ESTHER: 5:13 Haman’s Unlimited Arrogance

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.


ESTHER 2:7 Mordekhai’s Moral Character

“אַשְׁרֵי שֹׁמְרֵי מִשְׁפָּט  זה מרדכי
עֹשֵׂה צְדָקָה בְכָל עֵת שגדל יתומה בתוך ביתו
In one of his best books, “Intellectuals”, the famous historian Paul Johnson describes the ideas of great thinkers and philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau or Carl Marx. Johnson also writes about the private lives of these intellectuals and demonstrates their selfishness and cynicism. These great ideologues did not live according to the altruism they preached. Those values were for their writings, their readers and the masses. All these thinkers claimed that they sought the good of humanity, but in their private lives proved the opposite.
Mordekhai, one of the main protagonists of Megilat Ester, is one of the national heroes of Am Israel. He was a great political and religious leader in the city of Shushan, where the Jews had begun to assimilate. But what do we know about Mordekhai’s personal life?
On the one hand we know the prestigious ancestry of Mordechai. According to the text (peshat) of the Megilla, Mordechai was a descendant of the captives from Yerushalayim around 600 BCE in the time of King Yoyakhin. In this first exile,  15 years before the destruction of the Bet haMiqdash, the Babylonian King Nebukhadnetsar captured the aristocracy and the nobility of Yerushalayim, among them the great-grandfather of Mordekhai, Quish, of the tribe of Binyamin.
In his book Leqah Tob, Rabbi Yom Tob Tsahalon opens our eyes to a very important detail that teaches us something about the private life of Mordechai and his moral character. The Megilla tells us that Mordekhai adopted her niece Esther, an orphan from father and mother, and raised and cared for her as her own daughter.
Rabbi Tsahalon quotes the Midrash that describes the enormous merit of adopting a child. The Sages analyze a verse from Tehilim that says: אשרי שמרי  משפט עשה צדקה בכל עת, “Blessed are those who … practice Tsedaqa every moment.”  The Sages took this verse seriously and asked themselves: Is it possible to practice Tsedaqa literally “at all times”? And the answer is: YES. When a family adopts a child the adoptive parents do Tsedaqa (especially in the sense of Hesed) literally 24/7. In other words, adopting a child is the highest and “insurmountable” exercise of Hesed.
It is interesting that the Tora hints something similar in reference to Abraham Abinu. The text describing the early private life of Abraham Abinu is very poor in details. Except for one circumstantial but revealing point: Haran, the brother of Abram, dies leaving his son Lot orphaned. But then we see that וילך אתו לוט, Lot became part of Abraham’s family: Abraham adopted Lot as his own son!
Following this idea, it is as if all we need to know to find out the kind and altruistic character of Mordekhai is that he adopted Esther. And the same could be said of Abraham and Lot.
It is true that we human beings are complex creatures, and that it is not easy to know a person’s character for one of his or her acts. But there are exceptions. And I believe that for the Sages adopting a child is one of these exceptions.
I remember that several years ago (20?) we spent Pesah in a hotel located in Gush Qatif, which today unfortunately is part of Gaza …. The last day of the Hag, we sat next to a large family, with a particularity that could not go unnoticed. They had three children with Down syndrome. My wife and I were astonished at the extraordinary warmth these children enjoyed. First, they were the focus of attention of the whole family, parents, grandparents and older siblings. Everyone smiled at them and gave them lots of affection. In addition, each of these children was being attended by a personal assistant -one assistant per child! – who worked for this family. And then we found out the most extraordinary thing about this incredible family: these 3 children were adopted! Adopted by a family that already had its own children, some of them already married. This was a family that evidently had enough means, and they decided to “invest” their money, their time and their love not in ONE but in THREE children with special needs, and give them the best possible life. We never saw these family again, nor did we found out their names or where they lived.  But what else do you need to find out to know that they were “human angels”?
 
