HomeThe Festival of Purim celebrating the survival of the Jewish population of the Persian Empire may be part of a debate within Judaism itself, a debate that applies to everyone in our pluralistic world.
Good Morning!
Purim is celebrated this coming week. It is the commemoration of the threat to but salvation of the Jews who were living under the rule of the Persian Empire. The scroll of Esther contains the story and speaks of the role of Esther and Mordecai in overcoming the threat.
I am going to give some historical context and then talk about what may actually be a dissent that the Book of Esther raises within Judaism.
Israel was founded sometime after 1250 BC. A little before 900 BC the country divided in two, with the ten tribe nation of Israel in the north, centered on Samaria, and the two tribe nation of Judah in the south, centered on Jerusalem.
About 722 BC the Assyrians conquered Israel (the northern kingdom) and, in a common practice of the day, carried off the populace. This was done in order to scatter people and make it less likely that there would be rebellions. Aside from some unproven claims, the ten tribes of the north disappear from history at this time.
Then, in 587 BC, the Babylonians, having conquered the Assyrians and taken their place, defeated Judah and carry the people off into the Babylonian Exile.
About fifty years later, in 538 BC, the Persians conquer the Babylonians. The Persians were Zoroastrian, and their religious beliefs influence Judaism and Christianity in a number of ways, though that is for another day.
The most important thing about the Persian era is that the Persians had a much more tolerant attitude towards the peoples they ruled. It was their policy to allow various people to return to their old territories and reestablish their temples and practices as long as they remained part of the Persian Empire.
Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem over a period of decades. Several kings of Persia are named: Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes. Cyrus, the king who conquered Babylon, is highly praised in the Bible. It is during the rules of these kings that the Jews return to Jerusalem and slowly rebuild the Temple and the city walls.
An aside here: These refugees or returnees came back to a devastated city. They had to literally rebuild the walls of the city, the Temple, and their homes. And yet they set to with faith and hope and belief in themselves and in the fulfillment of their task.
And there’s was not just the task of building physical structures; they had to reestablish farms on land that had been abandoned for decades, begin new businesses, establish new religious practices and provide the resources for daily life.
As we face the various challenges we as a congregation have, we should remember that their problems were so much more, yet that did not keep them from overcoming them.
We have things to achieve as well, dreams for both the present and the future. Not only are we thinking of various options about the physical expansion of our facilities, but we have hopes and possibilities for increasing our programming and services.
Our pledge drive has begun, and I hope and trust that you will all be as generous as possible.
There is much to be done, there is expansiveness everywhere in this religious community, and I have belief in this congregation and in the fulfillment of the tasks that we have set for ourselves.
But back to the returnees from Babylon: These were people who were grappling with a real question: how could it be that God abandoned his people to the devastations they suffered?
The answer was that it was punishment form God because of the sins of the people of Israel. This idea of a punishing god, a god that punishes individuals and whole peoples, is not just a Jewish idea, and it is not just an ancient idea. It is natural, when suffering strikes for people to ask, “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?”
We have heard the “punishing God” idea used to explain the flooding in New Orleans and the stroke that afflicted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and we hear it in predictions of future punishment by those who believe the nation has gone astray in some way.
The returning exiles, anxious to assuage their God and fulfill his commandments in order to fend off another such catastrophe, naturally looked to be pure themselves and to establish a religiously pure society. The way to do that, they concluded, is to punctiliously follow all of the rules as set down in the sacred texts.
In any group, one of the questions is: who can be part of us; who is entitled to belong?
This is not an idle question, it has deep ramifications.
Still today, the question, “Who is a Jew?” is an important and sometimes vexing one in Israel. If your mother converted to Judaism, but did so in the Reform tradition, are you a Jew? And who gets to decide?
Who is European and therefore eligible to join the European Union? Is Turkey part of Europe? Malta and Cyprus are island nations in the Mediterranean, neither one occupies any part of the European mainland; they have joined the EU? What of Turkey? Part of Turkey is on mainland Europe; how much European soil must a country “own” to be able to join? The European portion of Turkey is larger than either Malta or Cyprus. In fact, it is larger than Malta and Cyprus put together.
Who gets to belong? What are the criteria?
That is one of the questions that the new community in Jerusalem faced. Who counts? In this new, purified community, dedicated to pleasing God and fulfilling God’s will, who can belong?
When the people of that region, people who had been living in the area under Persian rule, came to the refugees and said they wanted to help build the new Temple, they were told they did not belong and were sent away.
