Esther's Faustian Bargain, and Ours (Purim 5786)

The heroine of Purim did not begin her story that way. She began as someone trying to survive. Taken from her home and brought into the Persian court, she did what many Jews in exile have done: she adapted.

She became so assimilated that she even cast aside her traditional Hebrew name, Hadassah, and adopted Esther, which sounds suspiciously close to the Persian goddess Ishtar.

Her new name is suggestive in other ways. If one takes a small grammatical liberty, one notes the similarity between Esther and the word “seter”, which means secret. Differently spelled, the word “Ester” means “hiding.”

Although some later rabbis try to moderate that impression, reading the Megillah, one gets the unflattering idea that Esther was, at best, “non-affiliated”, and at worst, too fast to hide or shed her Judaism to be accepted at court.

Easy to judge, but can you blame her? Henri IV of France expressed a similar sentiment when, in 1593, he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. He famously said “Paris bien vaut une messe” (“Paris, meaning kingship, is worth a Mass”). Thus, Hadassah became Esther, a queen whose Jewish spark nearly went extinct.

And then came Haman.

With horror, Esther realized that she had engaged in a Faustian bargain, trading identity for acceptance, but that the other side never intended to fulfill its part of the deal.

Perhaps at first, Esther thought that no harm would befall her. Yet, prodded by Mordechai, she realized the sad truth. All her sacrifices wouldn’t buy her safety, and all her lavish praise of the king wouldn’t protect her. “Do not imagine that you escape in the king’s house…”

But then, Esther experiences something else – something visceral, something deep and unexplainable. She feels the pain of her fellow Jews. It’s the same feeling that Moses experienced when he “went to his brethren” after his life as a prince and saw the Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave.

When one sees Esther trembling at what’s happening to her people, I’m reminded of what we all felt on October 7. When I set out to write this piece, I attempted not to make it about that day. But how can I not? It was a moment in which, like Esther or Moses, our hearts “went out to our brethren.” Mijal Bitton captured that moment better than anyone when she wrote, “that pain you feel, that’s peoplehood.”

The similarity doesn’t end there. Much of American Judaism has been “pre-Purim Estherite.” It consisted of shedding layer after layer of Jewish specificity to be accepted in the general society. And then we realized that, despite all our efforts to “fit in,” we are still othered, and still vulnerable. Still at the mercy of the other, still accepted conditionally. We believed that by carving another and yet another pound of flesh, we were securing our seat at the “cool kids’ table.” We thought we were depositing goodwill into a metaphorical bank account, but when we tried to make a withdrawal, we found it empty.

In that light, it’s hard not to see Esther as the proverbial “October 8 Jew.” Those of us for whom it took an existential threat to shake us out of our complacency and remind us of who we are.

As Purim shows, the phenomenon of Jews “returning” in times of danger is not new. The Talmud, seeing that when Haman got the ringlet (royal authorization) to kill the Jews, Esther and her fellow Jews prayed, repented, and fasted, says caustically, “Greater was the removal of the ring than the [work of] forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses.”

But the question, for Esther and for us, is how to capitalize on that newfound commitment. How can we transform the shock into something deeper, more lasting, more meaningful?

For Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, taking ownership and responsibility is the key. In his writings, he distinguishes between “person of fate” (goral) and person of destiny (ye’ud). For him, Esther begins her story as a figure of goral. She is taken to the palace, and mostly, acted upon. The verbs that define her early life are passive: she is gathered, chosen, and crowned. Fate, for Soloveitchik, is the condition of being swept along by history, responding to circumstances without authoring them. Even when the news breaks, Esther’s first reaction is to seek stability within the given order. She has not yet claimed responsibility for shaping it.

The turning point comes when she embraces ye’ud. She decides to go to the king at the risk of her life. The sentence she pronounces at that time, “If I perish, I perish,” is not resignation but decision: she steps forward, commands Mordechai, gathers the Jews, and enters the king’s chamber unsummoned. She’s not cavalier, but she’s willing, for once, to sacrifice herself for the collective. For Soloveitchik, this is the movement from passive existence to covenantal agency.

Crucially, in the story of Purim, God doesn’t appear even once. Meaning that Esther acts without reassurance, without revealed miracles, without theological certainties. God is hidden; no voice guarantees success. Destiny here does not mean clarity, it means responsibility in the absence of clarity.

We are all October 8 Jews. Like Esther, in adversity, we rediscovered something precious about ourselves. We had to act in the face of uncertainty, face abandonment and hostility, and rely on inner resources of strength and commitment. The grammar of our identity was rearranged, and it is now seeking a new structure.

Interestingly, after the trauma, Esther doesn’t abandon the world. She stays at the palace and doesn’t break with the king. But her relationship with the world changes. She now faces it with a sense of existential security. Others still call her Esther, but she has no doubts: she knows she’s Haddasah, daughter of Avishai. For us as well, the solution is not disengagement from the world but relating to it on a different footing. Not accepting Faustian bargains that demand impossible renunciations, not making our self-worth contingent on the view of others, not submitting to litmus tests and conditional acceptance.

Post-Hamas Esther acts decisively in history, even when Heaven is silent. She transforms fate into destiny and privilege into mission. Her life takes on a new meaning: serving her people and fighting for their safety and flourishing. Esther doesn’t live in fear or mourning, but she retains, every remaining day of her life, the sense of mission and destiny that it gave her.

One cherished JFN member literally had this idea engraved on a plaque. In their offices, one can read “every day is October 8^th”. They don’t mean by that that we should inhabit the trauma forever, but that, like Esther, we use the pain and shock as a lever of change.

If we succeed in doing that, we can relive the words of the Megillah, which are less a description than an expression of hope, “The month was turned for them from sorrow to joy and from mourning to a festival, they were to make them days of feasting and happiness…”

Chag Sameach!