 
Dedicated to the memory 
of  Selli bat Lulu ז”ל


ESTHER 2:5 The Last Jew of Shushan

איש יהודי היה בשושן הבירה
We are approaching Purim, the day we celebrate the miraculous salvation of our people in the days of the Persian Empire. We will celebrate Purim, BH, on Saturday, March 11th at night, and on Sunday the 12th.
The story of Purim is narrated in detail in a wonderful book called “Megilat Esther” which we read twice during Purim.
Each year I try to read a new book that explains the Megilla. Last year I studied, and shared with the readers, the book of Rabbi Moshe Almosnino, “Yede Moshe”. This year one of my students, R. Nathan Zabulani, brought me from Israel the new edition of the book “Leqah Tob”, written by Rabbi Yom Tob Tsahalon (see  here). One of the two special features of this book is that it was published by its author when he was only 17 years old (sic!). Which means that he wrote this book as a prodigious young teenager.
Rabbi Tsahalon gives us a very generous account of Mordekhai’s personality when he explains the pasuq איש יהודי היה בשושן הבירה “There was a Jewish man in the capital city of Shushan” (pages 27-30 of the new edition).
In the following lines I will explain, in my own words, what the Rabbi says about Mordekhai.
1. Political leader. Firstly, Mordekhai was the representative of the Jewish people before King Ahashverosh, an extremely delicate position. Let me explain: the empire of Ahashverosh (486-465, before the common era) was the greatest in the history of mankind. It stretched from India to Greece, and from what is now southern Russia to Ethiopia. There were hundreds of nations in this gigantic empire. And every nation had its representative in the Kings Court . Mordechai represented all the Jews of the empire: hundreds of thousands (or more!). The Jews, as we shall see later, were not concentrated in one or two cities, but because they were involved in international trade, they were scattered throughout the Persian empire. Representing the Jewish people probably involved dealing with taxes, religious affairs and security issues, which could surely make the difference between life and death for the Jews. This is also the time when tens of thousands of Jews were returning to Israel to build the second Bet-haMiqdash. They suffered the harassment and the permanent political boycott of multiple enemies. “Representing the Jews” included the representation no less than 50,000 Jews who lived in the Holy Land, and were in the midst of rebuilding Yerushalayim and the Temple.
2. Religious leader. Mordekhai was also the religious leader of the Jews of Shushan, which was the capital of the Persian empire, as if it were today Washington D.C.  Mordekhai had an official position in Sha’ar HaMelekh, the KIng’s Court, where all matters of state, political, financial, judicial, military, etc. were handled. (And where the constant conspiracies against the King were orchestrated). Mordechai “mingled” with the King’s advisers and with the entire political elite of Shushan. And all this while living a strict life of Jewish observance. Mordekhai was also the “darshan” “speaker”  (we would say “Rabbi” today) of the Jewish community of Shushan (דורש טוב לעמו). He taught them Tora, try to keep them away from assimilation and bring them closer to HaShem.
3. The last Jew of Shushan. Rab Tsahalon suggests that unlike the Jews who lived in other cities of the Empire that were observant, those who lived in the capital were very assimilated. The Rabbi mentions the Midrash that says that the Jews who attended Ahashverosh’s banquet, to which all the citizens of Shushan were invited, did not observe Kashrut. And while they were not idolaters, that is, they did not formally convert to another religion, they were not opposed to the practice of it either. For example, if there was a procession of aboda zara (idolatry) and all the inhabitants of Shushan kneel in honor of an idol, the Jews of Shushan had no problem to participate actively of that event. Rabbi Tsahalon explains that the expression  “איש יהודי היה “should be understood not as “There was a Jewish man … ” but as” There was only one Jewish man left, i.e., who had not assimilated, in the city of Shushan.”   Had it not been for Mordekhai, assimilation would have ended with the cosmopolitan Jewish community of the capital of the Persian Empire.
(To be continued…)
 
