Top Highlights

• Like Moses, Mordechai is no Hebrew slave, but a man of the court, for whom the need for the political campaign against the decree is clear and pressing. And it is this that moves him to overcome the fear and self-doubt that grips every man rising to challenge the mighty, saying: “Who am I, that I should bring the people of Israel out of Egypt?” – t...
• He needs for them to love and respect him, and to desire his rule. There is no better way of gaining the gratitude of others than by using power to bestow liberty – for this means granting a gift of power to another. For those whom Ahashverosh has invited into his palace, accustomed as they are to submitting to the wishes of the king, this microsco...
• According to R. Johanan, each person grasps reality from a different perspective, so that no one man can ever understand the whole truth of any matter by himself: “Every word that went forth from the Lord was fragmented into seventy languages.”14 Thus not even something as unequivocal as a communication from heaven can help being fragmented into sc...
• In the view of R. Johanan, the reason that the Mesopotamians ceased to construct their united city was not that they simply could not understand the literal languages being spoken; they could have used interpreters. Rather, the account of the tower depicts the creation of different worldviews, each dictating its own understanding of reality – each ...
• The narrative in Esther does not propose that Ahashverosh approaches this ideal, but it does make a related argument: It suggests that for all his detestable personal traits, the actual evil that the king can do is kept reasonably in check so long as he is surrounded day and night by a range of advisers representing various perspectives that he has...