written by Rabbi Miriam Lorie, published in YCT's Purim reader as follows:
The Paranoid, the Schemer and the Heroine
The classic fairy tale caricatures of Purim – powerful King Ahashverosh, sporting a regal crown; evil and plotting Haman with demonic features; and beautiful demure Queen Esther – are ripe for a more grown-up re-reading. In what follows, I will attempt one, via Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Shakespeare’s Othello.
In his address Insights into Megillat Esther, delivered in 1973, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik writes the following:
Mordekhai had his own ideas about how to implement the rescue of the Jews. But it was the plan of the woman Esther that prevailed. Mordekhai wanted Esther to go immediately to the king and plead for the nation (4:8). Esther disagreed, feeling that slow, diplomatic channels were to be preferred. She made one wine party and then another, procrastinating for some seemingly unfathomable reason.
However, if we delve into the personality of Ahashverosh we will understand why Esther acted the way she did, and how the realities of the situation totally excluded the possibility of following Mordekhai’s plan.
The king had a paranoid fear of an insurrection against the throne. The Talmud relates that he was not the legitimate heir to the kingdom, rather the son of the steward of the royal stables. His only connection with royalty was through his wife Vashti, daughter of Belshazzar. She obviously despised him as a social climber who lacked any royal grace and dignity.
Already the cracks are appearing in our childhood images of the characters in the Megillah. Ahashverosh, we are told, “had a paranoid fear of an insurrection against the throne”. Gone is the powerful king of fairy tales; this king has insecurities. Rav Soloveitchik alludes to the midrash in Esther Rabbah in which Vashti, upon refusing to appear (naked?) before the king, says to him “You used to be the stable-boy of my father’s house”. The King, according to this midrash, didn’t have a drop of royal blood in him. He held the throne simply by virtue of marrying into the position. And he keenly felt the insecurity of such a position. He was a paranoid ruler, whose tenuous royalty could be easily undermined.
There is more evidence in the text to justify the theory that Achashverosh is paranoid, or had reasons to be. We know from the assassination attempt by Bigtan and Teresh that the king had enemies within. We see him over-react to Vashti’s slight at the beginning, and then again to Haman falling on Esther’s couch at the end. Both reactions feel disproportionate to their prompt. We learn of the law requiring death to any who enters the throne room without invitation while they are still at a safe distance.
This setting, in which an insecure ruler struggles to protect himself against numerous enemies, is the scene upon which Mordechai, Esther and Haman enter. What we are to see is that each in their own right try to “play” this vulnerable king to their own end. Rav Soloveitchik writes:
Feeling slighted by Mordekhai, Haman decides to destroy the Jews. He plays on the king’s paranoia by casting suspicion on the loyalty of the Jews. He tells the king (3:8) that the Jews are a unified nation, widely dispersed in the kingdom, with queer laws and customs. Being a strange nation, no one can guess whether they are planning a revolt… The king fell for this ploy and agreed to kill the Jews. When a paranoid lives in fear of an imaginary monster, all moral controls are abandoned. He has only one irresistible urge—to destroy. Esther understood all this very well and therefore could not agree to Mordekhai’s plan of immediate action.
Haman uses anti-Semitic rhetoric which is both ancient and startlingly contemporary; the Jews are everywhere, inextricably mixed among us – and yet paradoxically they are unified, inward-looking and different from us. In the mind of the paranoid king, this is a recipe for conspiracy. Where Haman’s insinuations end, the workings of a paranoid mind begin; Haman is given free reign to destroy the people however he will. The destruction of the Jews is given a wax seal of approval by a king who knows nothing of this people, not least that his own Queen is one…
This Queen, our Queen, is faced by the unhappy task of knowing that she has more power than any other Jew to reverse the decree. Things don’t go well at first. Mordechai is due to be hanged in the morning. Everything is sickeningly close to going wrong.
[The night when Ahashverosh read his chronicles] is the turning point in the whole story, the prime miracle. The most significant aspect of that night was not so much the king’s new respect for Mordekhai, but his loss of confidence in Haman. You feel the king’s malicious joy in taunting Haman while ordering him to honor “Mordekhai the Jew” (6:10). Whether it was Haman’s mention of the royal crown (6:8) that made the king suspect his loyalty, or his failure to reward the king’s benefactor Mordekhai, or the shifting perception of the universe in the mind of this paranoiac king, it was time for Esther to plant the seeds of distrust in his mind. This is the kind of subtle hester panim miracle, a change of mood in the mind of a deranged king, for which we give thanks to God on Purim.
The moment opportune, Esther tries her chances at playing on the fears of the paranoid king. She is successful, and the king, enraged, storms out the house. When he re-enters, he sees Haman prostrated, begging, at Esther’s couch. Haman, the newly-revealed traitor, is easily also seen as an opportunist adulterer.
How very different the characters in Megillat Esther now seem from the fairy tale caricatures of our childhood. Ahashverosh is no longer a powerful, confident, wealthy king, but a nervous, paranoid appeaser, whose very claim to royalty may be tenuously balanced on his marriage. And Esther, our once demure, obedient Queen is as cunning as Haman in playing the king to her advantage. True, Haman may still be the “bad guy”, but there is no hiding from the fact that Esther enters into a match-on-match battle with him, in which the king is a mere pawn. These characters are no fairy tale characters, but subtle, layered, and deeply complex.