Dedicated to the memory of 
Yaakov Yashar 
ben 
Chacham Moshe ז”ל


ESTHER 5:13 Haman’s downfall

וכל זה איננו שוה לי
The villain of the Purim story is Haman ben Hamedata, a descendant of Amaleq. King Ahashverosh appointed Haman as his “Grand Vizier” (or prime minister) and, as explained yesterday, issued the order (Esther 3: 2) that all court officials should kneel before Haman. Everyone followed the king’s order, except for one man: Mordekhai. And when Haman learned that Mordekhai did not bow before him, he decided to eliminate all the people of Mordekhai: the Jewish nation.
Haman was evil, but he was not foolish. Actually, it seems that he was an evil genius. Take, for example, the way he managed to carry out his version of “the final solution”. First, he had to persuade Ahashverosh. To do this, he presented his plan as something that benefited the King, and not as his personal vendetta(Ch. 3: 8). Persuading the King was not very difficult. Among other things, because Haman presented a plan with “zero” operating costs. What’s more: in exchange for the executive order of the King, Haman offered a lot of money for the royal treasury (3: 9).
Now, how did Haman plan to recruit tens of thousands of soldiers to find and execute hundreds of thousands of Jews, scattered throughout the Persian Empire, from Turkey to China?
Haman devised an evil plan, which is briefly described in the Megilla with just two words: ושללם לבוז ( “and their belongings will be for plunder”). Haman’s decree said something like this: “On the 13th of Adar, every subject of the Persian empire will be allowed to kill Jews. Police would not oppose, and nobody will be prosecuted for this. And what’s more: whoever kills a Jew ,  can keep his or her money, property, valuables, etc. ”   With his “genius” plan, there was no need to distract the army from its obligations, and there was no need to pay for costly transportation to take the Jews to concentration camps, or operating the gas chambers.
Our Rabbis explain that there was no shortage of volunteers. Many people, especially those who did not like Jews, were fighting against each other so that when the day comes, they would be the first to kill the Jews, and keeping their goods ….
If Haman had succeeded (and he was very close!) It would have been the end of our people ח”ו ….
In the end, as we all know, with the help of HaShem, Queen Esther and Mordekhai were able to  disrupt the evil plan of Haman, who ended up paying his evil intentions with his own life.
The Megilla also provides us a glimpse into the psychological profile of Haman. In chapter 5, verse 13, when Hamas is at home with his wife and friends, after attending as a guest of honor at a special dinner with the King and Queen, and without suspecting that Esther is designing a plan to counter his, we witness an unusual dialogue, almost a monologue, in which Haman makes a kind of catharsis of his feelings. First, Haman acknowledged his immense power, his incredible wealth and honor, etc. What follows is really surprising. Haman, amazingly admits that (Esther 5:13): “And all this [my power, my wealth, my family]  has no value for me, when I see Mordekhai the Jew,”sitting” on the gate of the royal court [ i.e., and he does not kneel before me].”
Haman,  was probably one of the most powerful men in the history of mankind. Even his personal life was very successful. He had a wife who supported him and a lot of children. And yet, it took one person, Mordekhai, who did not bow down in front of him, to make his ego collapse, exposing the emotional fragility of this powerful man.
Haman suffered from a high dose of ga-ava, arrogance, at the level of megalomania: the obsession with the exercise of power, especially for dominance and control over others.
Haman’s endless arrogance led to his own downfall.


ESTHER 1:11: Ahashverosh: money or ego?

