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The Bible tells the story of the People of God. That is the psychological framework that we have been accustomed to for the past thousand years: God is at our head, while the prophet and the king represent the people before Him. The politics of the Book of Books took place on two levels; not just between the People of Israel and the nations of the world, but also on the metaphysical level, between the People of Israel and the God who formed a covenant with us in which he pledged to lead us in through history's valley of the shadow of death, not just in our homeland, but also in exile.
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2.
But what does one do, in a situation when the father has disappeared, in other words, his prophets have disappeared? An orphaned child shuffles his way through the streets of life. The first time, we are told, we made the golden calf. Slaves who had only just left the hold of their masters and followed Moses, were frightened when they found themselves alone in the desert. It was too early. And so, they wanted a substitute. After the destruction of the Temple in the sixth century BCE when the exiles of Judah in Babylon saw how other exiled nations had been swallowed up and disappeared, they thought this would be their fate too. "Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed," they told the prophet Ezekiel (chapter 37). He came back to them with a historiosophical vision of colossal dimensions with a valley full of dried bones rising to resurrection – "a vast multitude." Our hope is not yet lost, you are about to return home, he told them in the name of God: "I am going to open your graves and lift you out of the graves, O My people, and bring you to the land of Israel… I will put My breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil."
Most of the time, however, we walked the paths of history with belief without answers. The prophecy disappeared and we left just with the covenant. Moses had expected such times: "Yet I will keep My countenance hidden on that day…" (Deuteronomy 31;18). A long day of a thousand years. What shall we do in such a situation? In the second century BCE, the Hasmoneans restored an independent state and with it spiritual independence. And after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE when we were scattered to the four corners of the earth, how did we manage? By lobbying the royal courts and political maneuvers to have decrees removed.
3.
The only expression in the Book of Books to Hester Panim (concealing of the divine provenance) that has marked most of the years of our existence, is a small booklet of 167 paragraphs that we read every year – and not for nothing. The Book of Esther is the only book of the Bible in which the name of God is not mentioned. It is the exception that teaches us the rule. The hero of the Bible is not God, but his people, and that is what makes the Bible different from the mythologies of other peoples of the ancient world. In the Book of Esther, the Jews are far from their land and live under a volatile leadership that in a short space of time orders both their destruction and salvation. The king is governed by his whims, influenced by his advisors, and guided by his emotions. The day of the destruction of the Jews is decided by fate, by casting lots (in Hebrew pur, and hence the name, Purim); the political tangles in which the Jews had to maneuver are thus taken to an absurd.
Women have no rights in that kingdom, and they serve there as accessories for pleasure. Still, the person who drives the plot in the Book of Esther is a young Jewish woman who is taken against her will to the king's court and becomes a queen. When the decree of annihilation is published and our enemies around the world celebrate, she is called upon to act on behalf of her people. At first, she is reluctant because if she is found out, she will be killed, but her uncle Mordechai teaches her a timeless lesson that still applies to our lives today as we see Jews around the world hesitating whether to act for the good of their people and their country vis-à-vis the governments of the countries in which they live and, sometimes, worse yet, publicly shaming Israel. "For if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, while you and your father's house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis" (Esther 4:14). If you were asking yourself, why you became royalty, says Mordechai, then you should know it not for your personal benefit or an imagined glory, but to save your people. You have an opportunity to do God's bidding, but if you do not, another savior will be found while you will be erased from history.
4.
In many ways, the story of the Book of Esther is similar to the story of Joseph. He too found himself, against his will, in a foreign country, after his brothers sold him into slavery, and after an agonizing process found himself at the pinnacle of an empire. Because of the famine, he brings his extended family to Egypt and thus saves them. He explains to his shocked brothers: "Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you" (Genesis 45:5). Later, he adds, "But as for you, you thought evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it to pass at this day that much people should be saved alive" (ibid 50:20).
Joseph refines the historiosophical model in the foundational book of our people: On the surface, there are wars and disputes and the brothers sell Joseph to get rid of him, but below the surface, there is a deeper stream that leads Jacob's family to be swallowed into the Egyptian womb and to be released hundreds of years later as a free people. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) called these two readings of history, causal observation and moral observation. Joseph who is thrown into a pit does not know at that moment, that precisely that terrible low will lead him to great success; for that, we need a perspective on life. Like Joseph, each of us has the pit they are cast into, each generation and its struggles. The boy who was twice betrayed and spent years in a dungeon taught that it is only temporary. Finally, he "put an end to darkness" (Job 28:3).
The Book of Esther is an application of this binary view of reality but without the explicit theological explanation. It is difficult to live in such psychological conditions, when the sin of misunderstanding couches at the door, at the door of the concealment of the divine face couches the sin of absurdity, as if existence has no meaning. Albert Camus, who believed in the philosophy of the absurd, wrote in his masterpiece "The Plague" that disaster befalls people when they "think about themselves" and forget "the ways of humility" in order to prevent disaster. When we are preoccupied with ourselves and the wretched absurdity of existence, there is no room for other higher thoughts. And thus comes the plague (or another catastrophe), and removes the corrosive, malignant thought, thus clearing away our old consciousness (the "conception") making way for a new understanding of existence.
5.
The Jews who lived in the kingdom of Ahasuerus were happy being considered a religious community. For the Persian rule, it was also comfortable. A religious community has no aspirations beyond civic life, that is, no national aspirations. This concept put the Jews to sleep and hid the danger from them. But as at other times in history, Haman recognizes the national truth behind the religious mask and reveals it to the king: "There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm" (Esther 3:8). The removal of the King's ring (who gave it to Haman to commit his crime) was a decisive thing, for it awakened our dormant national core.
Our present world is the world of the Book of Esther. Reading it over thousands of years prepared us for an existence in a world in which the divine presence is concealed, in which we must maneuver amid global political currents to thwart whoever wishes to destroy us, the Haman of each generation. In her answer to Mordechai, Esther teaches that the key to success in the mission of salvation is converging inwards to the national core. "Go, assemble all the Jews… and fast in my behalf… and so I shall go to the King." When our ranks are united, the nations of the world see they will not be able to divide us because in that time this is an existential war, for our hope is not lost. It was never lost.
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