Rhetoric Race and Religion
In Hadassah: One Night With the King, a popular 2004 novelization of the Book of Esther, the queen describes her first night alone with the king of Persia. Apparently she had a great time:
… our mutual hunger raged unchecked—at no time did I even think of demurring or becoming submissive, for my desire for him was genuine. I had fallen in love with him. I had seen past his outer facade … and now I had reached his heart.
This isn’t the same meek, pure Esther most Jews are familiar with from the story of Purim, the woman Jewish girls throughout history have wanted to emulate. This Esther is a bundle of raging hormones, swept away by the handsome and powerful Xerxes (or as Jews know him, Ahasuerus).
But the Esther in this novel is different from the heroine we’re familiar with in another significant way. Later inHadassah, Esther is depicted on her walk toward Xerxes to request a private banquet with the king and Haman. She teeters between life and death, as anyone who approached the king unbidden risked being put to death immediately. The original telling of this moment in the Bible portrays both Esther’s fortitude and her resignation to her fate: “If I perish, I perish,” she famously says. But in this novel, Esther seems to embrace her possible death:
[I]t was not until then that I remembered it all again. That the King of Kings was my father, that he missed me and longed for my presence as dearly as my own father had—and as urgently as I had come to crave the presence of Xerxes. And just as I had come to anticipate those times of fellowship with Mordecai and [Hathach]—simply basking in the warm glow of their nearness—G-d looked forward to my being with Him.
Suddenly, this most Jewish of all heroines is anticipating her death and looking forward to the day she is reunited with her God. The woman Jewish girls have revered since the days of the first Purim carnival suddenly seems so … Christian.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In