להראות העמים והשרים את יופיה
Yesterday, we began to analyze the dysfunctional character of King Ahashverosh and how his psychological problems affected the decisions, that almost lead to the annihilation of the Jewish people.
King Ahashverosh’s emotional insecurity made him needy of the applause of others. And since his material resources were unlimited, the King decided to invest a fortune in throwing a mega-party that lasts 187 days.
It is very interesting that when the Megillah explains why King Ahashverosh made this party, it says literally: “to show (בהראותו, to display, exhibit or show off) his wealth and the glory of his kingdom.” In other words, this party was not an act of charity for the poor. The King did not distribute bread, but crazy amounts of alcohol. This was a feast that he made for himself. To show off and exhibit his greatness and wealth.
Rabbi Almosnino, an expert in musar (Jewish psychology of human behavior) explains that there are two elements that might drive the behavior of a dysfunctional ruler or leader: money and image (ego). For some politicians, money is priority. These people will try to get to power only to accumulate money, and they would be willing even to sacrifice their image in order to get more money. For other leaders, image and ego are above money. These people, unlike the first, will be willing to sacrifice all their money in order to achieve a positive image that would make them feeling good about themselves. Ahashverosh, says Rabbi Almosnino, belonged to this second category. He squandered an enormous fortune with a single purpose in mind: to improve his image in the eyes of all his subjects, and thus, boosting his own ego.
Why is it important to know that for Ahashverosh his ego was more important than his money? Rabbi Almosnino said that when the reader reaches the most dramatic part of the Purim story, when King Ahashverosh approves Haman’s plan to eliminate the Jewish people, one would think that perhaps it would be possible to bribe the King, offering him more money than what Haman offered him in order to cancel this terrible edict. However, once we know that for this King his ego is more important than his money, we realize that there was not an option to bribe the King. Not because this king is very honest and incorruptible. But because this king is so insecure that he cannot backtrack on something he already decreed.
Arrogant people, explains Rabbi Abraham Twersky, suffer from low self-esteem. This emotional insecurity leads to arrogance, an unconscious compensatory attitude. Arrogance prevents a person from saying, “I was wrong”. Admitting a mistake is virtually impossible for an arrogant person, because the insecurity of that arrogant individual. Acknowledging a mistake would imply the recognition that one is not so great and perfect as he wants to “show off”. Admitting a mistake would go against the psychological pretension of perfection. And the social mask of  flawlessnessless will collapse.  Only a wise and humble person, that is, an individual who has a healthy dose of self-esteem, is able to admit making mistakes. Since there is no inflated ego to be deflated ….
The insecure Ahashverosh admitted no mistakes. (as we will see later on, in Esther 8: 8, the original decree to kill the Jews was never repealed: Mordekhai and Esther had to write a completely new decree, allowing the Jews to defend themselves)
One more thing: at the end of the party, the King wanted to continue “showing” more. And once he had shown all his wealth, his royal wine, his golden bowls, his garden, etc. there was only one more thing for him to display: his trophy wife Vashti. The Megilla (1:11) using explicitly the same verb as before: להראות (to show off), says that Ahashverosh summoned “Queen Vashti to show her beauty to the subjects of the kingdom and to the ministers, because she was very beautiful.” Our Hakhamim explained that Ahashverosh intended to exhibit his wife without clothes, and she obviously refused.
This party, as we will explain BH tomorrow, ended very badly for Ahashverosh.
The message is very clear and very strong. Vanity and ostentation leads to self-destruction. This infinitely rich, but miserably insecure and arrogant, King cannot control his exhibitionist impulses. And at the end of the party, in which he invested so much to boost his ego, he ends up dishonored and humiliated by all (היה אחשורוש שחוק לכל העולם).
To be continued…


