Jeremy Rosen
Purim: Fact and Fiction

Jeremy Rosen - Purim: Fact and Fiction

- Hello, everybody. Happy Purim to everyone. I hope you’re still sober. The story of Purim is an amazing one. It has so many different layers. We’re not certain either historically, or if you like, from a literary point of view, what its origin was, is, and what it’s supposed to be. Is it a historical record? Is it on the other hand satire? Is it a response to Mardi Gras and chaos in the world? Indeed, is it a religious book altogether because God’s name doesn’t appear in it at all? So I want today to try, as it is Purim, to explore the different layers. But most of all, I want to show you what a modern book it is. How up to date it is in so many different ways. The first theme on the face of it seems to be one of a satire on the Persian empire, on a record of a king who is drunk most of the time, who loses his temper with his wife and makes unreasonable demands, he’s surrounded by all those different advisors who are pulling him in different directions, and he doesn’t know which way to go, of incredible insecurity that the men are so upset that a woman actually stands up to them, and they have to go and enforce male control over the family. There’s the whole question of beauty, and beauty is made fun of because the language that is used to describe the beauty process that the girls have to go through before they appear before the king uses exactly the same words that are used in the Bible to describe the process of mummifying. And that’s also part of the disguise. Everybody is in some form of disguise or not. Merely the idea of having a beauty competition to find a wife sounds utterly ridiculous. And then the laws of the Persian empire are ridiculous.

Who believes, what’s a sense of having given a law you can’t take it back, you can’t retract. That doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. And then the insecurity of the Persian Empire, the fact that there are always plots going on behind the scenes to dethrone the king. Then you have the kind of the Lady Macbeth of the plot. You have Zeresh, the wife of Haman, who’s urging him on. And then when folk go the right way, she’s out of it because she’s only in it for the money and the power in the first place. So you have the idea of the trophy wife. But you also have the idea of manipulation, of how do you make your way in the political world without deception, without playing games of one sort or another? So these are some of the themes that are related in the book of Esther, but essentially it starts off with the idea of, how do you deal with your empire? Do you deal with your empire as Achashverosh does, is by first of all making sure that the people living in the provinces are taken care of, or do you think that people in the capital should be taken care of? In the capital, they are the biggest threat to you in one hand. On the other hand, you can always deal with them. But what about the people on the outside? And why do you think that all the time you have to be drunk in order to make political decisions? The drink flows everywhere, all kinds, as much as you want, no limitation. And of course, that clouds your mind and makes it impossible for you to come to the right political decision. In one sense, you could say that this is a book about women, about the role that women play, and the different roles that women can play.

Do you take the line of Vashti, “I’m not going to stand for any nonsense,” or do you take the more passive line of Esther who is quiet, who doesn’t say anything, who works behind the scenes, who finds ways of making sure that the king is on her side? And then you have this notion that we are familiar with today, the idea that women should be treated as equals and not to be treated as merely physical objects. In addition, issues that crop up. Where does the power lie? Does it lie in the monarch, or does it lie in the people who are controlling the monarch? Does it lie with the Prime Minister, or does it lie with members of the coalition? Then we have the important issue of, what was the place of Jews within the Persian empire? Now, Jews first arrived in the Persian Empire in the year 597 before the Common Era. And in 597, Nebuchadnezzar had taken the king, Jeconiah, Jehoiachin, Coniah, whatever it was, There are different names from all the time. He’d taken him back to Persia as a hostage, put him in jail because he couldn’t rely on the government in Judea to make the right political decisions. There were two powers, the power of Babylonia, Assyria-Babylonia to the North. There was a power of Egypt to the South. Israel was caught in the middle, and they were constantly buffeted between the two. So whereas Jehoiachin’s brother had supported Egypt and was taken down to Egypt, and that was the end of him, Jehoiachin tried to get in with the Egyptians, but found himself captured by the Babylonians and taken hostage with his royal court and some of the leaders. So 597 before the Common Era, you have the beginning of Jewish settlement in Persia. But then Jehoiachin’s successor, a man called Tzidkiyahu, also rebelled 10 years later against the Babylonians and tried to get in with the Egyptians who let him down again.

