Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
You may occasionally notice me trip over the best term for the portion of our Bible sometimes called the Old Testament. There are many reasons for this, not the least being that calling it “old” suggests that the Christian Testament, called “new,” replaces it, Christianity therefore superseding Judaism. This is theologically problematic, insulting to followers of Rabbinic Judaism, and has contributed to centuries of antisemitism.
Calling it the Hebrew Bible is more accurate, since most though not all of the texts were composed in that ancient language, not to be confused with Modern Hebrew.
I sometimes refer to it as the Tanakh, using the Jewish designation for the texts, though Christians organize the texts quite differently. Jewish Bible seems most neutral, though what we think of as Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, doesn’t develop until several decades after the execution of Jesus.
At least references to the first portion of this Bible are pretty clear. The Torah, also referred to as the Pentateuch, is the heart of Judaism, both pre-Rabbinic and modern.
Though there are myths and legends of the time before King Saul, the overwhelming majority of the text focuses on a period of about eight hundred years, from the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to the reconstruction of the walls and the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity. The Persians defeated the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., sending the captives home. This moment is captured in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
There are additions to the Jewish Bible after this date, but they are mostly presented as earlier texts. For example, the Book of Daniel claims to be a work from the Captivity, but is actually written more than three centuries later.
Today’s reading from the Jewish Bible is unique in several ways.
First, it represents events during a period that is barely mentioned, that almost 350 years between the reconstruction of the Temple and the Maccabean Revolt of 167 B.C.E.
Second, the events do not happen among the main body of the Jewish people, who are understood to have returned to Canaan, but instead take place in the diaspora, people who, due to dislocation or immigration, live among other cultures. In this case, the story of Esther takes place in Persia a generation or two after the Persians liberated the Jews.
Third, and the real clincher, is that the Book of Esther does not have a single mention of God, nor does it contain any typical Jewish themes like Law or justice.
I will summarize the plot in case you did not receive the Wednesday Weekly or did not have time to read the text. The king of Persia, called Ahasuerus here, has discarded his wife, and taken as his new queen a Jewish woman named Esther, but she has hidden her Jewish identity.
Her cousin, or maybe her husband before she married the king, is named Mordecai.
The final player here is the king’s viceroy, Haman, as wicked as any comic book villain.
There is palace intrigue. Palace and intrigue are redundant as far as I can tell. Haman has a beef with Mordecai, and receives the king’s permission to slaughter the kingdom’s Jewish minority. The date is set for the 14th of the month. Haman even builds a gallows on his own property to execute Mordecai.
Cue more intrigue and scheming. Finally, during a banquet she is hosting, Esther reveals that she herself is Jewish, so Haman’s plan will include her and Mordecai, both currently in the king’s favor. The king orders that Haman be hanged on his own gallows.
The king claims that he cannot rescind the original order, which makes no sense, but sure… Instead, he allows Esther and Haman to write a new order, which they do.
On the 13th of the month, the day before Haman’s planned genocide, Haman’s ten sons and five hundred participants in Haman’s plot are executed, as are 75,000 additional Persians perceived as enemies of the Jews. We are not told what constitutes being an enemy of the Jews. The Jewish people in Persia are saved.
Our lectionary reading conveniently skips over this part.
Mordecai takes Haman’s place as viceroy, and declares an annual commemoration of these events, today the holiday in Rabbinic Judaism called Purim, which involves costumes and noisemakers and two full readings of this text in which Jews are intended to be the victims of violence but instead are victors through violence.
Again, not one single mention of God, which is not to say that the holy isn’t at work, but also isn’t to say that the holy is at work.
There is plenty of violence in scripture, divine violence, kingdoms at war, but this is the first instance of antisemitism as we have come to understand it today, hating someone simply because they are ethnically Jewish, long before the early Christians found themselves at odds with other Jews after the Jewish War. At least Christians didn’t invent antisemtism, though as we have discussed, scapegoating and “us. vs. them” goes back forever as far as we can tell.
But the part that is more relevant today, and more troubling, is the question of proportionality. We are not given a figure for the number of Jews living under Persian rule, and we know numbers in scripture are almost always exaggerated, but 75,000 slaughtered enemies of the Jews is a huge number.
And here I insert the sort of historical disclaimer to which you have become accustomed. There is no way more than 75,000 Persians were actually slaughtered by Jews without there being both material evidence and accounts in Persian and regional texts. There may have been some historic event at the heart of the tale, but the scale of this preemptive violence is myth.
