RABBI PHIL

  Purim is the most unsettling holiday on the Jewish calendar, not because it is loud or comic, but because it refuses easy reassurance.  Other holidays move toward revelation, redemption, or law.  Purim moves toward survival.  It tells the story of a people who are not rescued by open miracles, but by human action taken inside a hostile political system, under conditions of fear, concealment, and radical uncertainty.

  The story begins, importantly, not with Esther but with Vashti.  Vashti’s refusal to appear before the king on command is an act of dignity, and it costs her everything.  She is removed, erased, replaced.   Vashti shows us what direct defiance looks like in a system that tolerates no limits.  Her disappearance establishes the rules of the world Esther enters.   Power is arbitrary.  Authority is male.  Resistance is dangerous.  Vashti haunts the story because she is right and because she is  expendable.

  Esther enters that world quietly.  She is taken into the palace, her Jewishness hidden, her identity concealed.  At first, she survives by adaptation.  She listens.  She obeys.  She keeps silent.  In a court governed by ego and impulse, this silence is not passivity.  It is strategy.  Esther understands that  visibility without leverage is fatal, and that survival sometimes depends on knowing when not to speak.

  But concealment cannot last forever.  The crisis forces Esther’s transformation.  Haman’s hatred is not personal in any meaningful sense.  Mordecai’s refusal to bow is merely the spark.  What Haman cannot tolerate is Jewish difference that refuses to dissolve into empire.  Jews are portrayed as scattered yet unified, governed by their own laws, alien to the surrounding culture, corrosive to order.  It is the classic antisemitic fantasy, familiar across centuries: Jews as an internal enemy, weak yet dangerous, marginal yet powerful.

  The turning point of the story comes when Mordecai confronts Esther.  His words are theological as much as political.  If you remain silent, relief and deliverance will come from  somewhere else.  Who knows whether you have come to this position for such a moment as this.  God is not named, but God is present.  History is not random.  Esther’s place in the palace is not an accident. She is being summoned into responsibility.

  Esther’s response is telling.  She calls for a fast.  This is not only preparation or resolve.  It is an appeal to God.  Purim is famous for the absence of God’s name, but this is one of the moments where the divine presence presses close to the surface.   Esther understands that courage alone is not enough.  She fasts, and she asks her people to fast with her.  Action and dependence are held together.

  Esther does confront Haman directly, and that confrontation is the center of the story.  She names him.  She exposes his plan in the king’s presence.  In that moment, Haman is revealed for what he is.  The bully collapses.  The swagger drains away.  Faced with exposure, he pleads, panics, grasps.  The architect of annihilation cannot stand upright when his fantasy is stripped from him.  Power reveals its cowardice when it is named.

  The reversals that follow are dramatic and destabilizing.  Mordecai takes Haman’s position and is integrated into the structures of power.  Esther remains queen, and the king’s repeated promise to her, “What do you want, up to half my kingdom,” signals recognition and attachment.  Jews are authorized to defend themselves, and they do so with devastating force.  The story does not end neatly.  Order is restored, but blood is spilled.  Many readers have long struggled with the final chapter, where Jewish survival comes through violence.  Purim does not offer innocence.  It offers continuity.

  Esther’s heroism lies in her transformation.  She moves from concealment to speech, from survival to responsibility.  She does not control outcomes, but she refuses silence, and that refusal changes history.

  And then Purim does something wise.  We blot out Haman’s name with noise.  We drown him out.  We drink.  We laugh.  We eat.  We refuse to let hatred have the last word.  For one night, we insist on life, on joy, on stubborn Jewish presence.  And that, too, is how we survive.

Phil

Rabbi Phil Cohen