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When I first came across Rav Soloveitchik’s piece on Megillat Esther, something bothered me. I felt, somehow, as if I had read this story before; this story about a paranoid ruler, his beautiful wife, and manipulative adviser. Eventually I worked it out. William Shakespeare’s Othello. For anyone who doesn’t know the play, take a look at this summary or even better – go and see the play!
In both narratives we see the same three characters. First, an insecure leader. Othello is a “Moor”: he is of a race (probably African) which is different to that of the white Venetians in whose society he lives. Othello is an outsider. He is clearly conscious in the play of his being different. And yet, despite this, he is a great and respected leader, a general in the Venetian army. This is rather like Ahashverosh in Rav Soloveitchik’s conception; he is an outsider, a non-royal, who has risen to hold the throne simply by marrying into the position. And both leaders keenly feel the insecurity of their positions, and are as a result, vulnerable. Both leaders have the bad luck of placing their trust in perverse advisers, who play on this vulnerability. This is the second character I see in common. Iago in Othello is the ultimate “bad guy”. Like Haman, his scheming seems to derive purely from the desire to avenge tenfold a personal slight. He plays on Othello’s insecurities, subtly poisoning his mind with suggestive snippets and insinuations, until Othello is sufficiently intoxicated that fantasy becomes certainty, that virtue becomes licentiousness. And, to quote Rav Soloveitchik,
“When a paranoid lives in fear of an imaginary monster, all moral controls are abandoned”;
the play ends in tragedy. Here is an example of Iago’s work:
Othello: What dost thou say, Iago?
Iago: Did Michael Cassio, when you woo’d my lady,Know of your love?
Othello: He did, from first to last: why dost thou ask?
Iago: But for a satisfaction of my thought;No further harm.
Othello: Why of thy thought, Iago?
Iago: I did not think he had been acquainted with her.
Othello: O, yes; and went between us very oft.
Iago: Indeed!
Othello: Indeed! ay, indeed:–discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest?
Iago: Honest, my lord!
Othello: Honest! ay, honest.
Othello: What dost thou think?
Iago: Think, my lord!
Othello: Think, my lord!
By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monster in his thought
Too hideous to be shown.–Thou dost mean something:
I heard thee say even now,–thou lik’dst not that,
When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like?
The third character in common is, of course, the woman. In both narratives, the wife of the leader is involved somehow in the demonic plans of the adviser. In Othello, Desdemona is used as the means by which Othello is brought down. Othello’s sensitivity towards the contrast between himself as a black outsider, and his delicate, white, upper class wife, is his weak point, and Othello becomes convinced that she has been unfaithful to him. In Megillat Esther, although Haman did not know it, Queen Esther is a member of the people he condemns to death.
More interesting and more telling than these similarities, however, are the differences between these two stories. The key difference is, of course, in the endings. Megillat Esther is a book which celebrates a victory; the ‘good guys’ live happily ever after having defeated their enemies, and an annual festival is proclaimed. Othello on the other hand, is a tragedy. The play ends with a heap of bodies; the tragic waste of hopeful young life.
Why this difference? Why does one narrative end in comedy, the other in tragedy? A key characteristic of tragedy as a genre of literature is the role of fate. A tragic character is faced with a fateful series of events in the face of which he or she is powerless. While this can certainly be said of the character Othello, I am interested in the powerless she in the play. Desdemona is demure and faithful. In the closing scenes of the play, she seems to know that death is not far away. She is hauntingly aware of her fate, and attempts to protest. And yet, in a certain sense, she is powerless to avert what is coming her way, and so the play ends in tragedy. How different to this is the role of the woman in Megillat Esther! Esther is acutely aware of the lure of ‘fate’. In Chapter four, after agreeing to attempt to save the Jews from Haman’s plans, Esther says….. “and if I perish, I perish”. If I am powerless in the hands of fate, she seems to say, then that is what will be. However the way Esther acts is very different to this. She carefully and purposefully takes action, taking the future of her people into her own hands. Fate is in Esther’s control, rather than vice versa.
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The difference between the two women in our parallel stories is that Esther is a woman who rules fate, and Desdemona is one ruled by fate. Or to use Soloveitchikian language, Desdemona is a ‘woman of fate’; Esther is a ‘woman of destiny’, because she takes what could so easily have been her fate by the horns and enacts salvation for herself and her people.
The book of Esther tells the story of one of the first chapters of Jewish history in which God no longer speaks to humanity through prophets. It comes at a point in Jewish history that Rav Soloveitchik describes as “the sunset of the glorious day of prophecy”. God is no longer tangible in the same way that God was before. It is fitting, then, that Esther’s story is described as one of hester panim, one in which God’s face is hidden. And it is also fitting that Esther is a woman who steps up in the absence of abundant divine miracles.
We’re still in that world of hester panim (and God’s face feels particularly hidden in these times). Our world is one without obvious divine miracles, and like Esther, people today are called upon to step up and take our destiny into our own hands to mould our own future – to be Esther-like rather than Desdemona-like. This is a worthy aspiration. However it should be mentioned in this closing that with every effort in the world, sometimes our influence is limited. In the Megillah, Esther cannot reverse the King’s initial decree, only bring about another decree which neutralises its impact. Being Esther, a woman of destiny, doesn’t mean being invincible. It means taking what comes face on and being an active rather than passive passenger on the journey of life. May we all be able to be like Esther in this regard.
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