Imu Shalev: Welcome back to A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and made possible through the generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

If Haman's story is a replay of what went wrong in Gan Eden, could Esther's story be a redeemed version of what might have gone right? That's the question we ended last episode wondering about.

We got here by exploring our new Cast of Characters. This time around, Achshverosh seemed to be playing Adam; Mordechai, he lines up with God; Haman is the snake; Esther is Chava, and Esther’s secret identity is the forbidden fruit - the forbidden fruit that, halfway through the Megillah, is suddenly no longer forbidden.

In fact, Mordechai, the God-character in our story, he commands Esther to reveal her identity to Achashverosh, and to feed him very valuable knowledge of good and evil, that “Haman wants to kill my whole people.” That’s what got us thinking in the first place, hey, maybe what’s happening here is a redeemed version of the garden.

But, as you may remember, Rabbi Fohrman wasn't quite satisfied with this argument. He thought Esther's strategies were too manipulative to make them truly redemptive. Yeah, Esther was acting better than Chava, but it seemed like she was playing political power games with Achashverosh, coyly hinting that she might be having an affair with Haman in order to get the upper hand. As Rabbi Fohrman put it, is a Machiavellian victory the best we can do? He thought the answer was no. He thought a closer read could reveal how Esther's actions were truly a redemption of Eden.

But before we could get there, I still needed to be bought in on the problem, is a Machiavellian victory so bad? What really was Rabbi Fohrman's issue with Esther using every means necessary to save her whole people?

To help me see why he was being so hard on Esther, Rabbi Fohrman wanted to really unpack that pivotal moment when she confronts the king. First things first, he wanted to take a closer look at what Esther was trying to accomplish there. Rabbi Fohrman thought it was more than just revealing her identity, even more than just convincing Achashverosh to take down Haman or save the Jews.

Through the prism of the Tree of Knowledge, Esther's real goal in that moment is to feed her husband forbidden fruit; in essence, to offer him knowledge of good and evil. And Rabbi Fohrman thought that, to truly accomplish that goal, to really rise to that challenge, Esther's means mattered just as much as her ends.

To understand why, Rabbi Fohrman took me back to our original Cast of Characters; you know, when Haman initially paralleled Adam, and what we learned there about why eating from the tree was forbidden in the first place.

Rabbi David Fohrman: One of the things we talked about in earlier episodes, Imu, was that one of the fundamental problems from eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is that when humans get a knowledge of good and evil too soon, when they're too cavalier with good and evil, they tend to confuse two meanings of the word “good,” and that leads to a terrible catastrophe.

They tend to confuse the aesthetic good and the moral good. They tend to confuse the sense of good in which I like something. “I like the macaroni and cheese,” and therefore it is good. I confuse that with the moral sense of good, right? “This is just, right, and proper,” and it's good in that sense.

And, you know, the downfall of every human being who succumbs to evil is that I view myself as a good person, right? I view myself as doing good things. The subtlety is, what do you mean by good? When I start thinking that what I like is what is right, that's trouble. If I see those things as being fused together - what I like is, by definition, what is moral, or once I like something enough I'm just going to convince myself that it's moral - that's a problem.

In Haman's case, that was a problem. Zeresh said, “Why don't you take down Mordechai? Why don't you make these gallows?” וַיִּיטַב הַדָּבָר לִפְנֵי הָמָן — And it was good in the eyes of Haman (Esther 5:14). Well, what do you mean by “good?” Well, it's certainly something that he wanted, and he convinced himself that, because he wanted it, it was the right thing to do. It was altogether good and proper that Mordechai should be hanged upon that tree.

So there is a great problem in Biblical history, that goes back to the first story of humanity, that's now being dealt with. It's the Tree of Knowledge problem, and if Esther is going to deal with it sort of at the end of Biblical history…

Remember, the Book of Esther is at the very climax of Biblical history when the Second Temple is being rebuilt in Israel. It's the moment where Biblical history comes to its end. So if Esther is going to deal with it, the thing she needs to do is to feed her husband forbidden knowledge in such a way that decouples these two meanings of “good” and teaches him that what he wants is not always the same thing as what's right.

Imu: Okay, so now I was getting the problem. If you look at Esther's story in a vacuum, all she needs to do is convince Achashverosh to save the Jews. It gets the job done, it's a good ending. But in the context of our Gan Eden connections, that's not all the story is really about. It's not only about persevering, about surviving or victory. The Torah seems to be setting up this moment as a redemption of what went wrong when Adam ate the fruit and first confused his subjective good for the moral good.

So for Achashverosh to really “eat the fruit” in a permitted way, so to speak, he has to undo that confusion. He has to understand why what Esther is asking him is morally good.

In other words, Esther's challenge wasn't just to get Achashverosh to do the right thing but to teach him to be a good human being, and you can't do that through manipulation and power games. The only way to do that is by making an actual, convincing, moral argument.

But now that Rabbi Fohrman and I were on the same page about the problem, I had to wonder - how does she do that? I mean, how do you do that for a king, let alone a king like Achashverosh? He's not exactly the most moral guy we know. Rabbi Fohrman was very willing to concede that Esther's challenge was daunting.

In fact, to really see what she was up against, Rabbi Fohrman reminded me of something we noticed last episode. Remember, God had kind of a beauty contest for Adam where he presents all the animals to Adam as potential mates. And early on in the Megillah, when Achashverosh is looking for a mate, he has a beauty contest, too.

