Taanit Esther
Feb. 25th, 2010 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidToday 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.
* I'm still not sure why it's not "Tzom Esther."
** Which makes it into a whole holiday weekend, really: Taanit Esther today, Parshat Zachor on Shabbat (reading the Torah section about Amalek; baddie Haman is often seen as a descendant of the Amalekites), Purim after Shabbat, and Shushan Purim*** the day after that.
*** Because the Jews in the capital of Shushan were given a second day to defend themselves, Purim is observed one day later in walled cities that existed at the time of Joshua (why then? it's complicated). Which mostly means Jerusalem, these days.
**** Packages of food given to friends on Purim. The minimum to fulfill the requirement is sending two kinds of food to one person, but it often becomes a social tit-for-tat social thing; my mom said something about making 80 packages last year, which is just nuts!
***** unless he's her husband, as some midrashim suggest.
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.
* I'm still not sure why it's not "Tzom Esther."
** Which makes it into a whole holiday weekend, really: Taanit Esther today, Parshat Zachor on Shabbat (reading the Torah section about Amalek; baddie Haman is often seen as a descendant of the Amalekites), Purim after Shabbat, and Shushan Purim*** the day after that.
*** Because the Jews in the capital of Shushan were given a second day to defend themselves, Purim is observed one day later in walled cities that existed at the time of Joshua (why then? it's complicated). Which mostly means Jerusalem, these days.
**** Packages of food given to friends on Purim. The minimum to fulfill the requirement is sending two kinds of food to one person, but it often becomes a social tit-for-tat social thing; my mom said something about making 80 packages last year, which is just nuts!
***** unless he's her husband, as some midrashim suggest.
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Date: 2010-02-26 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-26 05:14 am (UTC)The first was in response to your footnote, that that particular midrash was new to me.
The second was in response to the description earlier in your post of Mordechai as Esther's uncle; this seems to be what we are all told as pshat, yet the text actually says differently.