King Achashverosh, the king of one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen, and indisputably the mightiest power in the world at the time, decided – for whatever reasons of his own – to promote Haman to position of chief minister (Esther 3:1); “and all the king’s servants who were in the king’s gate would bow and prostrate themselves before Haman, because this was what the king had commanded for him – but Mordechai would neither bow not prostrate” (v.2).
This infuriated Haman – veritably drove him insane with rage.
And this seems puzzling: Haman was the second most powerful man in the world’s most powerful empire. Surely he was above such petty jealousy! Why should a man who wielded such immense power care about one citizen of the empire who didn’t bow and scrape to him? Surely he didn’t imagine that Mordechai could threaten him or his office!
Clearly, Haman’s rage and hatred against Mordechai was not something rational. They sprouted from something far more primæval.
Haman’s hatred goes back to his earliest ancestor – Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, the elder twin whose entire life was in conflict with his younger twin. Esau, who perpetually felt that his brother had cheated him out of what he believed was his by right.
One of the earliest events in the twins’ lives that the Torah records was when Esau returned from the hunt, tired and hungry, and demanded a share of the lentil soup that his brother Jacob was cooking:
“Feed me, now, from this red red, because I’m tired” (Genesis 25:30). It’s impossible to capture the urgency and voracity of Esau’s demand in English: the idiom simply doesn’t translate.
Let us see the precise words in the Hebrew original:
הַלְעִיטֵנִי נָא מִן־הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה כִּי עָיֵף אָנֹכִי
The word הַלְעִיטֵנִי has no English equivalent: the root לעט refers to force-feeding an animal, hence Artscroll’s translation, “pour into me”. JPS translates, “Let me swallow”. Maybe better English idiom would be something like, Give this to me to gulp down.
His description of the food, הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה, is equally impossible to translate. Artscroll translates, “that very red stuff”; JPS translates, “this red, red pottage”. I have translated above, “this red red”: the Hebrew הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה suggests that Esau uses the word אָדֹם (adom, red) both as a noun and as an adjective. The stuff he lusts to eat is red – both in colour and in name. “A bowl of red”.
In any event, his words carry the connotation of a voracious lust for immediate gratification. And the Ba’al ha-Turim (Rabbi Ya’akov ben Asher, Germany and Spain, c.1275-1343) notes that the initial letters of the words הַלְעִיטֵנִי נָא מִן are the name הָמָן, Haman.
And the riposte is that “Esau treated the birth-right with contempt” (Genesis 25:34) – in Hebrew, וַיִּבֶז עֵשָׂו אֶת־הַבְּכֹרָֽה.
The Ba’al ha-Turim notes that the word וַיִּבֶז(which we have translated here “treated with contempt”) occurs in only one other place in the entire Tanach:
וַיִּבֶז בְּעֵינָיו לִשְׁלֹחַ יָד בְּמָרְדֳּכַי לְבַדּוֹ כִּֽי־הִגִּידוּ לוֹ אֶת־עַם מָרְדֳּכָי וַיְבַקֵּשׁ הָמָן לְהַשְׁמִיד אֶת־כָּל־הַיְּהוּדִים אֲשֶׁר בְּכָל־מַלְכוּת אֲחַשְׁוֵרוֹשׁ עַם מָרְדֳּכָֽי:
“But it seemed contemptible to him to kill Mordechai alone, because they had told him of Mordechai’s nation; so Haman requested to exterminate all the Jews in all of Achashverosh’s kingdom – Mordechai’s nation” (Esther 3:6).
Haman’s hatred not only for Mordechai but for his entire nation goes all the way back to their ancestors, Esau and Jacob.
Esau felt that Jacob had cheated him out of his birth-right. Yet Esau obviously understood that his Jacob had such an intimate connexion with G-d that he would not have stolen the birth-right – and, come to that, their father Isaac’s blessing – capriciously or out of greed.
Esau understood that it was his brother Jacob who represented the intimate connexion with G-d – and it was against that that he had to fight.
Thus has it been throughout the generations: whether Esau (Christian civilisation) or Ishmael (Islamic civilisation), the nations’ hatred against us has flowed from their inherent recognition that we, the Nation of Israel, represent G-d in this world – and their opposition to Him and His plan for His Creation inevitable causes their antipathy to us.
The mission which G-d gave us, the Jewish Nation, was – and is! – to represent Him in His world, to spread the knowledge of His existence. Let us be clear: the ideal is not for the whole of mankind to convert to Judaism; it is for the whole of mankind to acknowledge G-d as universal Creator, and to obey the שֶׁבַע מִצְוֹת בְּנֵי נֹח, the Seven Commandments given to the Sons of Noah, the seven commandments which devolve upon all humanity.
These are defined in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 56a), and brought as practical Halachah by the Rambam (Laws of Kings 9:1):
- The prohibition on murder;
- The prohibition on theft;
- The prohibition on idolatry;
- The prohibition on blasphemy;
- The prohibition on sexual immorality;
- The prohibition on eating any limb torn from an animal while the animal is still alive;
- The obligation to establish law courts to administer justice.
When Haman first approached King Achashverosh with his plot for genocide of all the Jews, he began: “There is one nation, scattered and divided among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom; and their laws are different from every nation, and they do not obey the laws of the king” (Esther 3:8).
Haman seems to contradict himself here: are the Jews “one nation”, or they “scattered and divided among the nations”?
