Purim: Performing the Truth

by Rabbi Robin Podolsky

Rabbi Robin Podolsky is the Los Angeles Program Manager for At The Well. She also serves on the Board of Governors for the Sandra Caplan Community Bet Din, and serves as writing facilitator and script editor for Queerwise, a spoken word and writing group. She contributes to At The Well’s blog each month from the perspective of a woman who has passed her 40th birthday (and then some). She is thrilled to celebrate the wisdom, experience, power, and vitality of 40+ women and nonbinary people!

My favorite moment in the Book of Esther comes in Chapter 4. The Persian Jewish queen Esther learns that her uncle Mordechai is outside the city gates, in sackcloth and ashes, lamenting. She sends Hatach, a eunuch of her court, to Mordechai to learn what this is about. Mordechai sends word back with Hatach that the bigoted courtier Haman has bribed the king — Esther’s husband — into setting a date for a mandated genocidal pogrom against the Jews. He instructs Esther to go before the king and plead her people’s case.

At this point in the story, Esther is a closeted Jew whose husband has no idea of her heritage. She sends Hatach to tell Mordechai that she is not allowed to approach the king without being summoned and she has not been summoned in quite a while. Mordechai then sends Hatach, who by then must have been a little tired, back to tell Esther that this is her moment. Either she will aid her people or she and her line will perish. Mordechai observes, “Who knows if it was not for this moment that you attained the crown.”

Here, the story turns. Esther had the option of failing to approach her husband — who does come off as something of a drunken, erratic buffoon — and who, apparently, had done her the great favor of forgetting she existed. She could have lived a comfortable life in the harem under the king’s indifferent protection, availing herself of all the luxuries and entertainments the situation offered.

Instead, Esther sends Hatach to tell Mordechai, “Lech.” (Go.) Go and tell the people that she will indeed go to speak to the king “and if I am destroyed, I am destroyed.”

Then, Esther steps into a role of spiritual leadership for her people. The Book of Esther is famous for being the only book of Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) in which the name of G-d is not mentioned. However, Esther acknowledges, by the implication of her action, the Divine Presence.

She orders a three-day fast, an embodied prayer for G-d’s help, for all the Jews. She tells Mordechai to let the other Jews know that she and her women courtiers will be fasting with them. Like all good leaders, she does not demand from her people a sacrifice she is unwilling to make herself.

At this moment Esther steps into her authority, assuming the role of Esther ha-Malkah, Esther the Queen. Those of us who have lived for forty years or more in this complicated world, and have seen and thought through a few things, can learn from Esther. It’s time to drape ourselves in the authority of our Queen Years.

Sometimes that means taking on behaviors and styles that have intimidated us in the past. Purim, the holiday that celebrates Esther’s triumph, is a time for masquerade, for costumes and masks that hide our faces — or reveal hidden sides of ourselves that we invite out to play. Esther’s Purim story is about performance; masking and unmasking, doling out truths at strategic moments.

It kicks into high gear with Mordechai’s public performance of grief. In sackcloth and ashes, he wails his story immoderately in public, at the well-traveled city gates. No one who encountered him could pretend that, whatever happened to the Jews, they couldn’t possibly have known that anything was wrong.

Esther is living behind multiple masks. Her husband the king has no idea that she is Jewish, let alone related to Mordechai, the Jew who enraged the genocidal Haman by refusing to bow down to him. She is concealed by harem walls. To emerge on her own initiative is to risk her life.

Hatach the eunuch, however, can move between worlds. Between genders, between the women’s quarters and king’s and between the palace and the outside. Like Esther, he is both an insider and an outsider, her indispensable ally in connecting with her people. His public costume reinforces his slippery status.

When the time is right, Esther will unmask and tell the king who she is. She will reveal herself as a member of a despised group he had regarded as dispensable. The scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Z”L, calls this a coming out story. Esther will also unmask the unwilling Haman as the villain who has bribed the king to permit an extermination of the Jews. Even then, she does not win a complete reprieve, only permission for the Jews to fight back and Haman’s public execution. Strategically mature, she accepts the victory she has won.

In our own Queen Years, we may find ourselves faced with leadership opportunities and challenges; moments to which, it feels, we have been led. We may be called to assume a posture and a voice which had previously been concealed within us. We may be called on to use our accumulated strategic acumen to speak most effectively, revealing or holding back with careful forethought. In other words, we may be called to perform as elders who hold authority. And, in so doing, reveal our genuine selves.

At The Well uplifts many approaches to Jewish practice. Our community draws on ancient Jewish wisdom, sometimes adapting longstanding practices to more deeply support the well-being of women and nonbinary people. See this article’s sources below. We believe Torah (sacred teachings) are always unfolding to help answer the needs of the present moment.