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Taanit Esther
Feb. 25th, 2010 09:37 amToday is a dawn-to-dusk fast day, Taanit Esther*, commemorating Esther's three-day fast before going to ask her husband the king not to kill her people the Jews. Usually it's the day before Purim, but because this year Purim falls on a Saturday night, it's pushed back to Thursday; no fasts other than Yom Kippur on Shabbat (though in a post-Holocaust world, I could imagine dire times when there might be one-off fasts on Shabbat, unfortunately), nor on Friday, when one needs strength to prepare for Shabbat. Hence, Thursday**.
Anyway. I was lying in bed not thinking about how long it will be before breakfast today (also thinking about what to put in mishloach manot****), it occurred to me how this story would never happen today. Sure, there's a lot fewer absolute monarchs around in the first place. And there's more possibility for due diligence, so it's less likely a crypto-Jew as obvious as Esther (her Jewish uncle***** Mordechai seems pretty prominent...) would be able to hide her religion. But even if that all happened, Haman was foiled, the non-changeable edict of the king worked around by allowing self-defense, it wouldn't end up as a clear story at all. Instead, there would be tons of right-wing Jewish media decrying Jewish intermarriage. And how a woman could not be Torah-true if she is living in such a goyische palace. And it's a place steeped in sensuality (pretty literally, given the descriptions of months of perfuming before going to the king, plus the whole king-trying-each-chick-out-for-a-night contest at the beginning). It might have worked out well for us, but certainly we could not celebrate such a woman. Or, really, any woman taking on that public a role. I bet it would have been reworked to be a Mordechai story, all the way through, perhaps with Esther in a small supporting role.
I suspect that the only way such right-wingers deal with some of the independent women in the Bible (more independent than they want women to be now, certainly) is saying that they were of a greater level back then, blah blah blah. More of the cult of ancestors that we can never even hope to get close to in stature, etc. And yet, we (or at least I) need those people to be people, not perfect paragons of virtue, unblemished and without fault. That's not a person, that's an idol. I can't become perfect, but I can try to make myself a better person (for whatever value of better) if I have role models who are human, showing me that accomplishments are attainable if I try.
( footnotes )
Anyway. I was lying in bed not thinking about how long it will be before breakfast today (also thinking about what to put in mishloach manot****), it occurred to me how this story would never happen today. Sure, there's a lot fewer absolute monarchs around in the first place. And there's more possibility for due diligence, so it's less likely a crypto-Jew as obvious as Esther (her Jewish uncle***** Mordechai seems pretty prominent...) would be able to hide her religion. But even if that all happened, Haman was foiled, the non-changeable edict of the king worked around by allowing self-defense, it wouldn't end up as a clear story at all. Instead, there would be tons of right-wing Jewish media decrying Jewish intermarriage. And how a woman could not be Torah-true if she is living in such a goyische palace. And it's a place steeped in sensuality (pretty literally, given the descriptions of months of perfuming before going to the king, plus the whole king-trying-each-chick-out-for-a-night contest at the beginning). It might have worked out well for us, but certainly we could not celebrate such a woman. Or, really, any woman taking on that public a role. I bet it would have been reworked to be a Mordechai story, all the way through, perhaps with Esther in a small supporting role.
I suspect that the only way such right-wingers deal with some of the independent women in the Bible (more independent than they want women to be now, certainly) is saying that they were of a greater level back then, blah blah blah. More of the cult of ancestors that we can never even hope to get close to in stature, etc. And yet, we (or at least I) need those people to be people, not perfect paragons of virtue, unblemished and without fault. That's not a person, that's an idol. I can't become perfect, but I can try to make myself a better person (for whatever value of better) if I have role models who are human, showing me that accomplishments are attainable if I try.
( footnotes )