And he, this time, was captured trying to run away. His sons were killed before him, and then his eyes were put out, and then he was killed. And then, virtually all the skilled workers of Judea were taken to Persia. And in Persia, they established a community. And the earlier king, Jeconiah, was taken out of jail and made the head of the Exilarch, which was the house of David that ran the Persian Jewish community for the next 1,000 years. So this was an established community in which, whether it was Daniel under the Babylonians, or then when the Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, by the leadership of the Persian government, was studied with Jews of talent and quality. And so Mordecai, for example, is one of the court. He’s a senior guy, a senior politician. In Babylonia, the Jewish community, like any other community, was divided between those who were assimilating, who were marrying into the wider community, and those who were strong with their religious tradition. And with their religious tradition, they now have to create something to replace the lost temple. And so they create a world of study, of coming together, community centres to make up for the loss of any other. So the Babylonian community, which begins then at that time became in fact, the most powerful Jewish community throughout the history of the Jewish people until relatively recently, but even then, they are still Jews there. So no community has had Jews for as long as the Persian community. Under the Persian community, under the Persian regime, thanks to King Cyrus, all religions were treated equally.

All that mattered within this empire from India all the way to the Mediterranean, was that they accepted the authority of the Babylonian, of the Persian authority. So here we are introduced to a situation in which, the Jews find themselves in a position of power, and yet somehow they are still very insecure. Is this insecurity simply because, as in any empire there are rivals or do they sense there’s something beneath the surface? Obviously Mordecai, even though he was within the higher circles of the Persian empire, he must have felt something was going on because when he allowed his niece or some people actually, say his wife to join the beauty parade, he told her not to tell anybody she was Jewish. But why not, if he himself was openly Jewish? Well, one of the reasons historian say is because we know that the Persians never allowed their kings to marry anybody who wasn’t from an an elite aristocratic Persian family. So maybe she had to pretend. But then there’s the question, if Mordecai was feeling that the Jewish community was somehow insecure in Persia, why the heck was he provoking this guy, Haman? Because in fact, according to Jewish law, there’s nothing wrong with bowing down before a political leader or a monarch of some kind of being respectful. So why couldn’t he just do it? Was he really doing this to provoke? The rabbis, like to say, “Well, no, it wasn’t that simple. Basically Haman had an idol and he didn’t want to bow down to the idol.”

But it doesn’t say that in the book at all. In the book it simply says Mordecai just wanted to, if you like, provoke Haman and refuse to bow down. Well, this upset Haman extremely. But Haman’s response to want to kill the Jews raises certain issues. What does Haman say? Haman says, look, there is a nation here who doesn’t abide by your laws, doesn’t abide by your rules, they have their own rules and their own laws, they are scattered throughout the kingdom, so they’re not in one particular the empire, so they’re not in one particular place, what you need them for. Now Achashverosh, as the story goes, I suppose had put the country so much in debt and had spent so much on his parties and he’s having a good time, then he needed money. And so essentially Haman’s argument was, you are going to get a lot of money if you confiscate their property. Actually, this was the policy that was used in Europe and later on under Islam in many cases where the Jews were constantly seen as a source of income, either by taxing them or by killing them, confiscating their property. So this is the plea that Haman makes. And in one case you can say, that this is the introduction of antisemitism. And so from one point of view, Mordecai must have already worried about whether antisemitism was on the rise again or on the rise. And after all the text of the Megillah hints, because the Bible had already warned that Amalek is the danger because Amalek is the only tribe, when the Israelites came out of Egypt that had no reason to attack the Israelites. the Canaanites did ‘cause the Israelites were coming to take their country, but the Amalekites didn’t.

They attacked just for the sake of it and they attacked from behind the weak and the poor. And that’s why the Bible told us to remember Amalek. Didn’t tell us to remember the Canaanites. Told us to be nice to the Egyptians and other people who had oppressed us, but had a grudge against the Amalekites because this was hatred for no valid reason. It was, if you like, a pure disease, a sickness, a pathology. The Amalekites seemed to have disappeared, except in the time of Saul there was an Amalekite king whose name was Agag. And Agag again, attacked the Jews, attacked the women and the children, particularly the weakest and Saul was told to get rid of him. Agag’s an interesting name because Haman in the book of Esther is called Haman bin Hammedatha which is a Persian name. Haagagi, he was an Agagite. Maybe he was descended from Amalek. And except of course, Amalek had already disappeared, certainly at the time of Sennacherib, the Assyrians were mixed up all the nations. And according to the rabbis of the Talmud, none of those tribes were then still around. But this question of antisemitism does lie beneath the surface of this story because having sent out the instruction to kill everybody or the Jews, wherever they are in the regime.