ESTHER 1:5: Ahashverosh’s dangerous vulnerability

ובמלאת הימים האלה עשה המלך לכל העם
In the coming days we will concentrate on the King Ahashverosh, who was not a paragon of virtue, and see how important is to know his psychological profile 1. to better understand how the story of Megillat Esther unfolds and 2. for our own moral education.
The first chapter of the Megilla describes two major parties. A first celebration which lasted 180 days, and the second, which lasted seven days. In this second fest, the Persian emperor showed all his “kindness” handing out free and unlimited wine for a week, to all the people of Shushan. Giving free stuff to people was, and remains to this day, the favorite way demagogues and populist leaders use to increase their popularity.
But Ahashverosh had deeper personal and emotional needs, to act the way he acted.
To discover the psychological profile of Ahashverosh no better commentary than that of Rabbi Moshe Almosnino (1515-1580). Rabbi Almosnino wrote a wonderful book “Yede Moshe” where similarly to the way a psychoanalyst examines the profile of her patient from therapy sessions, Rabbi Almosnino examines the personality of Ahashverosh from a deep “psychoanalysis” of the the text of the Megilla (it is important to note that following a long tradition of Hakhamim Sephardim, Rabbi Almosnino was able to analyze the text, Peshat, also independently from the Midrash).
I will summarize his words:
King Ahashverosh was a great soldier, a great strategist and an eximious “Conquistador”. But unlike Cyrus and Darius, who besides being great fighters were also admired rulers, King Ahashverosh did not have many virtues as monarch. And when he was not on the battlefield, sheathing a sword and mercilessly killing the enemy, he did not know how to act. The main ambition of this great “conqueror of lands” was to “conquer” his own people. And in this business, probably due to his lacking of social skills, he was not very successful. And that is why outside the battlefield, the great Ahashverosh was a very insecure man.
Rabbi Almosnino says that “the king made a feast for all his subjects” because the King became a people pleaser. It was so much his desperation to be liked, loved and admired by all (in order to feel good about himself) that he who was willing to throw the biggest and most lavish parties to do so.
Why is it important for us to know this? Rabbi Almosnino asks. And he explains that the Megilla here anticipates to us that this insecure King was not going to make decisions that will necessarily be good for his Empire or his subjects. This Emperor’s decisions will be made based mainly on how those decisions would affect his need to be loved by his people, and especially by his closest advisers, those who most flattered him.
This psychological weakness of the King will be exploited to the maximum by his advisers. The machiavellian advisors of the King, always looking for their own benefit, knew that a king who does not enjoy a healthy dose of self-esteem, is an easy prey to their maneuvers. They just have to praise him enough for the King to become emotionally dependent on their approval. And the man who better exploited this vulnerability of the King was the evil Haman.
The Megilla tells us in detail how Haman presented to the King his plan to eliminate the Jews. For Haman, as we all know, it was a personal mega-vendetta against  Mordekhai. But Haman described his plan to the King not in terms of his own interest but disguised as the interests and personal benefit of the King and his image. “These people [the Jews] do not follow your orders … It is not in the interest of the King that these people would be left alive”. Ahashverosh would do anything that would improve his image, and vice versa. That’s why the King did not ask Haman who this people are,  what benefits or detriments this decision would bring for the empire, etc. Incredibly Ahashverosh accepts Haman’s request at face value without questioning him, just in order to please his favorite sycophant. On the other hand, Haman, very cleverly, did not reveal the name of the people he wanted to eliminate. Haman suggests the king to get rid of an anonymous “people”, “distant”, mostly unknown and, above all, disobedient. As if this decision was not going to hurt at all to the image of Ahashverosh. Quite the opposite.
A King with infinite power over the lives of his subjects, who suffers from such deep psychological vulnerabilities, is a dangerous ticking bomb. And we, the Yehudim, were about to be the main victims of the King’s tragic dysfunctions.
Tomorrow, BH, we will see how Ahashverosh ‘s insecurity unfolded into an extreme need of showing-off his wealth.  


ESTHER 1:1-3: Who was Ahashverosh?

