Jewish Political Responsibility in the Light of Megillat Esther

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Reading Megillat Esther without midrashim frees one from (some) external biases. The result is not an objective reading, but rather one that reflects internal biases. This is not bad; we each have unique contributions to make to the understanding of Torah based davka on our unique experiences, on our subjectivity. But recognizing that the goal is to relate our full selves to the text can make reengagement with midrashim liberating rather than constricting. This essay tries to model such an experience.

I have always been puzzled by 1:13-14, immediately following Vashti’s refusal of the king’s summons.

The king said to the sages, knowers of the times     

because that is the royal responsibility before all those who know custom and law

and those closest to him

Karshena, Shetar, Admata, Tarshish, Meres, Marsena, Memukhan

the seven officers of Persia and Medea

those with direct access to the king

who sit in the front row of the government.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר הַמֶּ֔לֶךְ לַחֲכָמִ֖ים יֹדְעֵ֣י הָֽעִתִּ֑ים         

כִּי־כֵן֙ דְּבַ֣ר הַמֶּ֔לֶךְ לִפְנֵ֕י כָּל־יֹדְעֵ֖י דָּ֥ת וָדִֽין:

וְהַקָּרֹ֣ב אֵלָ֗יו

כַּרְשְׁנָ֤א שֵׁתָר֙ אַדְמָ֣תָא תַרְשִׁ֔ישׁ מֶ֥רֶס מַרְסְנָ֖א מְמוּכָ֑ן    

שִׁבְעַ֞ת שָׂרֵ֣י׀ פָּרַ֣ס וּמָדַ֗י

רֹאֵי֙ פְּנֵ֣י הַמֶּ֔לֶךְ

הַיֹּשְׁבִ֥ים רִאשֹׁנָ֖ה בַּמַּלְכֽוּת:

Traditional readers know that Memukhan is Haman, and that this is the moment that justifies his aggrandizement at the outset of Chapter 3. Whether one accepts this identification or not, Memukhan’s advice must somehow lead to Haman’s rise, or else why is it in the story?

The other six officers are stick figures – they exist only to emphasize that Memukhan is the only one bold enough to speak. In other words: all seven understand that Achashverosh does not really wish to consult them, and Memukhan is not seeking to offer advice. The goal is to say something that the king already agrees with. Memukhan is the only one willing to gamble that he properly understands the king’s desired outcome. (This is the gamble Haman loses when the king asks him how to reward an anonymous someone. He says exactly what the king wants to hear, but misses the context.)

Another midrash sees Vashti as a daughter of the previous dynasty. Achashverosh had so far overthrown her family but not the structure they created; Memukhan understands that this confrontation was his way of taking the revolution one step further. 

It seems clear that the seven named figures held the seven offices that formally guaranteed direct access to the king and front-bench seats in Parliament. But were they the same as the “sages, knowers of the times”, and the “knowers of custom and law”?

 Megillah 12b says they were not.

“The king said to the sages” – Who were the sages? The rabbis;

“knowers of the times” – who know when to make leap years and establish months (= the Sanhedrin).

He said to them:

Judge (Vashti) for me!

They said (to themselves):  

How shall we act?

If we say to him: “Kill her!” – tomorrow, his wine will wear off and he will demand (revenge for) her from us!

If we say to him: “Let her be!” – we’ll be (accused of) disrespecting the monarchy!

They said to him:

From the day that the Temple was destroyed and we were exiled from our land – the capacity for wise policy has been taken from us, and we cannot deal with capital cases. Go ask Amon and Moav . . .

Immediately “the ones closest to him: Karshena etc.”

ויאמר המלך לחכמים – מאן חכמים? רבנן;

ידעי העתים – שיודעין לעבר שנים ולקבוע חדשים.

אמר להו:

דיינוה לי! 

אמרו:

היכי נעביד?

נימא ליה: ‘קטלה”‘ – למחר פסיק ליה חמריה ובעי לה מינן!

נימא ליה: ‘שבקה’ – קא מזלזלה במלכותא!