And with this stupid law that you can’t retract, all that Achashverosh could eventually say was that, you know what? Let them defend themselves. So a new decree went out to defend themselves. Now, what this did ironically is, it weeded out the true antisemites because if you were not in any way infected by the disease, you would take advantage of this situation not to attack. Just to step back. Those who did attack were those who despite the order to defend. And despite the fact that the king approved of this order to defend still went out to fight. And so very often I hear it said nowadays, why these Jews are so blood thirsty, they attack everybody, they beat them all up and they killed. And it’s how many? Well, the truth of the matter is, if you look at the text, not very many because only those who wanted to attack the Jews attacked the Jews. And so the Jews defended themselves. So in this sense, the question of antisemitism is already there in the background. And the question then is, how do you deal with it? Do you take the Mordecai way of trying to play it down, of not trying to make a fuss of trying to hide things? Or do you take the consequence of the offence that no, you’ve got to stand up and fight? And this debate still goes on today within our world between the two. But the question of the Persian community is an interesting one. We don’t know the historicity of it. And so there are different versions as to who Achashverosh might or might not have been. Some people think he was Xerxes, some people think it was Artaxerxes, some people say it was Darius, some people even say Darius was Esther’s son because Darius, years later, was the person who, although initially Cyrus had allowed the Jews to rebuild the temple, there was anti-Semitism, if you like, in the Persian empire because when the Jews who wanted to go back, and most prefer to stay in Persia, when they went back, they found there was opposition.

People were telling them, “You don’t belong here anymore. You left millions of years ago. You never were here. This is our land now.” And in fact, they stopped the building of the temple. And it took Darius, who is the grandson, to look into the archives and find that the Jews did have permission from Cyrus to build a temple that he then insisted that the temple should go ahead. So that’s why people like to say that, he did that because he was the son of Esther. But that doesn’t make sense. And that gets confused with the fact that many people think anyway, Achashverosh was Xerxes and some people say Achashverosh was Artaxerxes and there were five of them. And there was a Darius II who we know was the person who actually sent instructions to the Jewish Persian garrison that was in Egypt at the time, to keep the Passover in the right way. And those Egyptian priests who didn’t like them and were trying to get rid of them to stop it, otherwise you’d beat them up. So we have all these different candidates and we don’t know. We don’t know if there was an Esther and who her husband was, but there are different candidates. But the one thing we do know was that, under the Persians, the Jews thrived. And they thrived in so many different ways. And they built up their academies and they had more scholars and more experts in the Babylonian community than in any other community until relatively modern times. And in due course, when the Persian empire fought with Rome, there were Jews caught on both sides. Jews who supported the Persians and Jews who supported the Romans, Jews living under one, Jews living under the other.

And there too, the question always was, are we safe? Are we not safe? But what this also led to was a rivalry between the Persian community and between the community that rebuilt itself in Israel and regarded itself as the elite. And there was a rivalry between the two of them. The Babylonians thought those in Israel were arrogant and liked to resort to violence, whereas those in Israel thought those living in Persia were more assimilated. They were taking it easy. They didn’t stand up and fight. And so there was rivalry between the two. And this rivalry was also expressed in different ways so that the festival of Purim that we have today is the festival of the diaspora Jews. Whereas Hanukkah, if you like, is the festival of the Israeli Jews. But this brings us to our modern times. First of all, you have different cultures in one way, between the Jews from the Misrach from the east and the Jews from the West, if you like, Jews from Persia and Jews from Rome. And this expresses itself in different policies. So here if you like, we have Israel today in which America seems to side strongly with the Democrats and the peace camp, and although in Israel there is just as much a peace camp as there is a war camp. But nevertheless, there is a tendency in Israel to say to the Americans, off you go. Don’t interfere in our fairs. You can do whatever religiously stuff you want to do, but don’t interfere in the way we choose to do things. And similarly, you can look after your affairs and your rivalry with China and don’t interfere with us and our situation here where we have to deal with a terrible, with an existential threat and a different position altogether. And so whether it’s on a religious or on a political level, the difference between the Jews of Persia and the Jews of Israel has transformed. It moved itself in one way to the world in which we live together.