Rabbi Fohrman: Go back to the story in the Megillah and you'll notice something kind of disconcerting. Think about that beauty contest. If it's really true that the beauty contest in the Megillah is parallel to the other great beauty contest in the Torah, the beauty contest that Adam experienced, let's just play Cast of Characters here. If Achashverosh is playing Adam, the one at the center of this beauty contest, then who are all the women being herded into the King's harem? Who are they playing, in terms of Genesis?

Imu: Yeah, they're the animals. It’s hard to say that, but the king is certainly objectifying them and treating them that way. He's not dating them and making himself vulnerable.

Rabbi Fohrman: He is not, right? And even think about it in terms of the calling of names. There's almost like this twisted nature about the calling of names. We noticed how there's a similarity between the calling of names in Genesis and the king who would only invite one back called by name. But think about all the other women who weren't called by name. If I'm so objectified that I don't even have a name, I'm just the nameless girl in the harem and the king doesn't even know who I am, that's the ultimate “You're less than me,” right? You really are one of the animals.

So, all of these women are being objectified, they're being treated as something less than human, which puts Esther in a remarkably perilous position. Think about it. You're Esther, now you're queen. Now what? What kind of life is this going to be? What role am I supposed to have? What role can I have? 

Imu: Yeah, you’ve got to be docile. You’ve got to be pretty.

Rabbi Fohrman: I’ve got to be docile, I’ve got to be pretty. Can I speak my mind? Can I dare to correct the king?

Imu: Not if you don't want to head down Vashti's path.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. Didn't work out so well for Vashti. It's a pretty scary position to be in. 

Imu: It sets some really good drama because she should be able to go and ask for her people's life. If there's a genocide, and the king says, “I'll give you half my kingdom,” the least you could do is not kill my people. But if you put things in light of the Vashti thing, she didn't come to a party and got executed. So you really don't know how to tiptoe around the king. When he says, “I'm going to give you half my kingdom,” but he executed the last queen for not coming to a party, you don't know what you're going to step in. So it's not so simple. The drama is pretty heightened.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, it's not so simple. The king may not be pleased to hear that Esther's identity is a Jew, because what has the king rather cavalierly given Haman permission to do to all the Jews? Absolutely destroy each and every one of them, man, woman, and child. Now, if you're going to have a genocide where you destroy everyone, man, woman, and child, how must you view them? 

Imu: You're treating them as bugs, not even animals.

Rabbi Fohrman: You're treating them as vermin. You're treating them as something fundamentally less than human. You're treating them as pests.

Well, if you're the king, how happy are you going to be to hear that your wife is one of the pests? This is the challenge that faces Esther, right? Somehow, she's going to have to do this huge lift to be able to undo the problem of the treatment of knowledge of good and evil, to somehow teach this king that there's difference between that which he wants and that which is good, but working with one hand behind her back, because how is somebody who's less than human ever going to be able to make that argument? 

Imu: So here's Esther trying to teach Achashverosh that he's not God, but he doesn't even recognize her as human. It is good drama. But besides being dramatic, this particular moral problem was also kind of elegant, like it was drawing out two sides of the same problematic coin. On the one hand, thinking that you're God, that you're more than human and on the other hand, thinking that other people are kind of like animals, that they're less than human. These are both ways of wiggling out of being a good human yourself.

This elegance wasn't lost on Rabbi Fohrman. In fact, he thought it was key to understanding the ultimate moral that the Torah was trying to teach with all of these Gan Eden connections; I mean, all of our connections, going way back to Episode One.

But in order to get there, we have to get back to the drama, back to Esther's challenge. Because here she is, a nothing, an animal in her husband's eyes. Somehow, she has to make him see that she and her people are human, and in doing so, teach him a moral truth. At least, that's what she would need to do to make her story a true redemption of the Garden of Eden. 

So... will she be successful? To find out, we jumped into the text, to slowly and carefully reread Esther's encounters with the king, on the look out for where among all the drama and political intrigue she does make a moral argument to Achashverosh. And Rabbi Fohrman thought the text actually had a playfully literary tool that it was using in order to give us a clue.

Rabbi Fohrman: So what I want to suggest is that the Book of Esther is going to use a very clever literary tool to help tip off the reader to when Esther is successful and when she's not quite successful. And the literary tool is that she is going to have to deliver this knowledge to her husband, she's going to have to deliver this “food” to her husband, she's going to have to confront her husband and speak to him in such a way that she strings together the words “good” and “evil.”

And if she can do that, use the words tov and the words rah together to deliver this fundamental knowledge to the king, the knowledge becomes not just her own identity, but the knowledge that the “good” of what you want is not always the same as the “good” of what you should do. If she can do that, then she's successful. 

So what I want to do with you now is actually go through the text, actually look for these markers in the four encounters that Esther has with the king, and analyze them using that matrix.

Imu: I'm with you. Let's do it.

Rabbi Fohrman: Encounter number one: Mordechai says, “You've got to go to the king.” Esther is like, “I can't go to the king. He hasn't called me for 30 days. It’s going to be off with my head.” He says, “Esther, you've got to do it.” So she says, “Fine. I'm going to fast for three days, everyone's going to fast for three days, and then I'm going to go. I'm going to convene this feast and I'm going to give him this knowledge.”

