“I suspect that if President Bush suddenly declared martial law and demanded that the most beautiful Mormon women be sent to him for his sexual use, members and church leaders would rightly fight that immoral order.”

Unless, that is, they remember their 12th Article of Faith, which tells them they believe in being subject to secular rulers of all sorts. And if their rulers are wrong, they need not worry, since the responsibilities for any bad acts will be on their leaders’ heads, not their own. My advice would be not to worry about any of this and to be strictly compliant.

Isn’t the moral absolution we earn through unquestioning obedience just wonderful?

Aaron B

Aaron B

In in the March/April 2002 issue of Tikkun, Bonna Devorah Haberman offers an activist reading of the Megillah that is worth careful scrutiny — see http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0203/article/020314b.html Haberman’s reading suggests that Esther did *not* adopt the norms of the society she found herself in, but rather subverted them.

Comparing the story of Esther to that of Abraham, she notes, “While the rabbis did often stress that one of the greatnesses of our Torah is that the protagonists are fully human, surely they did not intend that we emulate their shortcomings. We refine our own humanity by revealing their assumptions, and analyzing and engaging with their struggles. The goal of this interpretation is neither outrage nor alienation, but to embrace empathy and to resolve to improve our own behavior and that of our societies. There is evidence of this process in the text.”

That process of change may be the proper lesson of Esther, rather than the lessons Kaimi suggests.

Here’s the map, by the way:

http://neiljenkins.net/LDSSinglesMap/

(1) The name of God does not appear in this book, the only book of scripture where this is the case

(2) The book describes the origin of Purim, the only Jewish holiday (until you get to Chanukah, I suppose) that doesn’t originate in the Pentateuch.

I’m conflicted about your comments, Kaimi. On the one hand, you have to play the hand you are dealt, and Esther couldn’t exactly go to Amnesty International and try to get the international community to rally to her cause. It would have been reprehensible for her to have the king’s ear and *not* use it to save her people. On the other hand . . . I agree with everything you said.

I think the only quibble that I would have with you is that I don’t see Esther starting out from the beginning with the thought, “I will use my beauty to bed the king, then he’ll have to listen to me.” I see her more as an innocent bystander, taken into sexual servitude, who then actually took great risk to tell the king what she thought.

In other words, she had no other options.

On another note, the night my wife and I were engaged, I took her to a synagogue in Park City where we celebrated Purim and judged children’s costumes. Since we were non-Jewish visitors, I think they saw us as impartial judges. :)

So I just want to hiss and boo every time I hear the name Haman. Purim is fun!

Vashti is the real hero of the story, if I’m remembering the name of the king’s wife who refused to parade herself before his partying friends. Vashti must be one of the first feminists on record and she refuses to submit to the cultural rules. Unfortunately she suffers the consequences. Or maybe she was fortunate after all … would you want to stay married to this hard-drinking, hard-partying chauvinist king?

I think Esther could be perceived as an example of the idea that sometimes rules and perhaps even commandments must be broken for the greater good. A sort of ultimate pragmatism. But I immediately see a problem with this conclusion — how could Esther have known that she was needed for the purpose of saving the Jewish people when she first entered the beauty contest? Also, as the faithful are wont to say, the Lord could have found another means to save his people. So what Esther did should not have been necessary. I don’t think Esther’s path was the way she was fore-ordained to go… but since she was there it was convenient for the Lord to use her in this way.

This is also a story that really packs on the principle of vengeance. What do you do with your enemies? You find a way to get them killed before they kill you … and you make sure it’s a public spectacle so that everyone get’s the point. For those who support public executions, this would be a resource to cite.

It might be interesting to see a comparison of King David and Esther. These are both figures who are very pragmatic, politically inclined, calculating, sexually-charged … and they wreak a lot of death and dstruction on their enemies (though it’s usually justified somehow). If we knew more about Esther’s life she could be a sort of female counterpart to David.

It’s always interesting to me, when I see a set of scriptures in the temple, to realize how many stories there are in the Hebrew Bible like this. You could be sitting in the temple, a sacred place, and be reading stories that involve an unbelievable amount of violence, gore, sexuality, etc. Somehow seeing them bound in white leather just makes it even more ironic to me.

It’s also stories like this that make me wonder at the objections so many LDS folks have to the mixture of sacred and the violent. When the movie “Brigham City” first came out, and I saw people objecting to images of the sacrament side-by-side with images of horrific violence, it seemed to me that these folks weren’t really in-tune with the scriptures and the images that they place continually before our eyes. The sacred and the violent (and sometimes the sexual as well) are constantly before our eyes anytime we open the scriptures. So we should be more used to it and not so surprised or morally horrified when these themes appear side-by-side in other places. I’m not saying we should seek them out… but we should be better prepared to deal with them than we sometimes say we are.

My final conclusion: It’s not just the book of Esther that has these strange, wacky, unusual or seemingly out-of-tune moral lessons we could learn. The scriptures in general (perhaps particularly the Hebrew Bible) are chock-full of these sorts of stories and lessons. It’s just a matter of being open to that wacky and unusual perspective in the first place.