Megillat Esther on 18th-century parchment, currently displayed in the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam
Esther and I have a complicated history.
Let me take you back to the classrooms of north Manchester about ten years ago. In my Jewish secondary school, I was considered by most of my teachers to be a delight and a pleasure to have in the classroom. But to the poor members of our Jewish studies department, I was a nightmare.
I remember specifically that, every year, as Purim and the lessons on Megillat Esther rolled around, my Jewish studies teachers would brace themselves before teaching my classes. Why? Because I thought that this story that they taught us year after year was disturbing and uncomfortable and hard to hear.
I didn’t want to accept it when the rabbis told us Vashti had developed leprosy and grown a tail at the idea of appearing before Achashverosh’s court. I didn’t think it was good for young girls to hear about a king snatching every beautiful woman from the Persian empire into his court. I didn’t understand why Mordechai was given all the credit in my school’s retelling of this story when Esther is the one who actually went and risked her life to talk to the King.
I accept now that I was a pain to teach. At the time, I thought my teachers were silly and narrow minded and had no willingness to be intellectually flexible. But now I look back and I thank them for the years of frustration. They lit a fire in me that never died. They are the reason that I do what I do – because I have been asking myself since those lessons on Megillat Esther how can we read and engage with these texts that are hard to sit with and, at points, hard to stomach.
My early introductions to Megillat Esther taught me that there is never a simple answer for why things happen as they happen – in the text and outside of it. Why we teach our daughters to idealise a woman like Esther is more complicated than just expecting them to ignore or overwrite the very tricky feminist problems the book gives us. And, perhaps a scarier question to ask, is why do we commemorate stories of attempted annihilation year after year? Are we a community that has to be defined by resistance and resilience?
Ella Vardi
Because if I can take you back to Manchester now, I can tell you that my community has much bigger problems than facing Ella Vardi in a Jewish Studies classroom.
It has been a scary few years for the Jewish community, here and at home, and increasingly continuing to live Jewishly can feel like an uphill battle. On Yom Kippur, as my sister and I began to lead the children’s services in our Manchester synagogue, Menorah, we were told to move all the children into a smaller guarded room and to carry on as normal until we got further information as to our safety.
My mother, Rabbi Kath Vardi, who had just begun the shacharit service in the main sanctuary, was tapped on the shoulder and told that at a synagogue in north Manchester two congregants had been murdered, and that police were evaluating the safety of all the Manchester communities. She turned to her congregation and told them firstly what had happened, and that they were welcome to leave if they wanted to. Everybody stayed. They prayed shacharit together, and then the police came and evacuated the community out of the building.
And I think that months later I remember this day and I remain in awe of my community. That in moments of fear and with the threat of violence lingering over the head of every person in that synagogue, that nobody ran away. And maybe this is what is at the essence of living a life that at times feels fuelled by fighting for survival, like an uphill battle or an exercise in resilience.
It has only really occurred to me in the last few days, as I picked my brain trying to think of something inspiring and inspirational to say about Jewish community after the last three years in particular, that we are not a community defined by resilience. We have been resilient, in our recent lives and in the complicated history of Jewish life in and out of the diaspora. I think that really we are defined by our togetherness – by our commitment to continuing to live as Jews and to help one another to live as Jews.
That isn’t to say that we all agree with each other ever or at all. You know what they say – two Jews, three opinions. But that despite our disagreements, from the bigger fights to the smaller arguments I was having with my Jewish studies teachers in 2015, we retain this sense of community, and togetherness.
That continual resilience is made worth it by a commitment to joy and to life. And maybe that is what Purim is about – that we sit with this difficult text that might make a few of us squirm, but out of it still comes a sense of communal joy and celebration.
This isn’t to pretend that any of this is easy. But it is to say that if we continue to hold one another, as Jewish communities and as friends of Jewish communities or people who appreciate and hold Jewishness in all its complexity, that ultimately – alongside hardships and fear and exhausting resilience – joy and life are an inevitable outcome.
Happy Purim!
- Ella Vardi is a member of Menorah Synagogue. She is studying for an MA in Hebrew Bible at Oxford University.