the Jews of Shushan faced isn’t a long-ago problem. It’s a current one. “It’s harder to approach Purim with joy, to make light of the antisemitism, because our world isn’t making light of it right now.”
The supplement is “a compendium of voices,” Dr. Prouser said. “It speaks to AJR as a pluralistic institution. It’s not putting forward one approach. There are many in the book.”
There are many themes within the Purim story, and various writers focus on the ones that speak most to them. Themes include revenge, “repaying violence with violence, of hiding or being overt about your Jewishness, about masking and unmasking.”
The idea of masking and unmasking, both in general and more specifically of Jewishness, is inherent in the character of Esther. She changes her name from the overtly Jewish Hadassah to the more cryptic Esther, which means hidden, when she becomes queen. “Yet Mordechai is very open with his Jewishness,” Dr. Prouser said. “The Book of Esther is ambiguous about what the right way to do it is. And it’s something people struggle with right now. Do you wear your magen David at all? Do you hide it under your shirt? Do you not call out your children’s names in a public park, if their names are Hebrew?” Those fears may or may not be logical — those people most likely to attack Jews might be the least likely to recognize a name as Jewish — but “logical or not, it is the way some people are feeling,” Dr. Prouser said. “And some people wrote about the question of hiddenness or openness.”
The book is made up mostly of essays, but it also includes poems and some artwork.
“Some people find the poetry meaningful and valuable, and others find meaning and value more in the art, or in the short essays,” Dr. Prouser said. The pieces in the supplement reflect many points of view; it would be impossible for all but the most casual of readers to agree with all of them. That’s on purpose. No one approach can work for everyone, but there is a place for everyone in the Jewish world.
Some of the book’s short essays consider the idea of heroism. “A lovely piece by Rabbi Heider Hoover, in Brooklyn, talks about three kinds of heroes,” Dr. Prouser said. “One kind is someone like Mordechai, who sees what is coming and takes the first steps against it. A second kind is someone like Esther, people who do what they can when they’re called upon. And the third kind is the people who do what they can to support the others. The Jews in the pews. The people who are writing letters and calling politicians and giving money. Doing what they can to support others. Those are all different ways of being heroes.”
Robert Scheinberg is the rabbi of the United Synagogue of Hoboken. His essay is based on a line from the Talmud, discussing the story of Purim. “Some of the descendants of Haman studied Torah in Bnei Brak,” the Talmud tells us in Gittin 57b.
He first encountered that concept more than 30 years ago and finds it both remarkable and important. Haman is a descendant of Amalek, the tribe we are told to annihilate.
But is that true? It is true that some people can be evil, Rabbi Scheinberg said. But he finds this line to be “a helpful corrective to the idea that some people have a predisposition toward evil” because evil is inheritable. “There are people who do unforgivable things — but not because of their heritage.
“Ancestry is not destiny.”
Chazan Ruth Ross devotes part of her essay to her dismay at Mordechai’s treatment of Esther — there’s nothing funny about how Mordechai basically pimps her out. Instead, it’s a shocking way for a cousin or uncle or whatever unspecified relative he is to treat a young ward.
But then, Dr. Prouser said, Chazan Ross writes about Esther’s need for community; how her call for fasting, to a community that already was fasting and whose fast she would have known about, is a “sense of solidarity with her community,” she writes.
“What Esther is looking for here, before she takes the leap, is a sense of solidarity with her community,” the essay continues. “She needs to know that even though she has in some senses rejected them by keeping her identity as a Jew secret, her fellow Jews still consider her a member of the tribe.
“I can’t think of a more critical message for our time and place this Purim. Mordechai is right. The Jewish community will find a way to survive.
“But Esther is also right. That survival is predicated on knowing that we are all part of this fight – born Jews, Jews who came to us in love, Jews who are observant, Jews who are not observant, non-Jews who love Jews, any human being who believes in the tenets we hold dear. Each of us may be walking into the king’s courtyard now, but not one of us is doing so alone.”
Dr. Prouser reinforces this message and repeats that each of us walks into the courtyard differently. And even though this is a time of sadness, we must allow some joy in as well.
She retold the talmudic lesson that if a wedding party wand a funeral procession meet at a crossroad, the funeral must give way to the wedding. Life goes first. “We should celebrate, even in the midst of sorrow,” she said. But that doesn’t mean that we forget the sorrow. We can’t, and we shouldn’t.
“I hope that people will find comfort and support in this book, in whichever way feels right for them,” she said.
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