Chag
Purim Sameach! One of the most significant and yet least noticeable details
about the book of Esther is the absence of God and prayer. When Haman demands
that Mordecai bow down to him, Mordecai refuses and when asked why, he responds
simply, “Because I am a Jew.” He does not expand, as one might expect, “And as
a Jew, I bow only to the Almighty God of Israel.” When Mordecai learns of
Haman’s plot to destroy the Jews for his disrespect, he puts on sackcloth and
stands outside Esther’s gate in conspicuous mourning, but he does not pray to
God for help or for forgiveness for having brought this onto his people. When
Esther contemplates the terrifying decision to approach the king unbidden, she
fasts and asks all the people to fast with her. She does not pray to God for
guidance or ask the people to pray for her protection. When the Jews are given
permission to arm themselves and save themselves (killing thousands of people
who may or may not have had anything to do with Haman and the plot for Jewish
annihilation), they rejoice and Mordecai declares that there should be an
annual holiday marking this victory, and yet again, no one gives thanks to God.
There
is a lot to learn from the Purim story: there are many layers of political
satire, feminist themes, warnings against our own violent natures when given
the opportunities to be in the role of aggressor, and more. But the lack of God
has always been interesting to me and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s chapter on
Esther: “Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the World,” from her book, The
Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, offered new
insight for me. Rambam says that in the messianic era, when all the tales from
the books of the prophets, the stories of sin and Divine punishment, will be
forgotten, the story of Esther alone will remain with the five books of Moses.
To explain this claim by Rambam, Zornberg offers a parable by Rabbi Yitzhak
Hutner:
“Two people are charged with the task of recognizing a face in the
darkness. One lights a candle and examines the face to identify it. The other,
without a candle, trains himself to identify people by the sound of their
voices alone. The person achieves a clearer recognition, by sight, than the
other can, merely by sound. However, the second person has taught himself a new
talent, of listening to the voice of the other. And when dawn breaks, the first
person will extinguish his candle but will be none the wiser as a result of his
nocturnal experience; while the other will emerge from it with a newly
developed capacity for listening as a channel of recognition.”
Though
most Bible stories show a people Israel with a candle, able to clearly see and
identify God, Esther shows a Jewish leader and population who have had to learn
a new capacity entirely. Zornberg calls Esther a “prophetess without
revelation, [who] finds a dark light within herself.”
I
feel that I’ve had the experience of being one with a candle and one whose
candle has been extinguished before the dawn has broken. Throughout my late
adolescence, after a spiritual experience at Jewish leadership camp, I felt
called to the rabbinate and felt I had a personal relationship with God. It
wasn’t that I believed in God as a person, or that I had direct conversations
with God or any of the sorts of clear depictions that the Bible gives us of
God. It was just that I felt there was a clear line of communications between
myself and God, messages that I could clearly decipher, a path that was lit
toward my future of faith and a commitment to the Jewish people. Then, around
the time I was graduating college, that line of communication was cut. It took
time to crawl out of the hole of depression that surrounded that severance, and
it took a lot of soul searching before I found that I was still committed to Judaism
and the Jewish people, and I was able to form a new relationship with God. But that
relationship was irrevocably altered. I developed new ways to experience faith,
to find the path toward the rabbinate in darkness, to use my other senses in
the darkness to identify my surroundings.
I
know that many people can relate to this. In my circles of relatively
unobservant Jewish friends, probably more can relate to finding God or
identifying our brethren in darkness than can relate to the experience of the
one with the candle. We can all draw inspiration from Esther in this. Even when
we are not sure that God is with us or if God is answering our prayers, we can
draw strength from the faiths and traditions of our people and make difficult
choices. We can still find the courage to stand up for what is right and be
ourselves and we can still rejoice with our communities when we are successful.
Then we can find Divinity in the darkness.
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