And by the same token, the question of religion. What is religion? In the Oriental world, the word they use is dat. And dat is used in modern Israel now to mean religion. Are you dati or not? But dat does not mean religion. It means the laws of the land. The laws of the land which Jews have always traditionally under the Persians abided by, Religion to them was this way of life, the way of life built around community, doing things, the text, study. it wasn’t a religion that we would call a theological religion. Whereas when you look at Christianity that inherited the Roman Empire, that became a theological religion and origin of belief. Practise was there, but it was subordinated to the idea of credo. So again, you have this division between religious cultures and what religion really means. And on the one hand, you have the Persian situation in which ironically, as I said at the beginning, God is not mentioned because God has become a theological issue. And now, do you believe? What do I believe in? Believing is theology. But in the Persian tradition, the nearest you come to talking about God is a hint. Esther is hidden, Hester Panim, God’s face is hidden. Everything is done beneath the surface. As Mordecai says to Esther, “If you don’t help us at this moment, salvation will come from somewhere else. There’ll be some other source. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got to act now. Otherwise for us, we’ll disappear even if others survive.” So this idea that God is a personal relationship, which is beneath the surface, it’s not so much a theological issue upfront, is another thing that gives a hint as to what is specifically Persian and Oriental about the story of Esther.

Now today we have Purim. For the vast majority of Jews around the world, it is a day like any other. But there are certain parts of the Jewish community where there are three days of constant activity. And in many schools, both Jewish schools, both in Israel and in the diaspora, Purim has been going on for the past week. And this past week, Purim has been essentially one of fancy dress, each day, a different dress to celebrate a different aspect of Jewish life or of Jewish history. Then we’ve moved on from that to the fast of Esther because as always, even though we triumph, we triumph at a cost, people suffer. Within us and without us people are suffering and we should never take for granted. But then we have two days of festivities. You have the first day of Purim when everything happened initially everywhere. And then you have Shushan Purim, the second day of Purim, which is for those who went on fighting the extra day in Shushan. And technically, is celebrated only now for those cities that had a wall at the time of Joshua. Most of those are in Israel. I’m not aware of any of those outside. So in Israel you’ve got Purim and Shushan Purim. And you have people who get on a bus one day and go down to Tel Aviv and then others on the next day get on a bus or a car or train now and go up to Yerushalayimi. And so you have these three days.

But it’s not just that. What people forget is that the main obligation of Purim is giving presence to people, and gifts to the poor. And if you live in an intensive Jewish environment, a ghetto, yes, wherever it is in Israel or in Antwerp or in London or Stanford Hill or in Brooklyn or in Monsey and all these places, you would think you are in a different world. The streets are full of people over these days in fancy dress, running around, bringing presents here and presents there, giving charity here and charity there, drinking more than they ought to, sometimes collapsing in the street. But it is a carnival, a day by day carnival. And it’s not too late. I would recommend to any of you, drive your car as close as you can get to the nearest ghetto and see what’s going on in the streets. You won’t believe it. It’s like no other time that you can imagine. It’s like the carnival everywhere and there are carnivals everywhere this time of the year, which is another reason why people seem to think there’s a connection, certainly is’ a fancy dress. ‘cause fancy dress or the way you close or is not mentioned as such in the Megillah at all.

But there you will see that it is the experience that counts. It’s not the theology that counts. it’s the passionate commitment that counts and you can see it at work in these little ghettos and these little communities. So it’s not too late to celebrate Purim if you haven’t arranged it. And indeed the custom in Purim is to have the huge banquet on Purim afternoon. At this time, well, for me, some of you it’s already passed and to have this banquet at which you invite people in all the time when people are coming in and singing songs and putting on plays, and you are distributing food and goodies and all kinds of nice things are going on. So Purim is the fun side of Judaism. But at the same time, it’s the sad time when we realise that we are surrounded by challenges and these challenges don’t go away. And there are so many ways of dealing with these challenges. So I wish you all a very happy Purim and I suggest you go if you have time and pay a visit to the nearest ghetto. And now I will turn to any questions that you might have and things that I’ve missed out or haven’t touched on that are there to be discussed.