So let's look at her first attempt when she talks to the king. The king raises his scepter and says: מַה־לָּךְ אֶסְתֵּר הַמַּלְכָּה וּמַה־בַּקָּשָׁתֵךְ — What do you want, Esther HaMalkah (the Queen)? What is your ask? עַד־חֲצִי הַמַּלְכוּת וְיִנָּתֵן לָךְ — Up to half the kingdom and I'll give it to you. וַתֹּאמֶר אֶסְתֵּר — So Esther says, אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — If it's good for the king, if the king finds it good, יָבוֹא הַמֶּלֶךְ וְהָמָן הַיּוֹם אֶל־הַמִּשְׁתֶּה אֲשֶׁר־עָשִׂיתִי לוֹ — Would you guys come, you and Haman, come to this feast that I make for him (Esther 5:3-4)?

So this is the first encounter between Esther and the king. And Imu, how many of our special words, tov and rah, can you find here in this encounter?

Imu: Right now, I see one. “If it’s good for the king.”

Rabbi Fohrman: “If it's good for the king.” So I have tov without rah, so I've got tov there. And Imu, what about our litmus test? Has the queen made a moral argument to him? Helped him discern the difference between what he wants and what is actually morally right?

Imu: No, this is the word tov as in, like, “macaroni and cheese is good,” not like, you know, “nobility is good.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. He means, “If you like it.” That's what tov means. אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — If you decide you like it, maybe you'd come to this feast.

Imu: I actually love what you're doing because you're slowing down the plot so you can see. If you're just reading Esther chapter four, the very last thing that happens is Mordechai is begging her, “You've got to speak up, and if you don't speak up now…This is maybe the reason why you become queen.”

And then she's like, “Everybody fast,” and she's going into that inner chamber, and you can hear the music that's playing as she walks in slow motion, and is the scepter going to come out or is it going to be off with her head? She's there, and she should make her plea to save the people, and she's like, “Can you come to my wine feast?”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Imu: It’s totally anticlimactic.

Rabbi Fohrman: And everyone's like, “No, no, tell him! Tell him!” But no, “Can you come to my wine feast?”

Imu: Okay, so that's encounter number one, and no moral argument. Just Esther appealing to what the king thinks is good in order to get what she wants, his agreement to come to her wine feast.

So let's go to the first wine feast. At the wine feast, the king again presents her with his golden possibilities: מַה־שְּׁאֵלָתֵךְ וְיִנָּתֵן לָךְ — What is your request and I'll give it to you? וּמַה־בַּקָּשָׁתֵךְ — What's your plea? עַד־חֲצִי הַמַּלְכוּת — Until half the kingdom, וְתֵעָשׂ.

And the Queen again has this moment on the silver platter, and what does she say? שְׁאֵלָתִי וּבַקָּשָׁתִי — You want to know what my request is? You want to know what my plea is? אִם־מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ — If I've charmed you in your eyes, וְאִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — And if it seems tov to you, if it seems good to you, לָתֵת אֶת־שְׁאֵלָתִי — to give my request, וְלַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־בַּקָּשָׁתִי — to do my plea, יָבוֹא הַמֶּלֶךְ וְהָמָן אֶל־הַמִּשְׁתֶּה אֲשֶׁר אֶעֱשֶׂה לָהֶם וּמָחָר אֶעֱשֶׂה כִּדְבַר הַמֶּלֶךְ — Why don't you come to another wine feast and tomorrow I'll do what you've asked (Esther 5:6-8)?

And so, Imu, let's apply our litmus test. How many words do we have here? Tov and rah. Which word do we get?

Imu: Yeah, we've got tov again.

Rabbi Fohrman: No rah. So she's done half of it, right? And indeed, she's only talked about half of the meaning of tov. Which meaning of tov is she talking about?

Imu: “I like it. It's tasty.”

Rabbi Fohrman: “It’s tasty,” that's right. She says, “If you like me, if it's tasty.” אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — And if you like this idea, maybe you'll come to another wine feast. But still no argument, right?

Imu: So, second attempt and still no moral argument. Esther just seems to be buying time up to this point. All she's done is invite the king to one banquet and then another. It's the second banquet, which is confusingly Esther's third encounter, where things truly heat up.

Rabbi Fohrman: At the second wine feast, the king again sets down the gauntlet. “What's your request? Up to half the kingdom and I'll give it to you.”

וַתַּעַן אֶסְתֵּר הַמַּלְכָּה — And so the queen says, וַתֹּאמַר — and she says, אִם־מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֶיךָ הַמֶּלֶךְ — If I found favor in your eyes; if I've charmed you, King; if you like me, וְאִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — and if it seems tov to you, תִּנָּתֶן־לִי נַפְשִׁי בִּשְׁאֵלָתִי וְעַמִּי בְּבַקָּשָׁתִי — Give me my life as my request, and give me my people as your bequest, כִּי נִמְכַּרְנוּ אֲנִי וְעַמִּי — Because me and my people, we've been sold to be utterly killed.

 וְאִלּוּ לַעֲבָדִים וְלִשְׁפָחוֹת נִמְכַּרְנוּ — King, I have to tell you that if we'd only been sold as slaves, הֶחֱרַשְׁתִּי — I wouldn't have said anything, King. כִּי אֵין הַצָּר שֹׁוֶה בְּנֵזֶק הַמֶּלֶךְ — Because, King, you don't really get enough out of it by saving us. Because, look, you know, at least there's some slave labor, and it's not so bad for us because, you know, we're not going to die.