אמרו לו:

מיום שחרב בית המקדש וגלינו מארצנו – ניטלה עצה ממנו, ואין אנו יודעין לדון דיני נפשות. זיל לגבי עמון ומואב . . .

מיד – והקרב אליו כרשנא שתר אדמתא תרשיש.   

    Achashverosh turned first to the Sanhedrin to ask what to do about Vashti. When they abdicate, he turns to the Seven; six of them are silent, and Memukhan seizes his chance.

The fundamental claim underlying Memukhan = Haman and knowers of the times ≠ the Seven is that the Megillah tells the story of a constitutional monarchy devolving into an arbitrary autocracy. The sages and the Seven never appear again in the story. Achashverosh moves on to make genocidal decisions without consulting them, or anyone. No one gets direct access to the king, and there are no front benches, only a king sitting in a throne room with the unchallenged power to kill anyone who dares approach him without advance permission. (In other words, Achashverosh’s throne room becomes the Holy of Holies.)

Yet what should the rabbis have done? Their analysis was reasonable – it was entirely possible that Achashverosh would blame them either way, or even that he was deliberately setting them up to be blamed.

Maybe we should praise them for recognizing that they had no role. In fact, the Sanhedrin did the same thing in Israel toward the end of  the Second Temple – they moved out of their Temple office (the Chamber of Hewed Stones) in order to give up jurisdiction over capital cases, so as to avoid being forced to decide between the pro- and anti-Roman factions of their constituency, or perhaps to avoid being directly pressured by the Romans to execute Jewish rebels.

But I think it is much more likely that the Talmud is blaming the Sanhedrin for the rise of Haman.

Granted, the genocide doesn’t actually happen, and there is room for someone to argue that the Sanhedrin’s failure was a necessary part of G-d’s subtle plan leading to Redemption. Yes but – the moral of the story then has to be that our job is to do what’s right, and not to try to anticipate His plan. Can you imagine the Sanhedrin thinking: “Let’s bring on an attempted genocide, so that we can be saved by a Jewish queen, so that in the next generation or so we’ll get permission to rebuild a Jewish state”? We believe that all paths, given infinite duration, will lead to Redemption; it makes little sense to say that Redemption could not have happened without X just because X happened first, even if you can construct a causal chain.  

What should the Sanhedrin have done? I suggest that the problem was that they asked the wrong question. They asked: What answer can we give that will protect us? The right question to ask was: What is the ethical and moral answer? That might lead to secondary questions such as: Must we tell the king that answer, even if he might kill us for it immediately or eventually? Is there a safe way to tell him? But they skipped the ethical deliberation stage and went straight to pragmatic political considerations.

(Another midrashic tradition asserts that Vashti was guilty of horrific and antisemitic sexual crimes against Jewish women. She got what she deserved. The problem was that the king wanted her punished for the entirely different “crime” of resisting the king’s demand that she exhibit herself publicly as a sexual object. Condemning her on the king’s terms ironically entailed condoning her actual evil deeds.)

As with Memukhan = Haman, accepting the point of the Midrash does not require accepting its historical claim literally. The Jews were a politically influential constituency whether or not the king specifically asked the Sanhedrin. They were also a desperately vulnerable constituency (perhaps because they were stateless, or perhaps their vulnerability would have been accentuated had their state also been vulnerable). When public questions of justice came up, they had to choose whether to focus on their responsibility or rather their vulnerability. They chose their vulnerability, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Let me be clear. Achashverosh was not a democratic leader. But at the outset of the Megillah, he functioned within a rules-based order to which he was in some way accountable. By the middle of the Megillah, he permits genocide for the sake of a bribe; by the end, he permits anticipatory mass killing out of sexual jealousy; and there is no hint that anything or anyone can constrain his choices.