To appreciate a little better the story of Megillat Esther, we are analyzing some historical data that will help us understand the events recounted in this wonderful book.
First, we will focus on identifying Ahashverosh, which is also the intention of the first pasuq (biblical verse) of the Megilla. With this data, I think we will better realize the magnitude of the miracle of Purim.
The ancient tradition of the Jews of Iran is that King Ahashverosh was the emperor who in Persian language is known as “Khashayarsha”. And Khashayarsha is none other than the famous King Xerxes (also known among Gentiles as “Ahasuerus”), who reigned from 486-465, before the common era.
Cyrus (reigned 559-529 BCE) was the first Persian emperor. Then followed his son Cambyses (528-521 BCE), and then the famous Darius (521-486 BCE), the predecessor of Ahashverosh. Already at the time of Cyrus, the Persian Empire was huge and reached all the way to India (in Hebrew “Hoddu”). But Darius expanded it further, conquering several civilizations of North Africa: Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia (in Hebrew “Kush”). This was the huge empire inherited by Ahashverosh.
 The Megilla begins with this description. The first pasuq of the Megilla reads:
ESTHER 1: 1 “And it came to pass in the days of Ahashverosh, the Ahashverosh who reigned from India to Ethiopia, a total of 127 provinces.”
Rabbi Moshe Almosnino, in his extraordinary book on the Megillot “Yede Moshe” explains why the Megilla started with this information, which might seem superfluous. As discussed yesterday, the Persian Empire was the largest known to humankind, and it was never larger than in the times of Ahashverosh. This information is relevant to the story of Purim. Because now we know that ALL the Jews of that time lived under the Persian empire. And when Haman decreed the elimination of the “Persian Jews”, he did not target just the Jews of Shushan,  but absolutely all the Jewish people. As this pasuq says, the Kingdom of Ahashverosh extended to Israel and it even included Egypt, where it is estimated that there were some Jewish colonies. IN THE TIME OF AHASHVEROSH  THERE WERE NO JEWS LIVING OUTSIDE THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. That gives us an idea first, of the magnitude of the danger experienced by the Jewish people during Purim: I think that with the exception of the Shoah, there was never a time the Jewish people were so close to an impending and total elimination. Second, as Rabbi Almosnino says, this fact helps us to appreciate even more the “godel hanes”, i.e., the extraordinary Providential protection HaShem granted us, saving us from total extermination.
ESTHER 1: 3. “In the third year of his reign, [Ahashverosh] made a feast for all his nobles and officials:  all the army officers of Persia and Media, and the princes and nobles of the provinces”
Although the Kingdom of Ahashverosh was very large, for the emperors it was never enough. Darius had left an incomplete mission: to conquer Europe. And the gateway to the conquest of Europe was Greece. Darius died before he could conquer Greece. Ahashverosh then, had as the main goal of his life to conquer Greece.
Ahashverosh or Xerxes is known in world history for leading the largest military expedition in the history of mankind. According to Herodotus, who is considered the father of modern history (and who began his career with the story of Xerxes) the Persian emperor prepared an army of 5 million (to be more precise: 5,283,220 men) between soldiers and auxiliaries, to conquer Greece (He ultimately failed!).
In its third pasuq the Megilla tells us that Ahashverosh made a feast which lasted for six months, and then he threw another party that lasted for seven days. Some say that the first party was actually a “smokescreen” to bring together all the rulers and the generals of the Empire, and spend together six months organizing the army of 5 million soldiers.
There are two facts in the Megilla that seem to corroborate this theory.
1.The first guests mentioned in this pasuq are indeed the Military chiefs of Persia and Media (the Medes were allies of the Persians).
2. This would also explain why Ahashverosh, who was very fond of alcohol, got drunk only on the last day of the second party: as if during the first six months Ahashverosh, the commander in chief of the army, had to be sober and lucid not to lose any detail of the preparation of this monumental military expedition. After six months of intensive work, the monarch allowed himself to celebrate for seven days, without any limitations.  Historical data also seems to confirm the theory of the smokescreen, as it is estimated that Ahashverosh began preparing his expedition in 483 BC (see this), that is the third year of his reign, as it is mentioned with exquisite precision in our Megilla .
To be continued…