Imu: The weirdest line in the Megillah.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, but King, that's not the case. We're not being sold as slaves, so it's really pretty bad for us. It's not so good for you. You don't get any slave labor out of it. So I'm really asking you that, אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — If it seems tov to you, maybe you'd think about sparing us. And the king, enraged, says, “Who's this guy who wants to do this?” And she says: הָמָן הָרָע הַזֶּה — It's Haman, this terrible person (Esther 7:3-6).

So Imu, I come to you and I say, how many of the special words has Esther used?

Imu: Well, this is, you know, more advanced. She's used the word tov and she used the word rah. She's declared somebody as evil, and I think it's “evil,” right? It's not like, you know, “I don't like mac and cheese;” it's, “This guy's a bad guy.” And she also says, you know, if it is good for the king, you should spare my life and my people. But she kind of weakens the moral argument when she says these lines that are so strange that I think any editor, if they were writing the story, would have cut out.

What I mean is, she says to him, “Hey, I’m just letting you know, this whole time I was a Jew,” and what I would expect her to say is, “I'm a Jew! Save me and my people. I'm the queen. Give me the power. I’ve got to save my people.” And so she's like, “I'm so sorry, I'm a Jew, and I wouldn't have brought it up if the genocide thing wasn't genocide, if it was just mass slavery”

Rabbi Fohrman: It was totally fine to enslave us all.

Imu: Yeah, yeah.

Rabbi Fohrman: After all, we are vermin, right? Like, we understand you dehumanizing us, putting us to slavery, and it wouldn't have been worth it to bring it up, considering the loss to the king from all of our labor. The argument she's making is decidedly non-moral.

Imu: It's utilitarian. 

Rabbi Fohrman: She hasn't distinguished between that which is good for the king and that which is right to do. It's closer to a moral argument. It just doesn't quite make it. And if anything, there's something behind the scenes that she's doing, which we talked about in our last get-together, which is a little sneaky. She has a little insurance policy going for her. What has she done by inviting the king to all these private banquets between her and Haman? She's leveraging the king's jealousy, right?

And so the reason why Haman's going to go down at some level is because, you know, when the king sees Haman on that couch, it ignites this idea that Haman's been after my wife this whole time. And it's like, what difference does it make “after her” to kill her, what difference does it make “after her” to have an affair one way or the other? It's all the same. You're after my wife, you're about גַם לִכְבּוֹשׁ אֶת־הַמַּלְכָּה. You want her even when I'm in the house.

So there's something decidedly amoral about that, right? She's going to have Machiavelli's victory, as we described before. And getting back to that question we left from the last time we talked, is that the way it's all going to end? Is that the best you can do for good and evil? That when push comes to shove, whatever way you can take down the villain through all sorts of realpolitik. That is what you should do. Is that the final message of the Megillah?

You know, maybe that's what history calls for. Maybe Esther is a hero at the end of the story, even if she hasn't made a moral argument to the king. But you can't tell me that you've solved the great Tree of Knowledge story in the sense that you've taken knowledge of good and evil and given them to your husband in a way that teaches them something about morality. You haven't done that.

Imu: So after all that, we were back here -- this moment we were discussing last time -- the great climax of the megillah where Esther seems to save the day. But, in the context of our Gan Eden connections, it falls short. Fortunately for us, there’s actually one more encounter between Esther and Achashverosh to go. One more chance for her to make a moral argument and redeem the great tragedy of the Garden of Eden. Because, keep in mind, at this point, Esther hasn’t actually fully saved the day. At least not yet.

Rabbi Fohrman: What's interesting, Imu, though is that if we think about this moment, the end of chapter seven, if the Megillah ends here, the Jews die. It's true, Haman is dead because of Charvona's actions, but his decree is still on the books. And at this point, Esther is forced to go to the king one last time. 

Imu: Before we just go further, I think it's worth even just saying for many of our listeners, they're not even aware that this final approach is even there. For many of us, our brains turn off when Haman is executed. You think, okay, the plot’s done.

Rabbi Fohrman: You think that's the end of the story.

Imu: But there's a whole other plea that happens after that.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, there is. And the reason why is because, posthumously, Haman is going to have his victory in the grave. Everyone is going to get killed unless Esther and Mordechai can do something about it. So Esther goes to the king one last time.

Imu: By the way, she goes to the king one last time, and it's so weighty and so different than the wine feast. That scepter that everybody remembers? It comes back. It's a scepter moment.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, it's a moment where the king seems to be in his private quarters once again. She risks her life to enter those quarters and, taking her life in her hands, she pleads to the king but with none of the insurance policies she has before. There's no Haman anymore that she could pretend that there's some sort of romantic dalliance, that Haman might be after her. 

Imu: Almost like if the text itself is taking you back to a “what if,” taking you back to that first moment where we expected that climax where she's approaching the king. She's now approaching him again, this time not to invite him to a wine feast. Instead, she's going to say something else.

Rabbi Fohrman: She's going to say something else, and listen to what she says: וַתֹּאמֶר אֶסְתֵּר אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — If it seems good, tov, for the king. אִם־מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ — And if I found chen, if I found grace in the king's eyes (Esther 5:4-8). And this is all language that she's used before.

