Purim as Satire
Dear companions,
Thursday night is the beginning of Purim. We are taught to be merry and laugh. Some scholars say the story in the Scroll of Esther is a satire against stupid and tyrannical power, which we have more than enough of scattered around us right now.
But before I address the story itself, I strongly invite you to join my Substack by clicking RebArthurWaskow.substack.com. I will be able to use Substack as I used to use “prophetic voices.” So if you would like to see a wide variety of progressive ideas (many but not all Jewish) ideas, please sign up to join me there.
Let’s look at the Purim story from a progressive standpoint: It’s all extremes. First the king creates a drinking party that lasts for months. Then, in a fit of drunken rage, he fires Vashti as queen, and the long process discerns Esther/Hadasah as new queen. (Hadasah, a student at RRC, and I have just been discussing the story.)
The story tells us about a super-tyrannical Prime Minister Haman who wants to commit genocide upon the Jewish people. The king has his own craziness: he wants to make sure that no woman in all his kingdom ever tells a man what to do.
Prime Minister Haman gets exactly his comeuppance in the form he intended as comeuppance for the Chief Jew, Mordechai. He is hanged on the same gallows that he had intended for the leader of the outlawed people.
And the king “completes the story” by doing exactly what the woman Esther tells him to do. The King's own arrogance brings him to live into a story in which he himself does what he has sworn no man will allow himself to do.
They are both the joke of someone who throws a banana peel on the ground, then slips on the banana peel he has thrown away and gets a concussion as a result.
But there is a third, even more biting joke: even the defenders of decency end up overwhelmed in the satire into doing mass murder, warning us to watch our own leaders with care, not only our enemies. At the end of the story, there is still a satirical over-glowing: the Jews not only defend themselves against their would-be genociders, but reach out in an orgy of blood to kill 75,000 Persians. This only makes sense as satire aimed at even the good guys: Even the Jews who have just barely been protected from their own genocide, take vengeance against anyone who might even have thought about the possibility of doing genocide. Our own leaders are undone.
Does this sound like a story from the front pages of the newspapers of this last year plus?
The Esther story is satire. Some of our leaders have decided it’s real history, to be imitated. Disaster.
Unfortunately, the regime of un-Jewish Jews who govern the State of Israel takes revenge in a satirical note. This part of the story says: Do not give hyper violence in the way you give your trust to your own leaders. The whole story is a warning against letting any leaders come to power who turn to genocide or even semi-genocidal tyrants.
But what if they already have? That’s the problem the prophet Elijah faced on Mount Carmel. Read I Kings Chapter 18 - that is the Haftarah for this coming Shabbat. We will talk about it next week.
I welcome your comments, both supportive and critical. You can write me directly at AWaskow@theshalomcenter.org or, I would prefer to build a space of deeper exploration by having you register as part of the Substack. Please register at RebArthurWaskow.substack.com.
Blessings of shalom,
Arthur