The Jews by themselves could not have prevented this. They were in a Prisoner’s Dilemma; only a collective insistence by all the kingdom’s constituencies on following the rules could constrain Achashverosh. But some, perhaps many, perhaps all of the kingdom’s other constituencies were antisemitic and might cheerfully risk freeing the king from all constraints for the sake of killing the Jews. Or they might fall into the grip of fantasies in which the king was already giving the Jews unjust and undeserved influence. That is to say, they might take our midrash literally and believe that the king submitted all crucial policy decisions to the Elders of Zion, who in turn advised him solely in terms of their own interests.

All this argued for saying nothing and keeping our heads down except on matters that affected our interests directly. But the outcome was that we were not consulted, even or especially, on matters that affected our survival.

Some recent books have read Megillat Esther as a political handbook for surviving in the Diaspora, and maybe even taken Mordekhai and Esther as role models for a Jewish state seeking to survive in an international jungle. That may well be true. What I’ve tried to show is that these midrashim offer a plausible reading of the story in which the preferred strategy – with no guaranteed result – is to take on responsibility for maintaining the rules and norms necessary for a society to be capable of restraining the arbitrary exercise of power.

This is an almost unapologetically midrashic reading. That is to say, I make no apologies for using midrash, but I try quite hard to argue that the midrashim are exposing genuine aspects of the text.

My interpretation of those aspects is of course heavily influenced by my internal biases; your application of my interpretation to contemporary life will of course be influenced by your own biases. I ask two things: First, that you consider the idea that I raised at the outset that midrash, and all traditional interpretation, can be experienced as liberating rather than constraining. Second, that you evaluate my interpretation first as interpretation, to the best of your ability, and then afterward – if and only if you think it has some claim to truth – consider how it might influence your sense of your own religious responsibilities in our world.

What Does G-d Think of Yitro’s Advice?

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Rambam writes (Introduction to the Commentary on the Mishnah) that the tasks of a prophet in the name of G-d can be divided in two. The first part is

That he prophesy in the name of Hashem

declare and caution regarding His service

and say that Hashem added a mitzvah or subtracted a mitzvah

from all the mitzvot included in the Torah.

It makes no difference whether this is done by adding or subtracting from the text

or rather by adding or subtracting from the received interpretation.

However, anyone after Mosheh Rabbeinu seeking to fill this prophetic role is by definition a false prophet and liable to execution. Post-Mosaic prophets are constrained by the Mosaic verse that Torah “is not in Heaven … rather the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart …”, which Rambam understands to refer to Written Torah (ironically in your mouth because recited) and Oral Torah (in your heart because derived intellectually). But while Mosheh lived, the Torah was still in Heaven, and Mosheh Rabbeinu himself continually added mitzvot and interpreted prior mitzvot via prophecy.

The second set of prophetic tasks is

To call to the service of G-d and caution regarding His Torah,

and to command people regarding observance of the Torah without addition or subtraction

as the last of the prophets said: Remember the Torah of Mosheh My servant . .

and to guarantee good things to those who observe it and punishment to those who transgress it

as did Yeshayah and Yirimiyah and Yechezkel and others

and to command commands and caution cautions that are not about religious matters,

for example to say ‘Make war on City X (or Nation X) now!’

as Shmuel commanded Shaul to make war against Amalek then,

or to caution not to kill . . .

Rambam may derive this expansive list from Mosheh’s self-justification to Yitro in Shemot 18:15-16.

Mosheh said to his father in-law:

Because the nation comes to me to lidrosh Elo-him

When they have a matter – it comes to me

I will judge between a man and his fellow

I will make known the chukkei haElo-him andHis torot.

We can read this as Mosheh as providing a long description of the single task of judging lawsuits (Rashbam) or read verse 16 as a detailed explanation of lidrosh Elo-him from verse 15 (Shadal, HaKtav veHaKabbalah). But I suggest that Rambam read lidrosh Elo-him as a separate phrase that referred specifically to prophetic statements about vital national policy questions.  This reading is also adopted by Seforno:

The nesi’im and the heads of the generation,

who come regarding the affairs of the public and how to organize them,

necessarily come to me,

because they encamped at the instruction of Hashem

Ramban fundamentally agrees as to the meaning of lidrosh Elo-him, but he provides a very different list of non-religious matters.

“Because the nation comes to me to lidrosh Elo-him” –

to pray regarding their sicknesses and to make known what was lost to them,

because this is called drishat Elo-him

and this is what they do with prophets, as Scripture says:

Earlier in Israel a man would say this when he went lidrosh Elo-him:‘Come, we’ll go to the seer’

so too: You will be doresh Elo-him from him as follows: ‘Will I survive this illness?’

meaning to pray for him and make known to him whether his prayer was heeded.

For Ramban, Mosheh’s time was not being taken up by vital national affairs of war and peace, but rather by quotidian pastoral tasks such as finding lost objects and praying for the sick. 

Netziv denies that praying for the sick was a prophetic function; one went to the prophet to find out what would happen, not to change it. However, he admits that one might respond to a prophetic doom by praying, and thereby seeking to change it, as Chizkiyah successfully did when Yeshayah prophesied his death.

But the most radical reorientation of the phrase lidrosh Elo-him I’ve found is in Keli Yakar and Or HaChayyim. They understand Mosheh as arguing to Yitro that it was necessary for him to sit as the sole judge, and inevitable that people would come to him regardless of how many other judges he appointed, because he judged on the basis of substantive rather than procedural truth. Mosheh judged not on the basis of heuristic rules and eyewitnesses, but rather based on what G-d told him had actually happened, and on what G-d told him would be the most just outcome.

Mosheh thought that people would never give up the confidence and certainty that their case had been decided justly. Yitro countered that people will give up a great many things to avoid standing in long lines.

One can see Mosheh as idealistic about human nature in this reading, and Yitro as cynically realistic. But I don’t see it that way. Rather, the real issue between them was that Moshe did not realize that time is a cost, and therefore correct justice inefficiently administered imposes unjust costs on both parties. Rabbi Abraham Halbfinger of blessed memory taught me this over and over again with regard to the Boston Beit Din.

Take an illustration from a different context: sometimes it takes so long to look at replays that the game itself is damaged, even though the specific decision is ultimately made correctly.

Or in a different beit din context: Suppose you implement a policy that every convert or child of a converted mother must have their Jewish status reexamined from scratch before being allowed to marry a Jew. Even if you eventually decide every case correctly, the psychological costs imposed on people whose status is left in doubt for long periods are so great that IMHO they overwhelmingly outweigh marginal improvements in accuracy.

Even worse, under such a policy no convert of child of a converted woman can ever be certain that their case won’t be reopened in the future, possibly under judges with different legal standards, or after crucial evidence gets lost.

I sadly concede that this policy has been implemented on and off in Israeli Rabbinic courts, and that some elements of the United States government seem now to be implementing a similar policy with regard to naturalized citizens. (Let us be clear: in Israel, specific ethnic groups may also be asked to prove that their parents were born Jews rather than converts. These policies eventually give one group the power to threaten everyone else with social and legal exclusion. Within the halakhic community, a group in the United States some decades ago goal tried to achieve that power through bullying and bribery. Conversion is the immigration/naturalization policy of the Jewish people.)

Perhaps Ramban correctly understands what Mosheh means by lidrosh Elo-him. Yitro responds that Mosheh is shortchanging the nation by dealing with so many details, even though he deals with them better than any substitute could.  The conceptual understanding of prophecy remains the same, but Yitro convinces Mosheh to budget much more of his time for national issues, in other words to implement the reading of Rambam and Seforno.

A more radical reading is that Mosheh in principle opposed the idea of lo bashomayim hi.  He did not understand that heteronomy is a cost, because tzalmei Elokim should, to the extent possible, play a role in determining the rules they live by. He thought that ideally everything would be directly decided by G-d. 

Yitro shakes Mosheh’s worldview by pointing out that G-d had not told him what was going through the minds of the people waiting on line, or how they would react if the system changed. Perhaps He would not have answered Mosheh if asked, because G-d did not want to decide everything at the cost of human responsibility and freedom. Mosheh shows that he understands this by not asking G-d before implementing Yitro’s advice.