Here we are so many centuries later, debating antisemitism, genocide, and proportionality still as tens of thousands have been murdered, as Gaza is a wasteland and 2000 pound bombs fall in Beirut.
The definition of antisemite has been expanded now to include not just hatred of or violence against Jews, but any criticism of the modern nation-state of Israel or its current government, making many progressive and justice-seeking Jews antisemites as well, or as they are more commonly labeled, self-hating Jews simply because they don’t hate Palestinians as an ethnic group enough to support murdering children.
Meanwhile, some who seek justice for Palestinians really have tipped into full-blown antisemitism, ignoring the fact that Jews and Christians and Muslims have all lived in the Holy Land for centuries, each having some legitimate and historic claim to the land. Few on either side seem willing to accept a multi-ethnic and multi-religious future that reflects that past.
It is enough to make your heart and your head hurt.
But I’m not going to wrestle specifically with that overseas conflict, where I see horrendous evil on all sides. As I’ve shared before, I refuse to do the mathematics of murder, a calculus that weighs Holocaust against the Nakba.
Instead, I want to think of the Esther myth, the celebration of Purim, and pause to ask about the stories we tell. Is this the story of escaping violence or the story of superior violence? Of lives saved or lives destroyed? Does this story undermine our efforts to create a world of us vs. them, or simply assert that our “us” is victorious?
The Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo celebrates a military victory. Other nations have massive parades to show off their potential for violence. That is not our way despite the base desires of tiki torch carrying white men and our former president.
The 4th of July is an assertion of principle not violence, and while VE Day and VJ Day were sort of a thing for awhile, they have long been displaced by the solemnity of Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Our faith stories, the ones we celebrate, matter in how we live our lives today. All Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, the idea that God was with us in some real and unique way in the life of this man who changed our understanding of Holy Mystery. We are non-credal, and your understanding of Jesus is your understanding of Jesus, not some suffocating box, but the Christ event remains a cultural and moral touchstone, and to so many of us, a source of inspiration and hope.
Some Christians dwell on his execution in the murderous mathematics of atonement. Our reconstructive and progressive Christianity focuses on the Triduum’s conclusion, the victory of love over the violence of religion and state.
Easter itself is tied to the Passover, a story with divine violence, but the Passover story we tell does not center that violence, but instead centers liberation.
Some traditions have a cycle of saints they celebrate, and I often find that system of belief a little too transactional, a little too woowoo magic, but I think there is something to be said for a cycle of saints that brings us back again and again to stories that inspire from the modern world, and the postmodern too, to St. Harvey Milk of San Francisco, St. Harriet Tubman of the Underground Railroad, St. Oscar Romero of San Salvador, women and men who risked it all to save not only members of their own generation, the vulnerable in their own time, but who also worked to establish justice for future generations, to celebrate storytellers and poets and painters and musicians who open us to the holy.
What are the stories we tell here at the Park Church? And I ask that specifically looking at the story we are writing now. Those Abolitionists founders are long gone. Beecher and the Eastmans are foundations and footnotes in a living history, but as the saying goes, what have you done for me lately? And that me that is asking is not some old white dude in the pulpit but is Christ as we understand her or him in the eternal sense, in the sense of Matthew 25 where the parable says “what you have done for the least of these you have done also unto me.”
The story of Elmira has been for far too long the story of flood and deindustrialization, of growing poverty and exploitation and the bandaids we throw on the wounds inflicted by injustice. We have sometimes been there at the frontlines providing first aid. We have created a safe space, and that is part of our story, a space where the wounded can come and find rest, a community that has room for those who may not have felt or been welcomed in other faith spaces, a safe space where you can bring your doubt and your denial. We have done great work for many years in direct mission, and members have done advocacy for justice, just as the founders of this tradition did, but what is next in our story?
We say we will be hopeful partners in Elmira’s renaissance, but how?
Even that story that started this whole conversation is real and lived into our time and work here in Elmira, as we say to our Jewish sisters and brothers that we love them but do not love a government willing to slaughter innocents in pursuit of unjust and unrealistic war goals, can tell our Muslim sisters and brothers that we love them and stand in solidarity with every Palestinian who longs for a land where they belong and are safe and can thrive, but we will never condone or support the sort of terrorism that took place almost a year ago, that we will celebrate liberation and justice and the defeat of evil but we cannot, must not, celebrate slaughter.
You want me to celebrate that you killed them before they killed you? To believe that God is on your side, and is not on the side of that other people She created? Nope. I’m out.
Tell good stories, stories of love, stories of justice, stories of life. And then go live them.
Amen.