The villain of the Purim story is Haman ben Hamedata, descendant of Amaleq. King Ahashverosh appointed Haman as his prime minister and gave the order that all court officials should kneel before him. All the officers obeyed the king’s order except for one man: Mordekhai. And when Haman knew that Mordecai was not kneeling before him, he decided to eliminate all the people of Mordechai: destroy the Jewish nation.
Haman had a plan, his own version of “the final solution”. First, he had to persuade king Ahashverosh presenting a matter in a way that would sound benefiting to the king and hide his personal thirst for vengeance against Mordekhai and his people. Persuading the king was not very difficult. Haman showed the king a plan with “zero” operating costs and in exchange for the king’s executive order, Haman offered a large amount of money for the royal treasury: 10,000 large bars (in Hebrew: loaves) of silver, which was a more than the money that was collected from taxes in one year throughout the Persian Empire (9,880 silver bars per year).
Now, how was Haman going to recruit hundreds of thousands of soldiers to find and execute hundreds of thousands of Jews, scattered throughout the Persian Empire, from Turkey to the West, Ethiopia to the South, and India to the East?
Haman designed a perverse plan that the Megilla briefly describes with two words: ושללם לבוז (“and their belongings will be for dispossession”). Haman’s decree said more or less this: “On the 13th day of Adar —a day chosen by chance (pur) by Haman — all the citizens of the empire will be allowed to kill Jews. Law enforcement officers will not prosecute anyone, because it wont be a crome but a service to the Empire. And the incentive for this massacre? If you kill a Jew you can keep his money, property, values, etc.” Haman’s plan was” diabolically great “. There was no need to distract the army from its obligations, nor to transport the Jews to concentration camps or kill them in gas chambers. Our Rabbis explain that there was no shortage of volunteers. People, even those who did not hate the Jews, fought among themselves to reserve to right to be first and keep s much as possible of the Jews’ assets.
The letters were sent to every major city in the empire. And if his diabolical plan would have worked, (and it was very close!) It would have been ח”ו the end of our people.
In the end, with the help of HaShem, as we all know, Queen Esther and Mordekhai were able to reverse the evil plan of Haman, who ended up paying his wickedness with his own life on the gallows.
The Megilla also offers us a glimpse of Haman’s psychological profile. In chapter 5, verse 13, when Haman is at home with his wife, after having attended as a guest of honor an exclusive dinner with the king and queen, and without even suspecting that Esther had a plan in place to stop Haman’s plot, an unusual dialogue took place, almost a monologue, in which Haman displays a kind of catharsis of his feelings. In the first place, Haman “confesses” his immense power, his incredible wealth, his honor, etc. And what follows next is amazing. Haman, incredibly admits the following: “And all this [my power, my wealth, my family] is worth nothing to me, when I see Mordekhai the Jew, sitting at the door of the royal court, not kneeling before me”]. “
Haman was probably one of the richest and most powerful men in the history of mankind. And yet, the fact that even if one person, Mordekhai, did not revere him, exposed the incredible fragility of the ego of this powerful man. Haman suffered from a very high dose of arrogance, at the level of megalomania: the obsession with exercising power, dominating and controlling others.
Arrogance destroys. Haman’s arrogance could have annihilated our people, and ultimately it led to his own end.