ESTHER 3:6. Megalomania

ויבז בעיניו לשלוח יד במרדכי לבדו
 
The villain of the story of Purim is Haman ben Hamedata, a descendant of Amaleq. King Ahashverosh appointed Haman as his  Chief of Staff.  The King also issued an unusual order (Esther 3:2) all the officers of the King’s court must prostrate to Haman. Everyone followed the King’s order except one man: Mordekhay.
According to the rabbis Mordekhay refused to prostrate to Haman not out of disrespect, but because Haman had been also made a priest,  a representative of a Persian idol he was carrying with him. The Rabbis deduced this insight from the special wording the Megila uses to describe the honors due to Haman. The people were ordered to bow down and kneel down to Haman (likhroa’ ulhishtahavot). Now, while bowing down is a sign of respect and honor, kneeling down is an unequivocal act of religious worship. Mordekhay made clear that as a Jew he would not kneel down to Haman, even at the expense of his own life. But the unexpected happened.  When Haman learned about Mordekhay’s offense, “he felt contempt to kill Mordekhay alone” (3:6), and anticipating the megalomaniac practices of a mob boss,  he decided to teach Mordekhay a lesson by killing all Mordekhay’s brothers and sisters living in the Persian Empire. In other words, the entire Jewish nation.
How would Haman execute his plan? To persuade the King was relatively easy. Among other things, because there were zero operating costs involved. On the contrary: in exchange for the King’s edict, Haman offered ten thousand talents of silver for the Royal treasury (3:9). Now, how would Haman recruit so many soldiers and forces to persecute, find and execute hundreds of thousands of Jews throughout the huge Persian Empire?
Haman came up with a shrewd evil plan, which the Megila briefly describes with two key words: ushlalam la-boz. A Royal Decree was sent to all the King’s subjects saying: If you kill a Jew on a specific day (Adar 13), you are not to be prosecuted, the police will not oppose you, on the contrary, law-enforcement forces will be on your side. And, on top of that, you can keep for you the Jew’s money, his assets and his properties. It was a genius evil plan. There was no need for professional army forces, or trains to transport the Jews to death camps or gas chambers. Our Rabbis explained that there was no shortage of volunteers for the job. Many people, were fighting among themselves to be the first to kill the Jews on the assigned day and keep their money!

Had Haman succeeded (and he was very close!) it would have been the end of the Jewish people, has veShalom.  At the end, as we all know, Mordekhay and Esther devised an effective plan, and HaShem, from behind the scenes, saved us from extinction.



ESTHER 3:8, Credit, an old Jewish innovation

ישנו עם אחד מפוזר ומפורד בין העמים בכל מדינות מלכותך
As we explained yesterday, the Jews were deported from Israel in 586 BCE. At that time, more than 100,000 Jews were living in the Babylonian Empire. The Jews were second class citizens, virtual prisoners of war of the Babylonians.  But the Jewish resilience prevailed. Not only they did not assimilate but in a few decades, especially with the surge of the Persian Empire (538 BCE), the Jews began to thrive. While in Israel, for centuries, the Jews dedicated mainly to agriculture, now they discovered a new enterprise: trade.  The huge Persian Empire was a perfect international free-trade-zone. Some examples.

According to Samuel Kurinsky (see below) the Jews discovered how to produce glass (from sand) including ornamental glass-beads. The Jews exported glass-beads to China in exchange for gold and silver mining rights. 

The Jews also exported to China linen, made in Israel, (thus helping their brothers in Yerushalayim) and imported Chinese silk.  Kurinsky explains that Chinese people fancied linen as much as the west fancied Chinese silk.  Because of the international network they developed, Jews were very prominent in the famous Silk Road.  “…the Jewish enclaves within the region, formed the hub of a network of trade routes that fanned out across Asia to the East and West. Jewish merchants and artisans established colonies at strategic points along those routes….”.

Jews were also very strong in the spices trade. They imported exotic spices from China and India,  which were in high demand in the west. 

But all scholars agree that the most successful Jewish enterprise was “credit”.  We have records, almost 900 clay tablets, of two families of Jewish bankers, among them the Murashu family.  (see this). Imagine promissory notes, written in Hebrew, that were recognized and honored by other Jewish merchants and financiers in the remote corners of the Persian Empire, which extended from India-China to Sudan-Ethiopia. “Jewish bankers made finance capital a factor of Persian industrial development and initiated a system of credit that Jewish traders wove into the world economy. The surviving records of two Jewish banking families are among the most revealing documents of the Persian period. Jews supplied the credit and capital for the expanding economy of the region.”
Probably referring to this international trade-hub, Haman described the Jews to Ahashverosh with great accuracy (Esther 3:8)”There is a certain people spread and dispersed among the peoples, in all the provinces of your kingdom…”
It seems that by the time of Ahashverosh, the Jews in the Persian Empire were economically successful. This could also explain why the majority of the Jewish population (probably over 200,000 Jews) choose to remain in the prosperous Diaspora instead of joining those who returned to Erets Israel in 538 BCE.

For more information about the innovations and entrepreneurship of the Jews in their first diaspora read: “Samuel Kurinsky – The eighth day: the hidden history of the Jewish contribution to civilization”