The Courage to Meet the Moment
The key lesson of our upcoming festival of Purim—the need to stand against religious persecution and attack—is well known, resonating in our current moment perhaps more than in past years. But the dramatic peak of the Book of Esther reveals a more subtle, inspiring insight. Mordechai implores Esther to approach the king for support against Haman’s evil plot. She demurs, asserting that to do so would counter royal protocol, even risking her life. Mordechai intones a message that reverberates to all who might assume that such a crisis might pass on its own, or that one might escape it:
“Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis.”
The message is clear: Not only is Esther obligated to risk it all in the face of such a dire decree out of a sense of moral duty to her community—but her very survival itself is at stake, if not in this moment, then eventually when her true identity would inevitably be revealed. And even more critically, perhaps she attained her station, emerging from good fortune (or God, who only makes a glancing appearance in the story in this moment), in order to rise to the nobility of this moment. Esther concedes, her courage is rewarded, and our destiny was secured. But there will always be moments like these for our people, and we are defined by how we meet them.