My husband used to have a recurring dream. The details of the dreams changed, but the basic theme was always the same (hence the adjective “recurring”).
In the dream, he’d be walking through a house. Though it appeared to be an ordinary house, it was constantly surprising him. Everywhere he went, he’d find a new door to open and a new room to explore. He kept coming across unexpected nooks and interesting crannies. Passages that seemed to lead to one place ended up in another. Everything he saw filled him with delight and made him eager to see more. It was a voyage of discovery.
If I had to interpret these dreams, I’d guess that all those intriguing rooms and passages can represent new ideas and fresh insights. A talmid chochom is always on a journey of exploration. He opens the Torah’s pages the way a dream-walker might open doors in an unfamiliar house, searching for knowledge. Every new train of thought can be a corridor leading to an unexpected destination. One discovery leads to another. The journey itself is a never-ending source of wonder and delight.
We can translate the dream’s message into other areas as well. Life itself is a journey of discovery. Every new experience has the potential to show us things we didn’t know before. Things about the world, about other people, and about ourselves.
It’s a well-documented fact that individuals under special circumstances may stun themselves and onlookers by summoning up powers they never expected to find. Like the mother who, in a surge of fear-driven adrenaline, lifts a car to free her trapped child, we all have strengths deep inside which can lift and carry seemingly insurmountable loads. Strengths which may be largely untapped… until Hashem sends conditions which call for those strengths. The crisis, the crunch, the catastrophe.
Even as we bemoan the intrusion of trouble into the even tenor of our days, and even as we cry out to be freed from its crushing talons, new and unforeseen powers come to our aid. An acuteness we never bothered to cultivate before. A new assertiveness to meet a new challenge. An unexpected skill for recruiting available human resources. In time, these dredged-up strengths, recruited to cope with a specific ordeal, begin to change from emergency tools to integral parts of our personality. We are transformed.
Nowhere is this transformation seen so clearly as in the Megillah we read on Purim. Even centuries later, Esther’s journey through the trials and tribulations that beset her, and the unique challenges that
confronted her, stands as an example and a signpost for every one of us.
Imagine walking through a sunny marketplace, basket on your arm, when you are suddenly surrounded by the king’s henchmen. They announce that you are a candidate for the queenship. The fact that you have no desire to be a queen, or that your only goal in life is to be a good Jewish wife and mother, means nothing to them. You are whisked away, a pawn in a game you never asked to play.
Esther chooses passivity as her prop. In the building where the women are kept before being taken to the king, she asks for nothing beyond the ordinary. She keeps her head down and her thoughts to herself. Having lost the power to navigate the course of her own life, she submits to her new circumstances with sorrowful docility.
Though Esther is ultimately crowned queen of the mighty Persian Empire, in some ways she wields less power than the most ordinary woman in Shushan. She is circumscribed by the rules and protocols that define her new role. Even the most basic ability to be herself is denied to her, as she’s forced to conceal her true identity and hide her own proud heritage.
In silent passivity she picked up the burden of her new life… until the momentous interchange with Mordechai. That’s the moment when everything changes
Learning that Haman has decreed destruction on her people, Esther feels powerless to help. Achashverosh has not called for her in thirty days. He isn’t even aware that she’s Jewish. Haman, the Jews’ archenemy, also happens to be her husband’s most trusted advisor. Esther is nothing but a passive victim of her fate. A helpless pawn. What can she do?
Mordechai ruthlessly shakes up this self-image with a few well-chosen words. “Who know if this moment is not the very reason you were crowned queen?”
And then something strange and wonderful happens. All at once, the helpless Esther summons up a commanding strength. Charged with the responsibility for saving her people, she begins to issue orders. The Jews are to fast for three days and nights, after which she will risk her life and venture into the king’s presence.
It is at this precise juncture that Mordechai stops telling Esther what to do. Their roles are reversed. Until now, Esther was his charge. He dictated her moves, and she obeyed. But with the awesome responsibility now resting on her shoulders, she can no longer afford to be passive. She takes charge. She acts.
And, with Hashem’s help, she prevails.
The Big Question
A friend of our family, a well-respected doctor who always goes the extra mile when it comes to helping people, says that he learned a huge life lesson from a talk he once heard my husband give about Purim.
Discussing Mordechai’s thundering rebuke to Esther, which has reverberated down the ages, my husband had said that this is an attitude we should all adopt in life. Our doctor friend took this message to heart. Now, he says, whenever someone turns to him for help, he asks himself a version of the all-important question that Mordechai once posed to Esther: “Who knows if I wasn’t put on this earth for just this person, at just this moment?” And he acts accordingly.
A twenty-first century doctor, learning from Mordechai and emulating Esther… and at the same time offering the rest of us a compelling role model. We, too, can take the message of the Megillah to heart in ways that can impact our every interaction in life.
Each new challenge we face is like coming across another closed door in a dream house. Whether we choose to throw open that door, or have it thrust open against our will, walking through it means stepping into new territory. The foreign land of an unfamiliar, and sometimes unwanted, experience.
At the same time, we also enter a new inner territory, one which we may not yet have explored or even mapped. A place of undreamt-of power and resilience that can not only help us cope but can end up redefining us in ways we never could have imagined possible.
Esther’s courage and deeply seated emunah is not the stuff of a long-ago bedtime story. It was, and remains, as real and as relevant to us as we choose to make it. Seemingly chained by circumstances beyond her control, Esther valiantly threw open the door to meet the challenge those circumstances thrust upon her.
Her heroism was the acting-out of strength she may not even have known she possessed. Her clear-minded and quick-acting plot came about when she discarded the role of passive victim and took charge of the parts of her life that were hers to use. So much had been taken away from her, yet she willed herself to rise to her unique responsibility in a way that was staggering in its significance for our people and for the world.
As we read about Esther’s transformation this Purim, may we discover the hidden strengths in ourselves… and soar to unsuspected heights of our own!