I suggest that we have been misunderstanding Haman’s words. Let us see the original Hebrew:
יֶשְׁנוֹ עַם אֶחָד מְפֻזָּר וּמְפֹרָד בֵּין הָעַמִּים בְּכֹל מְדִינוֹת מַלְכוּתֶךָ וְדָתֵיהֶם שֹׁנוֹת מִכָּל עָם וְאֶת דָּתֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ אֵינָם עֹשִׂים
Obviously, when Haman spoke to King Achashverosh, he spoke Persian; what we have is the translation into Hebrew by the author of Megillat Esther. Nevertheless, since the Megillah was written with רוּחַ הַקּוֹדֶשׁ (Divine inspiration), the words are deeply meaningful.
I suggest that Haman’s description of us as עַם אֶחָד does not mean “one nation”, the way it is invariably translated. It means, rather, “the Nation of the One”, Haman’s circumlocution for “the Nation of the one G-d”.
This immediately gives an entirely new complexion to his accusation. He is telling King Achashverosh:
There is the Nation of the One G-d who are scattered and spread out throughout all the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom; they have their own laws, which are different from every nation, and they are influencing all the other nations in the Persian Empire to worship their One G-d, instead of obeying the laws of the king.
This, argues Haman, is reason “to exterminate, to kill, and to destroy all the Jews, from young to old, babies and women, on one day, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month – that’s the month of Adar – and to plunder all they have” (Esther 3:13).
And what is remarkable is how little this paradigm has changed throughout out long and blood-stained history. Every nation, every culture which ever felt threatened by the knowledge of G-d was determined to exterminate, to kill, and to destroy all the Jews, from young to old, babies and women.
In previous centuries it was the Jewish religion. But these days humanity is more civilised, more progressive, more tolerant, and these days, everyone has the right to their own beliefs.
Jews keeping the Mitzvot in Britain, France, the USA, anywhere else in the world aren’t so much of a threat – as long as they are only a “religion”.
But when the Jews are identifiable as a nation – it is then that they become a threat to the world.
Because there is no precedent in history for a nation, defeated and exiled from its own land, scattered and spread out throughout the world, to nevertheless maintain its own identity and to return to its homeland after millennia of dispersal.
There is likewise no precedent in history for any land to lie neglected, to pass from empire to empire, from foreign conqueror to foreign conqueror, without any nation ever managing to seize it and establish itself as sovereign.
We Jews, the Nation of G-d, and the Land of Israel, the Land of G-d, are the sole examples in history of this phenomenon ever happening.
Every single Prophet, from Abraham to Malachi, carried the message that the Land of Israel belongs to the Children of Israel; that if the Children of Israel become corrupt they will be exiled from their Land; that no other nation will ever succeed in establishing itself upon the Land of Israel; and that ultimately, the Children of Israel will return to the Land of Israel.
The great British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) was bitterly opposed to Zionism: he argued that nations which lose their land fade out of history, and he provided countless examples to prove his point.
Had his undisputed academic brilliance been tempered by humility, he could have drawn the logical conclusions: That the Jewish nation does not follow the paradigms of other nations, that the Jewish nation has a mission in this world, and that the Jews’ uniqueness proves their claim to being G-d’s chosen Nation, charged with a Divine mission.
Instead, he contemptuously dismissed the Jews as “a fossil remnant”, later slightly softened to “a living fossil”. The logical and obvious truth was just too painful for Toynbee.
Our national return to our national homeland in these generations is what is now provoking the irrational fury of nations throughout the world. People who wouldn’t even be able to find Israel on a map of the world are nevertheless irrationally and obsessively determined to exterminate, to kill, and to destroy Israel and all the Jews therein, from young to old, babies and women.
As then in the Persian Empire, so today: humans the world over, created in the image of G-d and therefore with an innate understanding of His plan for the world, recognise that though we be scattered and spread out throughout the world, we are nevertheless עַם אֶחָד – not merely one nation, but the Nation of the One G-d.
When we return to our ancestral homeland, when we restore our national sovereign independence in the Land of Israel, we force the nations of the world to recognise the reality of G-d and His plan for His world.
As then, so today: there is no shortage of Hamans today, who are obsessively determined to exterminate, to kill, and to destroy Israel and all the Jews therein, from young to old, babies and women.
And there is likewise no shortage of Achashveroshes who are all too willing to collaborate with those Hamans and authorise them to begin their genocidal campaigns against us.
And as then, so today, G-d is hidden in the background, guiding His world in the direction that He decrees, and protecting His holy nation.
The events of Purim happened during the first years of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, as the Jews were just beginning to return to Zion.
We are incomparably stronger today, as a nation, than we were when Haman was plotting his genocide of the Jews. We are independent in our homeland, for the first time since Queen Shlom-Tziyyon died in 67 B.C.E., which was the beginning of the end of Jewish independence in Israel.
The percentage of Jews living in Israel is higher today than at any other time since the First Temple period; indeed, for the first time in some 2,400 years, there are more Jews living in Israel than in any other single country in the world.
The Hebrew word for “world” is עוֹלָם, olam, from the root עלם meaning “hidden”. G-d is usually hidden from His creation. But sometimes – just sometimes – He allows His mask to slip, and we manage a glimpse beyond the physical world and into the spiritual.
Such happened on the very, very few occasions when we witnessed miracles – the Ten Plagues, the Splitting of the Red Sea, the Giving of the Torah, the manna, and a few others.
And sometimes, G-d’s direction of human affairs becomes apparent after a long sequence of seemingly-natural events, which coalesce to demonstrate how G-d still looks after His children.
Such was in Shushan and throughout the Persian Empire.
Such is today, in our reconstructed Israel.