For Such a Time as This

First, the story. It's told in the Megillah, which is the scroll of the book of Esther.

It begins with the Persian king. Persia, because the Jews have been carted off into captivity, under Babylon first, and now Persia. And here's the Persian king and his wife Vashti. And here's another one of those dreadful festivals, and the King orders his wife to Vashti appear and, as the Megillah says, "show her beauty."

Vashti refuses. She's tired of this demeaning submission to her husband's will and she refuses, and the King punishes her for her disobedience by having her executed. He goes looking for a more compliant replacement to be the new queen, who must of course be very beautiful, and he chooses for his new wife this woman named Esther.

Now, what he doesn't know is that Esther was Jewish, having been torn away from her family by the exile. She didn't tell him, either. She just consented.

And here she is — so pathetic, totally compliant, no voice or presence of her own, no There there, her identity in a deep closet, and right away it's the displaced wife Vashti you want to cheer, certainly not this hapless, obedient wife.

And now, watch out — the ambitious and ruthless Prime Minister Haman gets it into his head to eradicate the Jews. An early Holocaust, slaughter them all, and halt the construction of the Second Temple. Using slander and lies, he's convinced the king to do it.

And the King is about to carry out Haman's order, and here's this closet Jew and she's the queen, so compliant and quiet. She went on like this for years.

What we see in Esther is the compromised person, a fear-driven, coerced person, forced into a position without integrity, a silent-too-long person, a person who has not begun to struggle to find her voice.

I wonder if you have ever felt like that. I wonder if you have ever looked at yourself|someone else| and seen a hapless Esther, powerless to do what is authentic and right.

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Now I mentioned she was an orphan. She'd been raised by an uncle or cousin or something like that named Mordechai. And Mordechai knows what kind of man this Prime Minister, Haman, is, and has already taken a stand against him. So Haman has constructed a gallows on which to hang Esther's uncle or whatever, Mordechai. There was no love lost between them.

Now, Mordechai learns of the prime minister Haman's plot to kill not only him, but all the Jews, and Mordechai figured out how to get a message to Queen Esther, hidden away inside the palace, alerting her and pleading with her to intercede on the Jews behalf.

But we know Esther. Compliant, pathetic Esther.

Are you following all this?

But Esther sends for Mordechai and wants to know more. And she asks, Why me? What am I supposed to do?

And so just when everybody's on edge, scared to death, Mordecai says to Esther, "Well, who knows. Who knoweth, really, whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

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In a moment of time, all these pathetic hapless years make sense.

Now either she really is hopeless and hapless and a lost cause, or this Moment has larger meaning, and this Moment is inhabited by very great powers which now come into play, and if Esther steps out of her fears, and acts, the forces at work in this critical moment might flow into Esther and through her and energize her for some great task.

Maybe Uncle Mordechai is right. Maybe she has come to this kingdom precisely for such a time as this.

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The story of Purim, it turns out, is a story of resistance and liberation. Because Esther does open her mouth, and reveal her truth, that she is Jewish, and because she does appeal to the King to save the Jews from his own prime minister; — and Prime Minister Haman winds up dying on the gallows he had erected for Mordechai. You go, girl!

How all this unfolds is hopelessly complicated, I won't even try.

What is important is this. Here is poor, pathetic, compliant Esther, and one day, she finds herself poised at a Moment, with a capital M. She finds her voice, gets her hands on the ropes of history.

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Now Esther and Mordechai just kind of show up in this drama — that's just where life put them, in this extremely tense situation — and they find a calling there they couldn't have expected, which results in saving the Jews and building the Temple, 2,350 years ago.

"Well, who knows, Esther. Who knoweth, really, whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

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Have you been imagining yourself in Esther's place? Or Mordechai's? But think about the King. He, too, was faced with his own ethical test. But that test could not come until Esther speaks her truth and the King becomes conscious, for up til now he had been oblivious to the ethical questions that screamed out of this situation. His crisis began with her moment to find her voice, to exert power for good.

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Consciousness bears a price, and consciousness is among the highest of goals of our evolution. We are becoming conscious. We must become conscious. And when we do, in the words of James Russell Lowell's great hymn, "time makes ancient good uncouth."

Consciousness begins when we find our own voices and speak our own truth and listen to each others' voices and truth. It brings new necessities. It makes ancient good uncouth.

The story does not tell us whether the king's previous views about women advanced at all in this crisis, but his grasp of our common humanity expanded far enough to include Jews, because his Jewish queen dared to break her silence.

It is astounding, from the perspective of a few years' distance, to see how primitive a state of consciousness managed to hold an iron sway, not so far away, not so long ago.

Think of the barbarisms once taken for granted, no so long ago. In this nation, not many of our great leaders, not many of our common citizens, possessed any great zeal to put an end to slavery, which had existed through long ages of time. They didn't think much of the "peculiar institution"; thought it should eventually end; — but they had no zeal to end it. President Lincoln was no great emancipator. Very few in our young nation had permitted themselves to hear the voices and life-truth of the people who were held in chains. It was, therefore, a significant insight when in 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, "The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization."

