Book Review: The Dawn - about the Book of Esther

Posted by Bible Probe on July 01, 2005 at 05:35:05:

Over a thousand years and a thousand pages, the Hebrew Bible relates the history of God as He appeared to the Jews and among them: As creator and mentor, as redeemer, warrior and fortress of refuge.

Only in the Book of Esther does the trail grow faint, the pen weary, the sense of things irrevocably blurred. History continues, but the Bible ends. It is the Jews who are sent into exile from their land, but it is God for whom there no longer seems to be any place.

What does Esther have to teach us that we do not already know - of the emptiness and grief of the old tale as it drags on, with man now the only actor, with the enemy now facing us across the stage, squinting with pleasure to have found us so alone?

Esther is, in fact, the classic text of Jewish continuity. It speaks of a different place and a new time, of Jews with no land and no revelations from on high, and yet the story line is eerily familiar: Amalek, the arch-idolater and anti-Jew, returns to seek dominion, the Jew stands to resist evil against all odds, the people return from their daydreams and wanderings to unite behind their truth, and for all his worldly might the enemy is brought low, leaving the Jews free to rule themselves under new conditions that permit them what they desire most, "words of peace and truth." (Megillah IX:30)

Esther is a world removed from the story told in the rest of the Bible, but it is not a different story. It is the same story, that of Moses, that of Saul, told again in a different bible, of which Esther is not the last book, but the first.

To understand this, we must take up the dictum of Rava, the third century Babylonian teacher - that the Jews accepted the Toah twice, once at Sinai when there was no choice other than to accept it, and again in the days of Ahashverosh when they accepted it voluntarily.

For the first thousand years of Jewish faith, the insular nature of the community of Jews meant that the word of God could hardly be escaped. A man could observe the law or fail to do so, but he lived in a culture which was bombarded by the thought of the priests and the prophets, and so always had to reconcile his behavior with the knowledge that somewhere, somehow, someone was judging him according to the covenant.

What changed in Persia was not only that prophets ceased to frequent the marketplaces of the east, but that the majority of the Jewish people was for the first time well beyond earshot. With dispersion, God's voice quite literally ceased to be audible to most Jews. And if they truly wished to keep listening, the responsibility would of necessity be theirs to find a way to hear it.

While the collapse of Jerusalem had been political in nature, its fundamental meaning was therefore theological.

Up until the exile, the Jews had been pursued by their God. It was he who prescribed to them the moral law, and they who passively received it. It was he who called the spiritual leadership, and even the political leadership, and they who responded to this call. It was he who saved them with an outstretched arm, and they who struggled to keep up with history. God approached, and the individual could choose between duty and, as in Jonah's case, flight.

In Persia in the days of Ahashverosh, God had hidden his face from man, had ceased to appear at all. But this did not mean that the world somehow ceased to need instruction or direction; God's withdrawal from man was met with no commensurate extinguishing of the voice of evil. If anything, the opposite could be said: Not since Pharaoh had Israel been so helpless before a nemesis so monstrous as Haman.

In the aftermath of the destruction and the exile, the world continued as before, revolving around its flaw, and the same eternal task remained to be done. But now there was only one force that could bear the responsibility for doing it - man himself.

The truly great events in the Book of Esther are found in the initiatives of Mordechai and Esther, who repeatedly choose to risk everything for the sake of right and truth: Mordechai's decision to stand against Haman's elevation; his willingness to violate the king's law to draw public attention to the Jews' anguish after the decree has been issued; Esther's decision to go in to the king twice, both times knowing that she may die before even having explained
her cause; and her final, face-to- face confrontation with her enemy.

It is these actions which ultimately bring about the fall of Haman and the lifting of the decree - and it is glaringly clear that all of these are, according to the narrative, the political initiatives of men, and no one else.

And herein lies the key to Esther. The most remarkable aspect of the book is not God's absence itself, but the fact that this absence does not induce defeat and despair. Quite the contrary, in fact: Mordechai and Esther prove that even in the grim new universe of the dispersion, the most fearsome evils may yet be challenged and beaten - so long as man himself is willing to take the initiative to beat them.

Thus while Esther adheres faithfully to the message of earlier Jewish teachings in terms of the outcome of the story, it heralds a dramatic shift in the burden of responsibility for this outcome.

Man may still find out what God wishes of him, but he will not be given the answers; he will have to seek them.

Thus Rav Assi, another third century Babylonian scholar, taught: Why was Esther compared to the dawn? To tell you that just as the dawn is the end of the whole night, so is the story of Esther the end of all miracles.

Where before, the story of man had been conducted in darkness, with an occasional sign from heaven illuminating the night, now these signs have gone.

There is yet to be light in the world, but this light must be brought as it was brought to the Jews of Persia - by Esther.'

The writer is the founder of the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute, where he is a senior fellow. The Dawn is available from Amazon.com and through local booksellers.

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