Imu: Although it's different. She normally starts with charm, and now she's starting with “good.”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's true. The order is switched, but then she uses a third phrase, a phrase that she's not yet used: וְכָשֵׁר הַדָּבָר לִפְנֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ —And if the thing is kosher in the eyes of the king (Esther 8:5). Imu, this is the first and only time that I'm aware of that the word “kosher,” כָשֵׁר is actually used in a moral sense in the entire Torah. Our words, kosher, כָשֵׁר, come from this phrase right over here. If it's kosher, if it's right in your eyes.

וְטוֹבָה אֲנִי בְּעֵינָיו, and there's that word again — And if I am good in your eyes, here's what I ask of you. I'd like you to repeal the decrees of Haman, אֲשֶׁר כָּתַב לְאַבֵּד אֶת־הַיְּהוּדִים אֲשֶׁר בְּכׇל־מְדִינוֹת הַמֶּלֶךְ — That he wrote to destroy all of the Jews in all of the provinces of the king.

And here, King, is why I want you to do it: כִּי אֵיכָכָה אוּכַל וְרָאִיתִי — Because, King, how could I possibly be the one person from survives from all of my people? Think about what that would be like for me. How can I sit and watch: בָּרָעָה — the terrible, monstrous fate, אֲשֶׁר־יִמְצָא אֶת־עַמִּי — That will befall my people? And how could I possibly sit and watch, בְּאׇבְדַן מוֹלַדְתִּי — The destruction of my birthplace, the destruction of everything I know.

And Imu, let's go back one more time. How many tov and rah words has she used?

Imu: Oh, there's a lot. We've got tov, אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב, וְטוֹבָה אֲנִי בְּעֵינָיו. I'll give כָשֵׁר an honorable mention. So it's tov, tov, and כָשֵׁר. I like כָשֵׁר. You know, one of the things we talked about is how tov can mean “good, I like it,” and tov can mean “good, moral,” but there's a word that unambiguously means “moral,” and that's the word כָשֵׁר.

So you've got tov, tov, כָשֵׁר, and I'm seeing rah, “evil.”

Rabbi Fohrman: אֵיכָכָה אוּכַל וְרָאִיתִי בָּרָעָה אֲשֶׁר־יִמְצָא אֶת־עַמִּי. She's got both sides of the equation, tov and rah. And now, is there a moral argument that is being made here?

Imu: I mean, maybe. I think it's wrapped still in some of the “love of me.”

Rabbi Fohrman: And what the King likes. That's right. 

Imu: Well that was confusing. Our whole discussion seemed to be leading up to this moment; Esther's last appeal to the king, her last chance to make a genuine moral argument. No games, no manipulation, just objective moral truth. And yet, here we were, and I don't know. We have some very clear moral language, lots of tov’s and rah’s, good and evil, and even the word כָשֵׁר, “proper” or “right.”

But, in other ways, Esther seems to fall short. She's still appealing to what the king likes. She says: וְטוֹבָה אֲנִי בְּעֵינָיו — If I'm good in your eyes, then please don't make me suffer and watch my people die. Not only is she saying to Achashverosh, “Do this if you like me,” appealing to his subjectivity, but she's emphasizing her own feelings. “I can't watch the downfall of my people.” It's so subjective; what he likes, what would cause her pain. The point isn't the loss of life or the grave injustice. How is this a moral argument?

To see how it was, Rabbi Fohrman thought we needed to take one step back and reimagine what a moral argument should even look like. I was assuming it should be objective and impersonal. What if that's not true? What if there's a kind of moral argument that almost paradoxically does appeal to subjectivity and is personal, but it teaches you the difference between your “good” and the moral “good” nonetheless.

Rabbi Fohrman thought we had actually come across a hint to this type of moral argument in our last Gan Eden paradigm, and if we could tease it out more clearly there, it would help illuminate what Esther is doing here. Remember, over the course of this series, we presented two separate paradigms, two different casts of characters for showing how Eden was echoed in the Megillah. We dabbled in integrating those two different casts earlier in this episode, but it was finally time to jump all the way in and start seeing the bigger picture.

If Haman's story is a replay of the garden, and Esther's story is a redemption of the garden, what is the richer, fuller, sweeping message of all these connections combined?

So, here's what we're going to do. First of all, clear your mind of Esther just for a moment. We're going to go back into the world of our first Cast of Characters, back to Haman as Adam, Zeresh as Eve, and re-examine some of the ideas from there. And then, we'll get back to Esther's final plea to the king, and put all of the pieces together.

Back when we were originally exploring our first Cast of Characters, the spotlight was on Adam and Haman. This time, let's talk about Zeresh, our “Eve.” Since it's been a while, I'll reset the scene. Haman just got home after the first banquet, and he rants to Zeresh about all the wonderful things he has. He's got money, prestige, family. None of it is enough for him, because he doesn't have the one thing he wants, and that is Mordechai bowing to him. And Zeresh basically says, “I hear you, honey. Clearly it's not enough. You want Mordechai? We'll get you Mordechai. We'll build a gallows in the backyard and hang him on it.”

When we were first discussing this back in Episode Two, Rabbi Fohrman asked me what I thought was just an innocent question.

Rabbi Fohrman: Imu, what if I put you in Zeresh's shoes right now? Imagine you are Zeresh and your husband comes home and starts talking obsessively. He's got all this stuff. He's got everything. And then he says these words that are painful to hear: וְכׇל־זֶה אֵינֶנּוּ שֹׁוֶה לִי — None of it, everything I have, nothing matters a whit as long as there's this one thing I don't have (Esther 5:13). If you were Haman's wife, what could you possibly tell him in that moment?

