Happy Purim
No, really
Events over Shabbos make this seem kind of a weird thing to post right now, but I already wrote it last week and if I wait it will be moot. Of course, when we get past the current wave of jubilation and AI lion imagery, the problems I address on this blog will still remain, and, in the event that the war succeeds in changing the foreign policy of Iran, we will be left with one fewer excuse for not thinking about them. The question of what kind of people we are and what kind of religion we want to have will still be there too.
About the war, I don’t have much to say. It is a good thing when murderous criminals get their comeuppance. It is a bad thing when the innocent are killed. Perhaps the most admirable thing about this country is its multi-layered system of civil defence, and I am once again reminded of how grateful I should be to be protected by it.
The most jarring feature of the Book of Esther is the recurrent disconnect between cause and effect, between motivation, at least as it can be rendered in thought, and action. Ahashverosh deposes his Queen merely because she won’t appear for him;1 Bigtan and Teresh try to murder him because they are ‘angry’; he appoints Haman to the chief office in the land without explanation; all we know about Haman’s administrative capabilities is that he decides to annihilate an entire race over a trivial snub. Everything is going very badly for the Jews and then it starts to go well, because the King couldn’t sleep. Many have told us how this story demonstrates the presence of God in the small things, how the agglomeration of apparently random small details comes together in a larger plan, but if you read it, it actually doesn’t at all. There is no connection whatsoever between Mordechai riding the King’s horse and the salvation of the Jews. What happens is that Haman asks Ahashverosh to kill the Jews, and he says yes, and then Esther asks him to not kill the Jews and he says yes to that instead. Why? Well, they asked. Everything else is just other stuff that happens; it is connected to the main ‘plot’ by what the ancients called fate, and we degenerates call vibes.
Perhaps the standout example of this phenomenon is at the beginning of chapter 3:
וְכׇל־עַבְדֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ אֲשֶׁר־בְּשַׁעַר הַמֶּלֶךְ כֹּרְעִים וּמִשְׁתַּחֲוִים לְהָמָן כִּי־כֵן צִוָּה־לוֹ הַמֶּלֶךְ וּמׇרְדֳּכַי לֹא יִכְרַע וְלֹא יִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה׃
Why doesn’t Mordechai bow? The question in this case is so obvious the book asks it for you. The response of the King’s servants ‘why do you transgress the King’s command’ can be read as rhetorical, a speech-act of condemnation, but syntactically, it’s just a question: why? And Mordechai doesn’t answer, so we don’t know.
For many readers, all this is an invitation to insert a back story. Perhaps Mordechai and Haman were leaders of rival court factions; that’s why Mordechai’s always hanging round the gate: he’s intriguing. Perhaps Mordechai was resisting the dangerous growth of centralising tyranny on behalf of the empire’s diverse subject peoples. Perhaps it was some kind of family blood feud. As a literary matter, I think all these readings are backwards. If a book is written a certain way, that’s how you are supposed to read it. It sure looks, sometimes, like the motivations of other people are inscrutable, whatever explanation of them offered afterwards being just a facade for primal, often disordered, psychic forces. Neuroscientists say that’s how it actually is, though, admittedly, they sometimes make stuff up. If it seems that we are subject to the arbitrary whims of others we can’t understand, let alone control, maybe that’s just how it actually is.
One thing everyone agrees on is that the Book of Esther is full of allusions to earlier canonical books. One genre of biblical writing (certainly not the only one) is a kind of hyper-realism, so stripped of extraneous detail, of the fluff we use to excuse ourselves, that it’s more real than real and crosses over to the other side. My favourite example:
Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Look, the LORD has kept me from bearing. Come unto my maidservant; perhaps I shall have a child through her.” And Abram heeded Sarai’s request. So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took her maidservant, Hagar the Egyptian—after Abram had dwelt in the land of Canaan ten years—and she gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. And he came unto Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was light in her eyes. And Sarai said to Abram, “The wrong done me is your fault!
🤷. The Book of Esther is what it looks like if you spin out that style for a whole story. It’s horrifying, really, but also quite comforting; cathartic if you want to be all Greek about it.
However, a literary reading is not the only way to read a book, and, in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably not the most important. Jewish tradition has a clear answer for why Mordechai didn’t bow. Haman had an idol round his neck, or perhaps was claiming divinity for himself. To bow on Mordechai’s part, whatever internal motivations he could have attached to it, would have been to affirm this idolatry, so like Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego, he didn’t, even at the cost of risking everything, because denying idolatry is what being a Jew is all about. Without that, the rest of it, your very life, isn’t worth a damn.
All of that is preparatory to a video that has been zipping around WhatsApp and Telegram:
In this video, Mordechai’s act of defiance is recast for our era as an injunction for the Israeli of today: he must not bow to the Left.
If you are very plebeian and jejune, you might be asking something like ‘what the hell is this?’ The Right been in government for 34 of the last 49 years, and the figure is only that low because we are counting Naftali Bennett (founder of the party ‘Rightward’ with Betzalel Smotrich), Ehud Olmert (son of an Irgun terrorist) and, err, prolific war criminal Ariel Sharon as leftists now. Who do the Right need to bow to, exactly? However, it’s not as stupid as it sounds because formal political power is only one form of power in society. Since we want the taps not to have muddy water come out when you turn them on, for there to be some public officials who don’t just embezzle all the money they are allocated, for pager operations to actually explode when they are supposed to, the wicked secular Ashkenazim still take most of the top jobs, and they throw their weight around as much as they can. For example, Aryeh Deri was imprisoned twice for taking bribes and tax fraud while in office, and had his sentence commuted after agreeing to resign from politics. Then, at the next opportunity, he was given the jobs of Deputy Prime Minister, Interior Minister and Health Minister, and the Supreme Court - being totally possessed by foreign, gentilic, postmodern, progressive ideas - was like ‘uh, what?’. Practically the dictionary definition of tyranny.
