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 Shabbat P'kudey

15 March 2024

Dear Members and Friends,

This is a strange year. The world beyond our own Jewish world is preparing for Easter and holidays at the end of this month, yet we, in the Jewish community, are yet to celebrate Purim, let alone Pesach. In this leap year, when an additional month has been added or ‘intercalated’, to use the technical term, into the calendar, we must wait an extra month to read Megillat Ester, the Book of Esther – the book that tells the story of how Esther saved her people by pleading with her husband to reverse a cruel and genocidal decree against the Jews of Persia.

It was for plausible reasons that Purim was abolished by the founders of Liberal Judaism. Even the words of Esther could not persuade them to remind us of the catastrophes that had beset the Jewish people throughout the ages:

‘For how can I bear to see the disaster which will befall my people! And how can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred’ (Esther 8:6).

It was not because they did not want to recap past tragedies or remember the Hamans of Greek or Roman empires, the Crusades or Cossack pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The devastation and destruction of the Shoah had yet to befall our people.

Nor was it because of the imaginary, fictional nature of the book with its caricatures and parodies, its sending up of the Persian court and laws.

No, it was because of the closing chapters of the Book of Esther in which the king, Achashverosh, permits the Jews of every city ‘to assemble and fight for their lives,’ to defend themselves against any people or province who attack them, and ‘destroy, massacre, and exterminate its armed force together with women and children, and plunder their possessions’ (8:11).

It was because of the document that was to be issued as a law in every single province throughout Persia, to be publicly displayed to all the peoples,  ‘that the Jews should be ready for that day to avenge themselves on their enemies’ (8:13).

It was because ‘no one could withstand [the Jews], for the fear of them had fallen upon all the peoples,’ because they ‘struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies’ (9:5).

It is impossible to read the Book of Esther at this moment in time in the carnivalesque, mocking, satirical context that was intended by its author – as an overblown parody of Persian culture. There can be no gleeful gloating over our enemies, fictional or not. For this is a book written for Jews without sovereign power, subject to the rule of powerful, tyrannical empires. This is not a book for Jews to take to heart today, for its story of revenge is too close and too painful to our current truths.

To hear Israeli public figures speak this week of the ferocity of Israel’s response in Gaza, the destruction of civilian infrastructures, the terrible ‘collateral damage’, the ‘abandonment of any sense of shame and embarrassment’; to be told of the constant settler violence against vulnerable Palestinian communities on the West Bank, and the dangerous dream of Israeli supremacy among the far right, an ‘agenda of Armageddon’ – was more frightening than anything I have heard or read in the last five months since October 7.

Even if a Palestinian state were created tomorrow, said one of the speakers, the Jewish State and the Jewish people would still have to live with the destruction of this war and serious crimes against the innocent civilians of Gaza.

In the cabaret of Esther, we are left with one question. After the Jews of Persia had avenged their enemies, how was it possible for calm to be restored; for an ordinance of ‘equity and honesty’ to be observed throughout the kingdom; for Mordechai the Jew to be regarded with honour, ‘seeking the good of his people and interceding for the welfare of all his kindred’ (10.3)?

I am asking myself, how was that possible? How might it become a possibility for now, for the future? If freedom and independence are a vehicle to human rights, how can we, here in the UK, empower the individuals and institutions in Israel that are defending those values with their life?

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexandra Wright

 

 

Tue, 19 March 2024 9 Adar II 5784