Imu: Haman is struggling whether or not he has enough. and I think that the person who loves him most can maybe convince him by saying, “Haman, you're enough for me.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes. Her secret weapon is, “You're enough for me.”

Imu: The way Haman so explicitly says that; “It's not enough, it's not enough, it's not enough.” It just made what Zeresh could have and should have said seem so obvious to us. It is enough. You're enough.

But you may be wondering, so what? What does this have to do with Esther? Esther's dealing with a totally different problem - the genocide of her people. And Achashverosh's reason for letting this genocide happen is not the same as Haman's. Unlike Haman, Achashverosh isn't pining for this genocide to take revenge on Mordechai and prove he's the top dog. Achashverosh just doesn't seem to care. He doesn't seem to recognize that the people who are at risk are human.

So saying, “Sweetie, you're enough,” doesn't sound like it would make any difference. Plus, “you're enough” is not at all what Esther does say to Achashverosh.

So why are we going down this rabbit hole? We just have to keep going down a little further, and then you'll see.

The reason Rabbi Fohrman was taking us back to Zeresh was because he wondered if her interaction with Haman could be seen as a commentary on Eve, Zeresh's counterpart in Gan Eden. After all, Zeresh and Haman's romantic relationship, the quality of their marriage, is not particularly significant in the Megillah. But Eve's romantic relationship with Adam, their partnership? That's central, starting with Eve's very creation.

Rabbi Fohrman: Back in the garden, we're told that here was Adam. He was all alone. God didn't like Adam to be alone, and God decided that in order for Adam not to be alone, he needed an עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ. He needed somebody who would help him out in the garden, and Eve was going to be the great עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ (Genesis 2:18).

What in the world does that mean? Like, not what does it mean for us nowadays. What did it mean for Adam? What does he need help with? He's in paradise, he's got everything. Does he need help washing the dishes? Does he need help shopping? How exactly is she going to help him? How is she supposed to help him? What is the only challenge that Adam really has in the garden? What's his one great temptation?

Imu: To violate the garden, to take from the fruit of the Master’s tree.

Rabbi Fohrman: Take from the Master's tree. Maybe she was there to help him with that one temptation. The tragedy is that she helped him actually give in to that temptation, but maybe what it meant to be an עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ was to help him with that temptation. How could she help him? Because if Adam, like Haman, ever came home from work one day in the garden, לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ, tending the garden and taking care of it (Genesis 2:15), and says, “You know, Eve, I've got everything. I've got all the kiwis. I've got all the papayas. There's only one problem. There's this one tree in the garden that I can't have.” At some level, what he really wants is to play God. How could she help him? What could she say to him?

Imu: “You're enough for me.”

Rabbi Fohrman: You're enough for me. You love me. I love you too. And I tell you, as someone who loves you, that you're enough for me, that I'm proud of you as you are. You don't have to want more. You don't have to want to be someone you're not. Love actually really is, as the Sages say, עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ. Sometimes you help, but sometimes you oppose, and sometimes by opposing, you help.

Sometimes you have to take someone who's blinded by their own desires to be something that they're not and to say, “Hey, bubbeleh, you don't need to have that. You know why? I love you so much for who you are, and if I love you for that, then can't you find that that's enough, too?”

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman's suggestion was speculative. I mean, just because Zeresh is playing Eve in our Cast of Characters doesn't necessarily mean that what Zeresh should have but didn't say to Haman was a commentary on what Chava should have but didn't say to Adam.

I don't think that the strength of this connection is in the textual algebra, but rather in the resonating themes. If Adam and Haman's struggle was wanting to be God, then the rest of us may look at that as hubris, greed, or lust for power. But what would Zeresh or Chava see? They might see the man they love agonizing and exerting himself to change his very fundamental nature. They might see someone who can't accept his own humanity. And ideally, wouldn't they want to oppose that painful insecurity? Because they want to help him feel better? 

But there was another nuance here that Rabbi Fohrman wanted to tease out. Because in this vision of an עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ, she isn’t just helping her husband feel better. She’s helping him be better too. She’s nudging him towards a fundamental moral truth: that human beings shouldn’t play God. That we don’t have ultimate control. And Rabbi Fohrman thought there was something kind of fascinating in the way this influence worked. Especially how it emerged organically simply out of love. 

Rabbi Fohrman: It is not a manipulative thing. It's not that she's figuring out how to manipulate him in order for him to climb down off of his high horse. All she has to do is look him in the eye and say, “I love you.” And if she can say that, being genuine, then what that communicates is, “If I'm a human being in a relationship with you, I love you for being human. Why do you desperately crave this power that's more than who you are?”

Implicitly leveraging her love. She doesn't even have to consciously leverage her love. All she has to do is just sort of put her love out there; in essence taking the ultimate subjectivity, her love for him, and using that to basically teach a basic moral truth, which is, you don't need to be God. You don't need to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. You don't need to have your will be the law of the land. You could just be you. 

Imu:  Honestly, leveraging your love did sound a bit manipulative to me at first. I had to think about it in the context of my own marriage to get it. You know, times when I, or my wife are struggling, maybe losing sight of our values, letting our inner demons win the day. And what does often help is a moment of affection, or recognition, just feeling loved. I’d never thought about that in these terms before. As moral guidance, but it resonated, deeply. Real love reminds us that we’re human, delightfully and imperfectly human. And that reminder goes a long way towards moral clarity.  