Q&A and Comments:

Anthony Tibor starts off by saying, “My theory is that the whole thing was started by Mordecai who was making a move for power. This is why he refused to stand by Haman. Haman realised this and made his move to kill Mordecai and the Jews.” Well, in one way you could well be right, but one of the features of the story of Esther is what Haman said to the king when the king asked him, “How can I reward somebody who I favour?” And at that moment, Haman thought, well, I am the favourite one. I am the one he wants to favour. And so he turned to the king and he said to the king, “You should take the king’s clothes, put them on this man, take the king’s horse and ride him on the king’s horse. And I want you to have one of your leading politicians lead him and say, 'This is how the king rewards the man he approves of.’” Now, if you stop and think about that for the moment, this is a direct challenge to the king. In other words, he’s putting himself forward as the pretender to the throne. And we know the throne was terribly unstable at the moment from the Bigthan and Teresh attempt to assassinate him. So it seems that everybody was interested in power. So in one sense, you are right that Mordecai might have been seeking power, except of course, everybody was at that time. So he was just playing the political game. And in his case, fortunately through Esther, he was able to win.

Esther asks, “The woman position in history is ridicule. God,” is it ridiculous, I think you want to say. “God says no good for man to live alone, but then blames her for made bread cloth on and on.” I’m not certain what you’re saying. I’m not saying why you think God blames woman anymore than man. But yes, there’s no question at all that the text of the Bible was written in an era in which it was male dominated. And let us not forget that the world has been dominated by men to this very day. And in some cases, women, if we look to the east, are treated no more as chattels and slaves. I like to think we’ve come a little bit away since then. But the one thing that I will say about the Torah is that when it comes to matters of life and death and civil matters, women and men are not treated as equal. Although, in the Persian empire and still today in parts of the Muslim empire, they are not. And indeed, certain parts you might say of the Orthodox world they are not. But we’ve come a long way.

Q: Now, Carol asks, “Are you using the Babylonian community and the Persian community interchangeable?”

A: And that’s an excellent question because the straight answer is, yes. The area which we call Mesopotamia on both sides of the Tigris and the Euphrates had many, many different dynasties going back thousands and thousands of years. But in the time span that we are talking about, that area came to be drooled over by the Assyrians. And Nineveh, Nimrod, these are Assyrians, and they incorporated Damascus, but moved up to Kurdistan and extended into Persia and went all the way down to the Persian Gulf. The Assyrian Empire, which was the empire that exiled the 10 lost tribes and scattered them amongst the Assyrian Empire, was swallowed up by the Babylonians. So Assyria and Babylonia became one of the same. And again, Syria, Kurdistan, what we call Iraq, what we call the west part of Persia, not the east part of Persia, down to the Persian Gulf, that became Babylonia. Babylonia, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, his empire was destroyed by the Medes. And so we talk about the Persians and the Medes. Media came from across the border, southern Persia. Media’s king was a famous Belshazzar of Belshazzar’s feast. But Media was conquered by Persia. So all the area of Assyria, of Iraq, of Persia down to the Gulf was the same area but changing rulers all the time. And Persia extended the empire, east to India and all the way west to the Mediterranean. And that’s why the Megillah starts off by saying, “Achashverosh was king from 127 states all the way from India to Africa.” So yes, those terms are all in a sense interchangeable even though they had their own specific cultures and variations. Some of them were more brutal, the Assyrians were very brutal, some of them were more peaceful. But interestingly enough, all of them had their different religious traditions, but they seem to coexist. And when there was rivalry, the rivalry was not necessarily from the governments, but it was very often from the priesthood, the priesthood and the traders. Those were the two areas where, whether it was the Christian world or the Muslim world, the Jews were constantly coming up against competition. Next question.

Nanette asks, “Those who could afford it lived on booze because there were no antibiotics, steroids available. Many people must have suffered permanently pain without treatments and surgery that we’ve developed over the centuries.” Well, now that that’s true, people drank the mead or beer as much as wine. Wine was for the rich ones, beer and other things were for the poorer because they couldn’t trust the water once they were living in towns and there wasn’t proper sewage and things of that kind. So yes, people did leave on booze all the time right through until modern times when they still do. Look, how many people booze and get drunk? So this is a separate issue from the question of health. Now it so happens that when in fact the, Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad established its universities of scholarship and medicine, to which the Jews were invited to participate in, whereas in the Christian world, they were banned from universities and colleges, medicine became a very, very serious discipline within the Jewish community. Of course, it goes back much earlier than that.

