Against Ahasuerus, Mordecai
discovered that two men had started plotting;
he learned about this as a private spy,
from paper that they both had used for blotting,
which Mordecai was able to decipher—
a gifted linguist working as detective:
he knew all tongues from Harrisburg to Haifa,
in not a single one was he defective.
Both traitors he would very closely follow,
by clues they gave a Clouseau-like masseur,
who orbited Shushan’s walls like Apollo.
At birth named Ishtar, Esther was Hadassah,
a name that labeled her as Jew.
she never told her royal rich harasser
before he, sexually, her knew,
by him not queried or identified
as Jewish. Cosmopolitan she thought
was safer, and thus always tried
to seem as Persian as a Persian ought.
Role models whom she emulated
were harem heroines, not wives of priests,
but though she thought she was assimilated
she didn’t think in fact all men were beasts,
as many liberated women thought
within the walls where people shopped in Shushan,
for she respected what she had been taught,
though her identity caused some confusion.
Contrast this with her cousin Mordecai,
who was her guardian husband: it would seem
he changed his name from Marduk to deny
allegiance to the Persians, whose regime
he always with derision would regard:
“Please call me Mordecai the Jew,” he’d say.
To say this word for Esther was most hard.
That’s why she would prefer the sobriquet
that she chose for herself, I mean Hadassah,
regarding Esther as the name of slave,
so only her rude royal rich harasser
would call her by the name her parents gave.
The king, of course, was sleeping while men plotted,
by strong wine that he loved intoxicated,
and by his many lovely wives besotted.
The complex where he lived was always gated
though open to his eunuchs and his wives,
a different woman in his bed each night:
he’d choose them for his harem from the dives
where he’d go incognito, out of sight.
When M learned of the plot, without delay
he went to the Intelligence of Persians,
notoriously known as PIA,
to which all dissidents had great aversions
for fear of torture used on men suspected
of antifundamentalistic treason.
Some captivated Jews we know defected,
of course heroic, but a rational reason
for torture—if you know that there’s a bomb
that may blow up and kill you in the palace,
it isn’t right to wait with great aplomb
till terrorists explode the bomb with malice.
The king declined to give the just reward
he’d promised for revealing both the plotters:
his courtiers said the king could not afford
to pay it to a Jew: “They are all rotters!”
But when one night he tossed and turned in bed,
in Shushan sleepless, maybe God behind him,
he asked to hear what Mordecai had said,
and so the minister chose to remind him
that Mordecai had managed once to foil
a dangerous plot that would have killed the king,
and sharply brought down price of all the oil
which helped to keep the kingdom in the swing.
When he was told the name of the detective
who’d learned about the terror from his spying,
he asked why the reward had been defective,
and realized that his courtiers were lying
when they all claimed the man was quite unworthy
of honors that the king was now proposing;
the king though was in fact quite down-to-earthy,
and even falling drunk he was imposing.
So Mordecai received the honors due him,
and rode the king’s horse wearing the king’s cloak.
Though many anti-Semites tried to boo him
he nobly took their protests as a joke.
Hadassah, too, regarded each protester
as ludicrous and very soon reverted
to that name with which she was born, Queen Esther
her title…and she never was converted,
unlike some other leaders who were Jewish,
(examples are too common to be cited)
she always waved the flag that’s white and bluish,
supported Arsenal, not M. United—-
for even in those days it was the Gunners
whom Jews supported all the world around;
the Persians sent throughout the land their runners
to give results of matches on each ground.
She led a life that made her uncle proud,
for she was more than Queen, she was a writer,
more popular with all the liberal crowd
than Mordecai, conservative and fighter,
who therefore disapproved of them in journals
where left-wing types give their opinion,
for Mordecai preferred to sit with colonels
and with the Orthodox prayed in a minyan.
You’ll notice there’s one name I did not mention,
that of the Agagite, the biggest foe
of all the Jews. I’ve chosen by abstention
all reference to him hereby to forgo.
I could have mentioned him a lot of times,
but have restrained myself: it rhymes with layman,
but though I’m often driven by such rhymes,
I have restrained myself with my no-namin’.
You find too often, reading the Megillah,
his name, but since I greatly hate the beggar
who wished to be of all the Jews the killer
let my omission here growl like the gregger
that drowns out every reference to the rascal
whose name the Torah tells us to blot out,
thus making Adar’s Purim a pre-Pascal
celebration. It seems quite without
God’s name, Queen Esther’s Book that is twice read
on Purim, just as, next month, on Passover
we don’t eat the least crumbs of leavened bread,
not even cakes we saved as a leftover,
commanded by an unseen God whose “Name”
we never utter, loathing to reveal it.
I’ve tried here in these in fact the same:
God’s name unwritten in this profane writ.
It is a name that any faithful Jews,
who think they know it, quietly conceal,
a name that none of them will ever use,
how to pronounce it always most unsure,
except the High Priest on Yom Kippur who
expresses it when very clean and pure,
but other Jews should never ever do.
On 3/17/24 Rabbi David Silber suggested in a Torah in Motion lecture that the absence of God in the Purim megillah reflects that He is ironically—–perhaps as a warning—–replaced by a mortal ruler, Ahasuerus, who is overcome by two mortals, Mordecai and Esther, whose names are, etymologically, transformations of names of local alien gods, Marduk and Ishtar, transformed into Mordecai and Esther. As a result, the megillah echoes the way that at the Reed Sea God defeated not only Pharaoh, like Ahasuerus a ruler of exiled Jews, but, as God tells Moses before the Tenth Plague, intends to execute judgments וּבְכׇל־אֱלֹהֵ֥י מִצְרַ֛יִם, on all the gods of Egypt (Exod. 12:2). This victory is recalled in Hallel in Ps. 118:14 when it states עָזִּי וְזִמְרָת יָהּ. God is My strength and song, a phrase that echoes words of the Song of the Sea, Exod. 15:2, sung after God defeated not only the Egyptians but their gods, whom the Reed Sea drowned together with them.
God’s defeat of Pharaoh and his gods at the Reed Sea is echoed by the defeat of Ahasuerus. The decree against the Jews is defeated by Judeans who are led by two Jews whose names echo names of Ahasuerus’ gods. Ahasuerus’ disorderly government of misrule is led by a quasi-magician called Haman, a Persian magus who echoes the magicians on whom Pharaoh relied—the link explains why Haman relied on lots, which denote the black magic that provides Purim with its name!
Purim culminates with its celebration in the Passover seder, a word that means “order.” The climax of the seder is when Hallel is recited, with Ps. 118:14 recalling Exod. 15:2.
“They were the host site, but also very much partners in this,” she said. “They were fully invested emotionally and financially in helping us make this happen.”
“Before Oct. 7, life was very simple and normal,” Lee said. “I had a full-time job, and I was full of motivation and very busy with my days. Life after Oct. 7 has been hard, and I’ve had depression. It’s hard to find a spark of any type of motivation. I barely have any discipline within my life, and I feel like my life shattered and now I need to pick up the pieces bit by bit.”
“There was this whole idea of, ‘We will dance again,’” Hepner said. “It’s a real thing.”