With that, it’s time to return to Esther. Because remember how we got here. We were trying to understand Esther’s last plea to Achashverosh. On the one hand, Esther finally seemed to be making a pure moral argument. No games, no politics. But on the other hand, her words still seemed so subjective and personal. So we went on a hunt for a model of a moral argument that is subjective, and look, we found it in the עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ. In the context of marriage, objectivity and subjectivity, emotions and morality do seem to converge. That’s true in the Garden, where the story of Adam and Chava’s relationship is inseparable from the story of eating from the tree. And maybe it’s true here in the megillah too, where once again we have a fraught moral challenge playing out within a marriage. 

So, could the key to understanding Esther’s final plea to her husband be looking at it through the lens of עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ? Could Esther also be leveraging her love? But what love, what unconditional love, could Esther be expected to offer Achashverosh, a person who doesn’t even recognize her as human? 

Rabbi Fohrman’s theory wasn’t that Esther was leveraging her love. He didn’t think she was an exact carbon copy of the עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ we’d seen so far. Rather, he thought she was more like the exact inverse.

Rabbi Fohrman: I want to suggest that maybe something similar is happening here with Esther. Maybe Esther is teaching us something about sort of the flip side of עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ. Maybe Esther is also leveraging her love, or, to be a little bit more accurate about it, leveraging the love that the king says that he feels for her. 

In other words, it's not just that עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ can affirm a man's humanity and therefore talk him off the bridge of needing to be God. An עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ can also do something else, which is sort of implicitly ask of her man that he recognize her humanity. This is really what Esther needs from the king.

The king has been treating every woman in his life as less than human. They were all just tools in his world. Vashti was a tool. All the women gathered for the beauty contest, they were all tools, too. But if you could see someone who services you as not just this thing, not just this animal that makes me feel good, but as a human being; if I can inspire you to relate to me that way, then you can begin to get in touch with morality. That's virtue.

Imu: To really show me what he meant, Rabbi Fohrman took us back to the text, back to that fateful moment in chapter 8 of the Megillah where Esther makes her final plea.

Rabbi Fohrman: Look at her language: וַתֹּאמֶר אִם־עַל־הַמֶּלֶךְ טוֹב — She says, “If it's pleasing for you, the king.” And there, like that, she's just talking about what he likes. Nothing moral about that.

But then she goes on a little bit more: וְאִם־מָצָאתִי חֵן לְפָנָיו — If you like me, if you really have feelings for me. There, she's talking about love. “You say you love me. What does that really mean?”

וְכָשֵׁר הַדָּבָר לִפְנֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ — And if it's right in the eyes of the king. This is the moral argument. This is that bridge to some moral truth.

If it is right and noble and good in your eyes, וְטוֹבָה אֲנִי בְּעֵינָיו — And I am good in your eyes, i.e. you like me, then here is what I'm asking. If, in fact, you like me, if you love me, I'm asking you to repeal these decrees, and here's why I'm asking you to repeal them. Because what does it mean to like me? Liking me doesn't just mean I'm an object that satisfies your desires. It doesn't just mean I'm your trophy wife. It doesn't just mean I'm the person that you invite to banquets and impress everyone. That's not what it means to like me. What it means to like me is to care about my feelings. What is it like to be me? Imagine what it's like to be me as you destroy every single one of my countrymen.

אֵיכָכָה אוּכַל וְרָאִיתִי — How can you ask me to sit and watch the destruction that would come on my countrymen? It would be agonizing for me. I'm asking you not to see me as a thing, not to see me as a treasured animal, but to see me as a human with feelings, just as you have feelings and to honor those feelings. Right? 

Then, by extension, the queen is teaching the king something not only about her, but about her countrymen. Once the king decides that she's not an animal, that she is a human being, someone who can stand up and say, “This is what I need,” someone whose feelings need to be honored, and she says, “I am one of them” then, ultimately, when he saves the people, why is he saving them?

Because if my queen is one of them, and she isn't an animal, and she's not just a pest, but she's somebody whose feelings I need to honor, and she comes from them, then who are they? She is of them, and they are of her. They are people, too.

It's an argument that leverages love to teach him that there's a difference between what's convenient for him and what is right. 

Imu: What you're saying is that pretty much everything Esther has said to the king the entire time has also been good for the king. So up until this time, Esther is staying in the submissive role because every argument she's making to the king is, “Here's what's good for you, here's what's good for you.”

The king says to her, “I'll give you up to half my kingdom.” She's like, “Come to the wine party. Wine party is good for the king. Come to another wine party. Feels good for the king. Hey, Kingy-poo, someone's trying to kill me, and I'm your favorite pet, aren't I?” King is like, “Alright, that's true. I guess we should get rid of the guy who's trying to kill you.”

But now she's saying something that doesn't benefit the king at all. It's basically saying, “I can't watch my people get exterminated. Are you going to do something about this?” She’s taking up space and making her first claim that has nothing to do with whether he likes it.

Rabbi Fohrman: And she's taking a risk. He could just say, “That's not your job to like it. Your job is to show up at state parties and be beautiful. Shut up and just take it,” right? But what she's saying is, “Look, I'm asking you to decouple just for a minute. It's not just all about what you like. You like having me at these state dinners, and you like seeing me as beautiful? There's more than that. There's what's right.”