In reading the sacred texts (the Torah) the returnees found there certain marriage rules: men should not take foreign wives, that is, they should not marry out of the religion.
In the Book of Ezra it is decided that any men who have married such wives must send them away, and they do so; they send them away with their children.
Now, let’s think about this: These are the people living in exile who “return” form Babylon, though in fact many of them have never been anywhere else. They have traveled a long road. It is about seven hundred miles as the crow flies, but one could not travel a straight line through that country. Instead, one had to take the long, curving arc of the Fertile Crescent, which probably at least doubled and maybe tripled the distance. The women and children who were now being discarded had made that journey as well. They had left their homes and traveled this whole distance to be in this new place, had felt the same exhaustion on the road, and the same tired satisfaction that the long walk was now done; and now they are being “sent away”.
In that time, women had few rights, and had few ways to support themselves. They could not stay where they were, they had no means of livelihood, and they would have had to go back fifteen hundred miles or so to reach Babylon again.
There is a very good chance that this was a death sentence for them.
Think of the sense of betrayal, of the lack of ability to comprehend what was happening to you, and of the fear these women and their children must have felt.
This was not just a group decision on belonging; this was very personal. Your life partner husband is sending you away; your father is discarding you. This is not some amorphous entity; this is a real, present and important individual.
If they asked why this was happening, the response would be, “The law says…”.
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are about purity; they focus on purifying the group, the community. There is no mention of allowing conversion; there is only exclusion. So, these books are about achieving a kind of genetic purity. Excise the impurities that taint the community.
Slobodan Milosevic just died in the Hague; this was his desire: to excise the taint in the Serbian community. In his view, non-Serbs could stay, but only if they served; they would not be full citizens. Milosevic never expressed regret for the murders, the genocide, the death camps of Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina. But I know this about me, I know that in the secret recesses of my heart there is the same ability to hate. If I say of the death of Milosevic, “good, I’m glad he is dead”; or if I have simply no sympathy for him, I am thinking out of the same place in my heart that allowed him to do what he did. That is where we act from whenever we wish to cleanse the community, whether to expel someone or to use capital punishment; it is a desire for purity, a desire to expunge the impure taint on the community.
The Book of Esther claims to be from about the same time period as the resettlement. In the Christian Bible, the book of Esther follows immediately after the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In the Jewish recension, the order of books is different and Esther actually appears before the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
At any rate, in the book of Esther, Esther marries king Xerxes (486-465 BC). According to the Book of Ezra, it is during the reign of Artaxerxes—son of Xerxes--that Ezra, with a letter from that king, comes to Jerusalem to take charge of the rebuilding.
We know the basic outline of the story of Esther: Esther marries the Persian king but, on the advice of her cousin, Mordecai, does not reveal that she is Jewish. The king’s advisor, Haman, hates the Jews and conspires to get the king’s agreement to kill all of the Jews throughout the Persian Empire. In the end, Esther, who is deeply loved by the king, reveals that she is Jewish, Haman is revealed as a bad guy, the Jewish people are saved and Mordecai is named to Haman’s place as advisor to the king.
These two stories have very different viewpoints. In the Ezra and Nehemiah view, relations with non-Jews must be highly proscribed. The community must be separate and pure. In Esther, quite the opposite lesson is taught. In Esther, relations with foreigners, deep, intimate relationship, is precisely what saved the Jewish people—including Ezra and the other returnees in Jerusalem.
Add to that these speculations of scholars:
that the name Esther is a derivative of the name of the great Mother-Goddess of Asia, Ishtar;
and that the name Mordecai is a derivative of the name of the all powerful Babylonian God Marduk.
What would this mean? One possibility is that the story is claiming that the Jewish people were saved by Jews that were so assimilated, so integrated into Babylonian and Persian society that even their names were Pagan.
This would be a direct refutation of the Ezra purity laws. It would be a statement that one can be loyal and true to one’s religion, to one’s own, without being a religious separatist. One can be a true Jew—or a true Christian, or a true African American, or a true Latina—without rejecting the broader society around you. You can be a true Jew and be a citizen of the Persian Empire. Or you can be a true American and be a citizen of the world. You can oppose a policy of your government and still be a true patriot. You can be both at the same time. And you can love someone from that broader world without losing your own identity, your own being, or your previous group loyalties. You can love someone from another culture or race and not betray your “own”. This is an expansive view. May it ever be ours.
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