Oh? What did you say, Mr. Emerson?

An indispensable element of a new and coming civilization?

Nor are all the battles won. Seek to exclude or destroy any component of our common humanness or of our common humanity and the whole body of humanity becomes sick and the well of our public life is poisoned. Lessons we thought we had learned sometimes come unlearned, and our nation's reversion to the current pretention to a right to rule the world and determine the terms and conditions of life, to a right to the unbridled pursuit of greed, without regard to the terrible toll on the earth and air and watear, bear witness to what humans can forget.

We may see it in our nation's ethics-free bearing of overwhelming force and utter disregard for the world's dispossessed, in the hollow eyes and tears of a multitude of Iraqi people deprived of food, medicine, sanitation and water, about to be blown to smithereens by our bombs, and alternately terrorized by the street thug who became their dictator; in the twisted priorities that secure the financial interests of the least vulnerable while the shelters and the clinics and the social services must shut their doors. Yes, lessons we thought we had learned sometimes come unlearned. In such times, the voices of those awake and conscious must not go silent.

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Albert Camus said something else to his former friend in Germany; he said: "I have never believed in the power of truth in itself. But it is at least worth knowing that when expressed forcefully truth wins out over falsehood."

And on this day when Esther speaks truth forcefully, this story becomes one of resistance and deliverance and freedom.

The story turns on profound personal transformation, and is fueled by voices that speak from the soul. The change we seek doesn't come any other way; there are no easy shortcuts. I came upon another phrase of Albert Camus this week, spoken during the French Resistance to the Nazis, when he said:

Civilizations are not built by rapping people on the knuckles. They are built up by the confrontation of ideas, by the blood of the spirit, by suffering and courage.

Just so.

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Every year at the Jewish festival of Purim, the story of Esther and Mordechai and Haman is retold. It is a holiday with a pretty raucous history because you're supposed to celebrate. Drink until you can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. And every time the name of Haman is spoken, you spin your gregger to drown it out! It's a story of happy outcomes and the annual celebration seems to be founded on the notion that right and truth and justice will always win. But they don't always win.

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No, all this turned on the capacity of Esther to transcend herself, and in her powerlessness, to recognize in a moment of time unstoppable energies of the kind that are always released in moments of crisis and that invite us to be partakers in that new and coming civilization. Esther found her voice because she recognized her life to be no isolated existence but an integral part of Life itself, which is a roaring engine of creativity.

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You've got your compromised and powerless situations; you haven't found your voice. And a moment comes when you might find it, when in fact you might have power, and you are tempted not to dare. But then you enter this place and the strength of community and the spiritual power that is here buoys you up and you go forth and dare, and your fear subsides enough to dare. To do what the moment calls on you to do.

And may it be that when we enter this place, we become more conscious.

That is our task. To become conscious. We are barely conscious. We bear within us Truth, and Beauty, and Possibility, and Very Great Powers. If only we were conscious. How do we make this a place that helps us become conscious?

And once conscious, what dare we venture?

These moments when we feel so powerless against great forces: these may be the times when we find our voice, when the power inherent in the moment enter into us and we know we're here, right here, right now, precisely for such a time as this.

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I ask you now, in this silence, to listen. Hear the delight and the discontent. Hear the love and the anger, the fulfillment and the disappointment. Feel the power this moment holds and feel the hope and the promise. Let us be together in silence.

Readings

Haman said unto king Ahasuerus, There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king's laws: therefore it is not for the king's profit to suffer them.

If it please the king, let it be written that they may be destroyed: and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the hands of those that have the charge of the business, to bring it into the king's treasuries.

And the king took his ring from his hand, and gave it unto Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the Jews' enemy.

And the king said unto Haman, The silver is given to thee, the people also, to do with them as it seemeth good to thee.

And the letters were sent by posts into all the king's provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, . . . and to take the spoil of them for a prey.

When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and a bitter cry;

And in every province, whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes.

So Esther's maids and her chamberlains came and told it her. Then was the queen exceedingly grieved.

Then called Esther for Hatach, one of the king's chamberlains, and gave him a commandment to Mordecai, to know what it was, and why it was.

So Hatach went forth to Mordecai.

And Mordecai told him of all that had happened unto him, and of the sum of the money that Haman had promised to pay to the king's treasuries for the Jews, to destroy them.

Also he gave him the copy of the writing of the decree that was given at Shushan to destroy them, to shew it unto Esther, and to declare it unto her, and to charge her that she should go in unto the king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him for her people.

And Hatach came and told Esther the words of Mordecai.

Then Mordecai commanded to tell Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews.

For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

On that night could not the king sleep.

And from a letter to a German friend in
July 1944, from Albert Camus.

Now the moment of your defeat is approaching. I am writing you from a city known throughout the world which is now preparing against you a celebration of freedom. . . .

You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world — in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests. And, to tell the truth, I, believing I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden passion.

Where lay the difference? Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness. . . .

As you see, from the same principle we derived quite different codes, because along the way you gave up the lucid view and considered it more convenient for another to do your thinking for you and for millions of Germans.