But nevertheless, study of medicine was carried out, which included autopsies. There’s evidence of that, including surgery on brains and all kinds of things. In fact, relatively speaking, medicine in those days was very advanced. But on the other hand, the poor person couldn’t afford it. And so the poor person and the average person relied on the witch doctors and superstition and all other kinds of healing and faith healing because they were not part of this upper class that had all the goodies. And remember that in mediaeval times, it was only the top upper crust that had the benefit of civilization as it was. The ordinary poor, they were basically slaves of one kind or another. So it is a grotty life, whether you were Jew or not Jewish, if it comes to that.

Q: Is there a connection between the Persian New Year and Purim?

A: Well, a lot of people say yes because this time of the year is the the Persian New Year. And there is a connection between that, as I suggest before, between Carnival and the period of Lent. So all these things seem to be interconnected and go back a long time indeed. Probably have pagan origins to begin with. But the art of a religion when it comes forward is that it tries to improve on the pagan tradition, but never succeeds actually in eradicating it. And in fact, in let’s say Jewish custom, many of the customs that we have today in the orthodox world are derived from mediaeval, non-Jewish and superstitious sources. So all cultures absorb from other cultures, whether it’s in music or language or pronunciation.

Q: “What was Esther’s relationship with Mordecai? Uncle? Spouse? What is a different morality?”

A: Well, first of all the book says very specifically, very specifically, that Mordecai adopted Esther when their parents died and says that they took her, he took her lebaht, as a daughter. So the text says that in black and white. Now you may say, what shall we say? Adoptive father would allow his daughter to take part in this beauty competition to become the wife of the king? And that’s a very good question. But in an autocracy, in a dictatorship of those times, he will have had no choice. And it’s not as though they didn’t have the secret police and the informants in those days. They jolly well did. And so it was a matter of compulsion. You might say on the other hand, he planted her there in order to play an important role and knew that she had qualities that the other girls didn’t have because she was more disciplined, she was more modest, and we know she didn’t flaunt it. And we know that she didn’t ask for any of the magic potions that other girls wanted to take in in order to drug up the king. And so she had certain qualities. But it says nothing about him marrying her.

The source is a later Midrash which says, likes to play words and instead of saying, taking her lebaht, as a daughter, taking her lebayt as a wife, in which case, again, my question is how could he possibly, as you would rightly ask, to allow his wife to get involved in this? And some people will turn back and say, “Hold on, look what Abraham did, when Pharaoh took his wife or supposedly sister.” And the same thing with Isaac. Couldn’t he have stopped it? Shouldn’t he have stopped it? Should he have killed himself before? What options did he have? So you know, it’s very difficult to speculate. The beauty of the book of Ester is that each generation interprets it in a different way. In the same way I make a parallel between it and the diaspora and and Israel competition and differences we have today. We do this all the time. So the question is, you can either go by the text in which you are confined by the text, or you can interpret the text, in which case, every interpretation is going to be a product of your imagination and your period.

Romaine says, thanks, Rita, “The Bible, to get Esther as an orphan, who was raised in the house of her uncle Mordecai, the Midrash adds, ‘Esther’s father died during her pregnancy and the latter died during childbirth.’ As a result of her mother’s death, Mordecai to care for Esther’s nursing. According to one tradition, he couldn’t find a wet nurse and he himself miraculously had milk and nurse her.” Okay.

“Another tradition was Mordecai’s wife nursing the infant. The Babylonian tradition may have changed. Esther was Mordecai’s wife. Esther states Mordecai adopted her as own daughter, literally lebaht.” I’ve mentioned all these things. “And this excuses this analysis of, cast the Bible now in a different light.” So yes, every generation interprets the Bible in a different way and makes apologies for it in a different way and adapts it in a different way. That’s the beauty of it, which is one of the reasons why I’m so opposed to trying to fiddle with traditional texts and try to re-edit them and change them. You’ve got to keep the text with an integrity of its own and then you interpret it in each generation and say, “This is how they did it, then this is how we do it now.” “They were,” Ben Dort, “cousins, names for brothers who were parents.” Another possibility.

