[Previous sermon: "January 19, 2007 - Va'era"] [Next sermon: "Shabbat Shemini - Imus and the Evil Tongue"]

Shabbat Zachor - Tetzave, March 2, 2007

Purim is not just for children. Even as a kid, I remember sensing the sitra achra, the frightening side, of this holiday. In part, it was that the people pictured on the groggers don't have eyeballs, which made them look like sinister zombies to me. Moreover, it was the sheer chaos of Purim that unnerved the type A, anal retentive part of me that likes control and order. Chaos, noise and irresponsible drinking are all prescriptions for the observance of Purim- not so kid friendly when you really think about it. But its like the Simpsons, or any mature cartoon. Kids understand the simple plot and can have fun with it, but adults know why its funny, ironic or painfully true. Similarly, if you look at the Story of Esther with an adult lens, you notice the humor, the nuance, the irony and the messages which are jam packed into this story.

For one thing, Ahasuerus is a sorry excuse for a king. The opening verses of the Megillah suggest that it takes him three years on the throne of his 127 province kingdom to get together his inaugural ball! It becomes even more evident how impotent Ahasuerus is when his queen Vashti refuses his order to appear at the ball. It just goes to prove that this great king, protector of the realm, defender of the empire, ruler of Persia, actually controls nothing, not even his own household. And throughout the narrative of the Megillah, we are reminded of the same thing. For example, the so-called king never makes his own decisions. Memuchan, Haman, and even Ahasuerus' servants who suggest the beauty contest, "advise" him constantly. And whatever they say, goes. Ahasuerus is probably the only king in history, who never says "no." When he sends letters out to the kingdom reminding the men that they are the rulers of their households or issues decrees to the kingdom, he has to send these to each province in their own language. This is repeated over and over. As powerful as he may be in position to be, Ahasuerus hasn't even been successful in establishing Persian, his own tongue, as the language of the realm.

While the character of Ahasuerus as powerless king might be laughable on its own, the irony ratchets up a few notches when we learn that the Persia is a monarchy governed by protocol. The Hebrew word, dat, which comes from a Persian toot for "custom" or "protocol" shows up in the Megillah 20 times. (And except for one verse in the book of Daniel, it doesn't appear in any other books of the Hebrew Bible!) This would seem to indicate that everything in Ahasuerus' kingdom was supposed to be done "properly" and that the system was orderly and just. But we learn as the story progresses that this kingdom of properness and protocol is just as illusory as Ahasuerus' power. A few examples. The text gives us no reason, no protocol for Haman's ascendancy to his position of grand vizier. It happens, admittedly by the text, suddenly and out of the blue. Moreover, what does Haman do in that position? Decide that the one guy that doesn't bow to him, even though everyone else did, should die and so should all his people. In other words, a entire nation should be wiped out for Haman's ego. And again, we just have to laugh at the way he executes his diabolical plan. He doesn't pick a day with importance to the crime, like the anniversary of the day that Mordecai refused to bow.

He doesn't even pick a Jewish holiday, to stick it to Mordecai's people. He decides by casting purim- a lottery. Despite the stated value of dat, of properness and protocol, to the empire, readers of the Megillah see right through the helter skelter way in which power and impotence, success and failure, even life and death are handled most capriciously in the Persian palace. And to magnify this point even further, just when we think the story is over and the evil villain has been undone and all will live happily ever after, we learn the damage cannot be undone. When Esther pleads with Ahasuerus that another decree be sent out to reverse the one sent by Haman to annihilate the Jews, the answer is that no royal decree can be revoked, even by the selfsame king. Not only is Ahasuerus impotent in his own right, the protocol itself limits the ability of justice to be carried out. And this leads to the true sitra achra, dark side, of the story, the chapters from which we usually shield our children because they are so troubling. Because Mordecai, Esther and the king couldn't revoke the decree, the Jews are instead, by a new royal decree, permitted to raise up arms and defend themselves. They kill 75,000 Persians on the thirteenth day of Adar, the day they themselves were supposed to be destroyed.

Its bloody and its unsatisfying as a fairy tale, isn't it? Unless we see there is some message we must unmask, revealing the true Book of Esther, a cautionary tale. Perhaps part of what we adults are supposed to see in this story about a kingdom far, far away, in which reality is so obviously upside down and ridiculous, is that its not so distant from our own reality. The powerful are oftentimes mere puppets. Corruption resides not only with individuals who let their egos guide them, but corruption also can be found within the system. And all that is a recipe for brewing injustice, and fomenting violence and death. One needs only to look at the graft and corruption within our own government, the intransigence and inability to reverse strategies of which our own leaders are guilty, and how the ego of one can drive the fate and future of countless innocent others.

At the beginning of this week, I took the opportunity to lobby our 11th district representatives in the State Assembly to abolish the death penalty in Maryland. Regardless of whether or not one feels it is the only fair punishment for capital offenses, and whether or not one feels the death penalty sufficiently expiates the community of evil, and whether or not one feels that it should be at the disposal of the courts as a deterrent for crime, we know the system is not functioning. DNA exonerations keep showing us that the system of reaching death row is corrupt and tainted. While Maryland is not the worst offender, as Mayor Martin O'Malley testified last week, Are any of us willing to sacrifice a member of our own family -- wrongly convicted, sentenced and executed -- in order to secure the execution of five rightly convicted murders? And even if we were, could that public policy be called "just"?" Nationally, between 1973 and 2003, 95 death row prisoners were exonerated, 8 in 2000. Moreover, there is the issue of race. African Americans are disproportionately represented on death row. Eighty five per cent of death row inmates are there for murdering white victims while among all murder victims, only 50% are white. In addition, where you live determines whether or not you are likely to be sentenced to death.

Baltimore County seeks death penalty in every case where the law allows it, whereas the same is not true in Baltimore City. According to James Leibman, a professor at Columbia University Law School, who studied death penalty cases, there were errors in 2/3 of them, and 68% overturned on appeal. The caution we are to remember in the Book of Esther is that we cannot create a empire, a nation, a community in which the rules don't lead to fairness, justice and peace. After all, how different an ending to the story did Mordecai make with his royal edict than would have come to pass with Haman's? 75,000 lives makes this story remain a tragedy, and not a triumph.

This week's Torah and Haftarah portions focus on the building of the Tabernacle and the Temple. As Yitz Greenberg has reminded us, the Temple is a microcsm of the world that Judaism seeks to create. The building was consecrated to life. Inside, no war was permitted; no death or dead body or even a person in contact with a dead body was allowed to enter. (Numbers 19) No hunger or poverty marred this building. Those who were better off were commanded to include the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the Levite in their feasts and celebrations. (Deut. 16)

The Temple was a place of moral purity. All who sought to come in were asked, "Who shall ascend Adonai's holy mountain? Who shall be permitted to stand in God's holy place? (Ps 24) They had to answer: "One who has clean hands and pure heart, who has not taken a false oath...or sworn deceitfully." (ibid.) Before giving that answer, the person would have to correcct whatever behavior contradicted the statement or face the searing flame of God's judgment for lying in God's presence at the holiest place on earth.

Of course, we Jews have not always lived up to these expectations. That is why we read and remember the details of the construction of the Temple: to hold up for ourselves the blueprint, literally and spiritually, of the model place- the place that one could come to, no matter how mired one became in the imperfect systems of our own world, to be reminded there was a vision for a better world, a world of justice and peace. As long as we have and read these stories, and we dream that the world actually can look like the holy places described in Scripture, then perhaps we will not yield to the injustice we see around us, and we will build again.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri