Sermon: Time’s Up for Amalek

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 1 March 2018

We are just four days away from Beauty and the Feast, Alyth’s Purim spiel event.   Where you are sitting will be turned on Wednesday evening into Ahasuerus’s Shushan palace and everyone who comes will find themselves in the middle of the three feasts of the Book of Esther, joining Esther, Ahasuerus, Vashti, Mordechai and Haman in the midst of this telling of the Purim story for this year.

 

The Book of Esther has inspired art and creativity down the ages.   The depiction of Esther in each era follows societal attitudes towards women.    You can be sure that the Esther in Alyth’s Beauty and the Feast will be not unlike women in this Synagogue community.  Strong and equal participants in the community, bringing their talents and abilities to Judaism without restriction from men.   Alyth’s 2018 Esther may be daunted by approaching Ahasuerus to petition him to invite Haman to a feast where she will make clear what Haman is planning to do to destroy the Jews, but Esther will resolute, clear in her aims, brave and ready to stand up for justice.

It was a bit different in depictions of Esther in the seventeenth Century.   The famous painting of Esther approaching Ahasuerus by Valentin Lefebvre in 1675, now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, follows many contemporary precedents. There is Ahasuerus sitting on his throne with his royal scepter extended towards her and there is Esther, fainted clean away unable presumably to cope with the emotional stress of facing this powerful man.     An image of a woman dis-empowered.

 

Go back another seventeen hundred years and a further creative treatment of Esther was incorporated in within the Biblical book of Esther.   This is preserved by the Catholic Church where an additional six chapters of the Book of Esther portray the heroine as the ideal Jewish woman of the turn of common era, pious, praying to God before each encounter with Ahasuerus, modest and demure.

 

The 21^st Century Esther has the power in her hands to stand up for justice.   She is not held back by weakness.  She does not wait for “deliverance to come from another place” (Esther 4:2), the phrase that Mordechai uses to, in the Rabbi’s opinion, bring God into this story of human machinations.  (Megillah 7a)

 

There is another woman in the story of Esther whose power and position is also subject to interpretation in every era, Vashti.   She is the original Queen of Shushan, wife of Ahasuerus.    Early in the story she is summoned by the King to come to another feast, which has been going on for seven days to, in the words of the Book of Esther, “ show the people and the princes her beauty; for she was beautiful to look on” (Esther 1:11)   Midrashic interpretation (Megillah 12b) decided that this was an instruction from Ahasuerus for Vashti to appear naked except for her crown.

 

When she refuses to do so, Ahasuerus exercises his power to make decrees, however stupid, and decrees throughout the Empire of Shushan that “Every man should be the ruler in his own house.”   A stupid decree, just as later in the story he will be decreeing that the Jews should be killed at the pleasure of Haman.

In 2018 Vashti’s story has given rise to a new Purim costume – a Rabbi has been promoting a T-Shirt for Purim with the words #VashtiMeToo and a complementary T-Shirt saying #AhasuerusTimesUp.

 

The Book of Esther is one of the few parts of the Bible where the characters and stories of woman are fully developed and told, with the story from woman’s point of view and not only that of the men.  There are relatively few women characters in the Bible, Sarah, Rebeccah, Rachel, Leah, Dinah, Bilhah, Zilpah, Serach Bat Asher, Shifrah, Puah, Miriam, Zipporah, Huldah, the daughters of Zelophehad, Deborah, Yael and Bathsheba – is almost an exhaustive list of from the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible.  A few more unnamed women appear in the stories.    Generally, we do not get to hear their full story or understand their point of view.   Only in the Book of Esther are the women fully drawn.

 

Esther is a book made for this year.   It is about power and its uses and abuses.    Its telling begins today, on Shabbat, when we hear the Amalek Torah portion, commanding us to remember Amalek to blot out his name and yet not to forget.     Esther, when she faces us to Haman, the descendant of Amalek, and destroys his plan to murder the Jews, finally succeeds in finishing off Amalek and what that name represents.   Haman, by the end of the Book is no more.  In the Deuteronomy mention of Amalek that we read today on Shabbat Zachor we hear what the offence was that made Amalek the representation of abuse of power:  “he struck at the rear of the Israelites wandering through the desert, he targeted the weak and vulnerable.”   This cannot be forgotten.

Amalek, aside from mentions in genealogies, appears four times in the Bible – the first time in the Book of Exodus (Chapter 17) when he attacks the Israelites – at that time God says that he will not forget the attack on the weak and vulnerable.  The second time in Deuteronomy, the portion we read, where we are told to be vigilant against the Amalek abuse of power.  The third time earlier in the Book of Samuel and in our Haftarah portion where the power of the King of Israel is against them and again Amalek represents an abuse of power.   Finally through Haman the descendant of Amalek, a powerful woman, Esther remembers the abuse of power and seeing it happen in her time, she makes sure that it cannot happen to her people – and saves the Jews.

 

The sin of Amalek is to exert their power over the vulnerable to get their own way.   What is said in Deuteronomy is repeated in the Book of Samuel:  the Amalekites ambushed the Israelites.   What is said there is repeated in the Book of Esther, Haman’s aim is to attack the Jews because they are not the same as others in the Shushan empire, they are dispersed, they do not appear able to fight back, they are vulnerable.

 

Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance then comes to say that when the powerful abuse their power against the vulnerable, the attack will be remembered and action will be taken.   Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the time will come when the vulnerable will be able bring the abusers of power to account – as long as we remember, and get ready for a time when power is equalized.

In the holding to account of sexual and bullying power abusers that has been such a feature of the past year, this is what has happened.  They, whether a powerful person in the film, political, charitable or any other field, thought that they could exercise their power over others in a way that we can be certain they knew to be wrong, and it would be forgotten because they held the power and the vulnerable did not.   But their abuses were not forgotten, it never was – those who had been exploited remembered, always will remember, the effects of abuse do not go away.   They can be suppressed because the people who have been abused do not have the power to do anything much about it in our society.

 

But now they do.   And so times up.  We are like Esther – not fainting, not waiting for God to turn the conscience of the abuser but rather taking action and now knowing that society is with her.

 

Our Bible is powerful because its stories ring true in each generation.   They give new messages if we hear them.  The Purim spiel makes this link directly as each generation’s Purim interpretation addresses the power abuses of their day.   Let’s celebrate the empowered Esther’s of our time, no longer so vulnerable – and remember with them so that we never push their memories away and compound their pain.   It is right to hold powerful abusers to account.