Q: Yona, “Your point about the empire need for money is born out in the last chapter of the Megillah. What does the emperor do? He levies a tax with Mordecai’s assistance.”

A: Oh, absolutely right? He’s levying taxes all the time. He’s got to pay for this. I mean, you know, who’s going to pay for the trillions and trillions that the American Treasury has got to find? It’s got to come from somewhere. What are they going to do? They’re going to have to tax.

Q: “Destroy Amalek?” Esther asks. “They tried to destroy the fear of the Jews after Egypt even if they didn’t win.”

A: I’m not certain I understand what you are saying. “Please clarify. You mean what?

Q: Judaism not a theological religion?”

A: Yes, Yona. I will. A theological religion is a religion in which either you accept the theology, shall we say the Trinity or the idea of Jesus in His relationship to God, or you can either be burnt at the stake or you can be excommunicated or you can be removed. Within Judaism, within the Talmudic era and before there is no command that says you have to believe. It’s not that there aren’t important ideas, there are, that Talmud gives a list of them. And these ideas are very important. But it interestingly enough, the Talmud phrases it in track date, Sanhedrin by saying, “These are the people who have no portion of the world to come.” And then it gives a list of people who deny anything. They deny there is life after death, they deny the Torah is divine, they deny things. So it’s the emphasis is essentially on behaviour. Are you keeping the Halakhah? Are you keeping the law? The emphasis on theology came much later when theology was taken by Christianity using the Greek tradition to build up a system of beliefs. And although there are in Judaism, systems of beliefs of one sort, the first serious one doesn’t appear until 1,000 years ago at the time of Maimonides. And even then, there were rate authorities at the time who disagreed with his list of 13, some dove down to six, down to five, some differentiated between what is essential and what is not essential. And so for us, it is the behaviour. It is the Halakhah that counts.

Now Halakhah carries with it morality and ethics and that is terribly important. But the idea of, how do you believe and what you believe is much less important. And that’s why I say it is a behavioural tradition. And that is also one of the reasons why it survived so well in the diaspora. Because if you consider, throughout the world in which we’ve been scattered, each country has its own culture, its own traditions, its own way of thinking. Whereas in every country, wherever you are, you eat and you drink and you sleep. Physically, you are doing the same sort of things. That’s why the Bible is concerned with behaviour, with eating and drinking and living and the things you do in your daily life and gives rules and laws for it. And it doesn’t give a list of things you have to believe. The first of the 10 commandments is not a command. It says, “I am the Lord your God.” This is something you’ve got to relate to. It doesn’t say, you must believe I am the Lord your God. So therefore I say, Judaism is not a theological religion, although there are bits of theology in it. It is more a behavioural religion. We call it Halakhah. To some extent, Islam would say the same thing that it is the way you live that counts.

Carla, Thank you very much. “I wish you Purim sameach.”

Q: “Babylonia and Persian same country?” Yes, I’ve dealt with that one along with charity, “Isn’t there an obligation to read the story of Esther?”

A: Yes, you have to read the Megillah morning and night. Last night and this morning, you have to read the Megillah in order to publicise the miracle that happens. If I missed it out, it’s because I took it for granted. Sorry.

Q: Dale, “Are you saying Mordecai was already one of the power elites before he replaced?”

A: Yes, it says he was sitting in the gates of the city. Sitting in the gates means you are one of the inner circle. He was definitely part of the government.

Q: “Were the Persians at the time of pre-Zoroastrian? And how did they treat the Jews?”

