Purim –A Social Justice Perspective

Purim –A Social Justice Perspective
by Deborah Swerdlow

As a little girl, I always wanted to dress up as Queen Esther for Purim. She seemed so glamorous, the heroine of the story—and playing Esther meant I got to wear a pretty dress and a crown. I don’t recall wanting to dress up as Queen Vashti, who seemed the minor character with a few lines at the beginning and a sudden disappearance.

Queen Esther risked her life to beg King Ahasuerus to stop Haman’s plan to kill the Persian Jews. But the fact is that Esther needed some encouragement from her uncle Mordechai to stand up for herself and her people.  She hemmed and hawed, worried that she was risking her life by approaching the king without an invitation. It is only after Mordechai tells her to consider the needs of her community that she does what is right.

The wonderful thing about the Jewish calendar is that each year, we have another chance to read the same text and find new meaning in it. Through the lens of my position as the RAC’s Eisendrath Legislative Assistant for women’s issues, Vashti now looks like the more admirable female in the Purim story – and her quick disappearance disturbs me.

King Ahasuerus ordered Vashti to appear before his drunken princes and leaders in her royal crown so that she may show off her beauty.  Why is this remarkable?  Isn’t it likely that the King would summon the Queen to appear on a moment’s notice?  But the rabbis add that in this case, she was summoned to appear wearing only her crown – and so Vashti flatly refused. She would not allow herself to be debased or used for the sake of another man’s entertainment. She asserted herself.  Isn’t Vashti someone we should want our children to emulate and imitate?

But what became of Vashti after her moment of valor?

The text says the princes from Persia and Media suggested that King Ahasuerus banish her so that she “may never again appear before [the] King” and start looking for her replacement—the point, they said, was to make an example out of her, lest all the women in the country and princesses in these two provinces think it is acceptable to disobey their husbands. This suggested punishment implies that whatever befell Vashti after she left the castle was…not good.

We can assume that Vashti, now homeless, had no assets, no employable skills, and few, if any, people to turn to for help (after all, the “common folk” were not known to be accepting of banished queens). And that’s assuming she wasn’t immediately put to death in order to guarantee that she never come before the King again.

Unfortunately, we know what life can be like for the thousands of victims of domestic violence who stand up for themselves and walk away from their abusers, only to find that they have few resources and barely any safety net.

About one in four women will experience domestic violence at some point in her life, but not all of them find the strength and the resources to leave their abusers. Those who do may find themselves with no place to call home—the mere 2,000 emergency shelters in the United States are drastically fewer than what is required to meet the need.

Even if a woman is able to find a place to live after leaving an abusive home, she is at a greater risk for depression at a time when our mental health care system often fails to adequately address people’s needs. She may also have lingering physical injuries that impair her ability to work. A 2003 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that victims of domestic violence lost almost 8 million days of paid work because of the violence perpetrated against them.

And then there’s the social stigma associated with domestic violence: the erroneous assumption that victims are weak and helpless, that somehow they asked for this horrible treatment, that somehow they’re toxic to everyone else.

We may not definitively know what happened to Queen Vashti, but we do know what it is like for victims of domestic violence today—and what we can do to help. (please see  box below for some suggestions.)

I probably won’t dress up as Queen Esther, or Queen Vashti, for Purim this year, but I will see the story of these two women through a different lens.

Kein Ye-hi Ratzon. May it be God’s will.

Deborah Swerdlow is an Eisendrath Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center in Washington, D.C.

You can donate gift certificates to food stores, gas stations, and drugstores so victims can support themselves. You can donate your old cell phones to JCADA, so they can be recycled and the proceeds used to fund client services. You can also host a workshop about domestic violence at your synagogue or bring our prevention initiative AWARE’s teen program, ‘It’s Not Love,’ to a youth group or religious school in your community.

*Edited for size and to include local resources