And so, in a way, what I'm arguing is that Zeresh's challenge and Esther's challenge are two sides of the same coin. What Zeresh needed to do was leverage love, and what Esther needed to do was leverage love, to teach a fundamental truth, and in some way the fundamental truth is the same, that it's enough to be human. And love has a lot to do with that.

Or, to put it another way, Zeresh needs to leverage her love to say, “Hey, you love me. I'm impressed with you the way you are. To be a human being is to be enough. You don't need to reach for being God.”

And Esther, what she does is the flip side of that. It's to say, “I'm in this vulnerable marriage where the king sees me as fundamentally less than him. I have to stand up and actually challenge the king and show him that I'm one of him.” And she does it by leveraging his love for her and saying, “If you love me, what does love mean? Love means caring about what my inner world is like, because I'm not just a thing. I'm not just a pest. I am a human being like you. In essence, love means two humans recognizing the humanity of the other. No more and no less. ”

Imu: This seems like a good time to acknowledge -- while Esther does stand up and, with bravery and vulnerability, compel Achashverosh to see her as human and her people as human too… Achashverosh doesn’t fully rise to the occasion. He doesn’t rescind the genocidal decree. He just allows the Jews to fight back. In other words, he’s been moved enough by Esther's plea to stop a massacre, but not to stop a bloody war. As if he only kind of half gets the message about the value of human life. 

So, are Esther’s actions really a redemption of the Garden, when the end of the megillah isn’t as perfect as we might like? During editing, Rabbi Fohrman and I reflected on the implications of this a lot. But strangely, as we did, the imperfection in Esther’s victory made the lessons we were drawing actually seem even more resonant and true to life. What makes Esther's actions a redemption of Eden isn’t that everything works out perfectly or that all moral and relationship woes are solved forever. The megillah isn’t offering a quick and easy self-help formula – you know, three easy steps to turning any old tyrant into a sweetheart. Love and vulnerability can be rejected, and, in case it needs to be said, no one person is single-handedly responsible for another person's moral character.  

If in the Megillah we find a redemption of Gan Eden, it’s not as an inevitability but as a possibility – a possibility of what love can be. The way, on the one hand, a genuine offering of love can help us accept our own humanity and, on the other hand, the way nurturing a spark of love can help us come to accept the humanity of others in return. And, one step more, how, when we are open to it, this type of love can even be a springboard, a way to undo the mistake made back in the garden, and gain the knowledge of good and evil we are meant to have.

Rabbi Fohrman: And Imu, I guess the deepest argument I want to really make is that maybe the ways that we human beings learn about morality is through love, through our ability to love just one other person. Can we actually care about one other person and make it more than just about us and what we like? Can we actually learn to care about them and their inner world? Does it matter to us, not because it's more convenient for us, or a better trophy for us, but because we actually care about them?

And once we can learn to care about one other human being, what do we learn by extension? “I cared about her because she was human. I look around myself and I see there's a world of other humans. Maybe I should care about them, too. Maybe I should care about their inner world. They’re humans, too.” Your mind extends the argument that begins in love. What does it mean to actually love?

That's what Esther's asking the king, and maybe it's the seed of all morality. It's how we really learn the difference between good and evil.

Imu: Sitting back after this session, it was totally dizzying to think about the journey that we've been on. We started off with these wild midrashim about angels and ended up here, talking about marriage and relationships. It's like we traveled from a mystical, enchanted version of the Megillah right into our own homes; a Megillah about the most common, everyday dynamics of domestic life. 

But that actually felt right. Tanach begins with the Garden of Eden, and all of history is sort of this road that flows from Eden right up until this moment. If we're supposed to see Torah, if we're supposed to see Tanach as meaningful in our real lives, it has to feel like a continuous road. There needs to be a through line from that mystical and angelic place to the mundane and ordinary one that we live in.

The way I now see it, putting together all the pieces from this season, the Megillah is almost like a fork in that road. Our two Casts of Characters are like two paths leading out of the garden, and it makes so much sense that these paths would pop up here in the Book of Esther, so close to the end of Biblical history. Like the Torah is saying to us, “I can hold your hand so far, but at some point, you have to choose. How are you going to eat from the tree? How are you going to relate to good and evil? Are you going to do it like Haman, desperate to gain control, repeating the mistakes of those who came before him? Or will you do it like Esther?”

And when I put it that way, the answer seems easy. Who wants to be Haman? But I think maybe the most powerful takeaway I got from this season is that it's not an easy choice, or an obvious one. Haman and Adam's drive to be God, their discomfort with being merely human, it's actually pretty relatable. For most of my life, I thought that being moral was all about trying to transcend my human limitations and gain objective truth, and then getting as many other people as possible to listen to me. I didn't think of that as playing God. I thought of it as being God's noble right hand man on earth.

Esther shows us another way instead of moral conviction being grounded in objectivity and enforced with power. What if our source of morality was our most personal and intimate impulse to love? What if we don't fight our deep subjectivity, but instead accept it, and accept that it plays a part in knowing what good and evil means for a human being as a human being?

Rabbi Fohrman asked at the beginning of the season where we find God in the Megillah. Not behind the scenes, but maybe in a way we could take into our everyday lives. The way I re-stated it back in Episode One was, how do we find Godliness? It's kind of ironic, isn't it? But the answer seems to be in our very humanity.