A: Barry. Excellent question. There are some people who say that Zoroastrianism goes back long, long, long, long, even before the Persians. Zoroastrianism is a religion which basically believes in good God, Ahura Mazda, the good God. And then there’s a bad God who is the God of evil. Although many Zoroastrians like to say, no, it was monotheistic. Most people have looked at it and studied the history say, no, it wasn’t. It was dualistic. It was what became known as gnostic, which gave right the idea of Satan, the idea of an evil God to marry a good God. But it also worshipped fire. That’s why, for example, there’s an electric company called Mazda and why Mazda is used to describe or Osram. These are Zoroastrian gods of fire and they worshipped fire and they didn’t like people using fire outside of the temple in any religious way, which is why Zoroastrianism went through periods of great antisemitism. The Talmud records how the Zoroastrians, who became the state religion under the Sassanids, who lived in the second century CE, long after the Persians, long after the Persians of Darius and the Achaemenid the dynasty. They forbade the Jews who light candles. Wouldn’t like candles on Shabbat, couldn’t like candles in their home. They had to do it surreptitiously. So as with the Christian church, the Zoroastrian went through periods of tolerance and periods of intolerance. But certainly, during the period of the second century, at the same time as Christian was rising, Christianity was rising, Zoroastrianism and the priests of Zoroastrian were pretty anti. On the other hand, during that same period, there were two famous Persian kings who had Jewish wives and Jewish wives who interacted with the rabbis and actually encouraged conversations between the kings who were technically Zoroastrian kings with Judaism and the Talmud.

Q: James asks, “Can’t us Jews, identify Achashverosh for the name of his wife Vashti?”

A: No, you can’t because again, Achashverosh or some people say it’s Xerxes, some people say at Artaxerxes, and again, some people say it was Darius. So the problem is this, that although we know very clearly what the line of dynasty and kings and dates of the Persian empire are very accurately, we don’t have the same documentation for the Jewish community at that time. We just have our tradition of the book of Esther. So archaeologists can tell you, historians can tell you exactly who the kings were and what we know about them, and even the names of their wives. Well, maybe Esther went under some other. I mean she did have two lives. She had a Hebrew name Hadassah and she had a Hebrew name Esther. But Esther of course could have been Astarte, which is a nice non-Jewish name in the same way that Mordecai could be Marduk, which is a nice non-Jewish name.

So when you look at it from that point of view, we can’t tell who Vashti was. Again, there’s a biblical tradition that she was the kind of the daughter of the king and Achashverosh was a stable boy who married up to be with her. We really can’t track. And in addition to that, there is a 70 year gap in chronology between Persian chronology and between Jewish chronology. And to complicate things even further, when it’s says that Mordecai the son of Jair, the son of Kish and he came from Israel, comes from the family who came to Persia during the reign of Jehoiachin, Coniah. If he was the one who came during the reign of Coniah, he would’ve been a very, very, very old man at the time of Esther’s story. But if it was his grandfather who came at the time of Coniah, not so much. But because the text isn’t clear, we can’t know for certain. And therefore, identification really, if I can put it this way, is a fool’s game. You’re not going to get there. You’re not going to find out. But of course doesn’t mean to say they’re wrong. Just because we have no evidence of, shall we say, coming out of Egypt or being in the desert or of many of these things historically, doesn’t mean to say they’re wrong. There’s a lot of archaeological evidence that’s preserved in stone, but a lot that has been lost.

Anally says, “I attended a lecture entitled The Book of Esther as a Zionist Propaganda. It seems to remember that Jews in Persia were quite comfortable by the rise of Babylon. Even though they were allowed to return to Israel many preferred to stay put. That’s a story conspiracy to kill Jews. Of course, that’s absolutely hogwash if I can be polite. First of all, we have documentation of the book of Esther going back 1,000 years, even before Islam. So how they can say that it’s creation of Zionist propaganda? Just shows how stupidly ignorant they are. And the Jews in Persia were, under Persia, were treated terribly under the Shia for generations until the Shah of Persia took over. They weren’t given rights, they were treated as second class citizens. They were bullied and harassed and beaten up and attacked. There were moments that slightly better. But it’s true that Jews in Iraq were treated better, Jews in Syria were treated better and many Jews in the Muslim world were, but they were still second class citizens. They still had to pay the tax and they were not given equal rights. But nevertheless, they did do better under Islam than they did under Christianity. But this is part of the nonsense, the old joke of saying, you know, the Jews were never there or indeed, that the Jewish Bible is a forgery, but the Jewish Bible was around there long before Islam ever appeared on the scene. And there are other even Samaritan versions and Greek versions long before. So you know, one shouldn’t take this seriously. You just laugh it off, as you should laugh off most conspiracy theories.

So anyway, I’m really sorry that I have to stop there because my time has run out and I have to get on. But I do want to say that if any of you want to send me your questions by email to jeremyrosen@msn.com. I will be very, very happy to answer them. And I hope to see you again. Happy Purim, everybody.