Go Quiet or Go Public?

Why would a man invite the wrath of an empire, risking death and devastation to descend on his entire people? Is it so important to hold fast to your principles when the result may be catastrophic? Why not just succumb to the demands of the obvious, a much more powerful ruler who will stop at nothing, who is utterly inured to the loss of human life, who is irrational and angry and unmoored, and may even take pleasure in inflicting brutality? Is this just the more vulnerable party’s petty ego disguised as sacred belief, a desire not to seem weak? But shouldn’t war be avoided when you are outmatched and outgunned? Why stand firm, and provoke the apocalypse?I refer of course to a story that Jews around the world read a week ago, Megillat Esther, narrating a battle of wills between Mordechai and Haman. (Recent events in Ukraine show that these dynamics are unfortunately never exhausted). Mordechai plots a bewildering trail in the Megilla. He begins by urging, on multiple occasions, his ward, Esther, to never reveal her Jewish identity. And after she dutifully obeys him each and every time, Mordechai suddenly blows the roof off of the whole scheme by deliberately failing to bow down to Haman. Despite popular misperception, absolutely nothing in Jewish law or custom would have forbidden him from bowing, and at the very least he could have made a pretense of it or simply absented himself at that specific and fleeting moment in the day. Instead, he goes out of his way to be noticed and to attribute his failure to bow to his Jewishness. Before you know it, he rips his clothes, seats himself at the king’s gate and, seemingly deranged, starts screaming.As the Israeli thinker, Yoram Hazony, notes; “Mordechai's public resistance to Haman's authority... contradicts everything that he has come to stand for throughout the first seven years of Ahashverosh's reign ...On the surface it is as though Mordechai has recanted everything he ever believed about his relationship with the Persian state. But Mordechai has not changed: It is Persia that has changed. To make sense of the revolution in Mordechai's behavior we must first understand the revolution that has taken place in the king's government.”A lifetime spent pursuing the path of being quiet, of instructing his young charge to muffle her Jewish identity in a place that Mordechai perceived was maybe not particularly friendly to Jews, but not yet genocidal, has to give way to a brand new tactic in the wake of Haman’s rise to power. Mordechai is looking at Germany, circa January 1933, and he does not like what she sees. But perhaps Haman/Hitler can still be stopped.The window of opportunity is very small however. The Jews in Persia, like those in the Weimar, are not fully aware of the torrent of evil about to be unleased upon them, but Mordechai sensed it in every fibre of his being. Now was not the time to go quiet, but go public, if Haman is to be stopped before it is too late. As Hazony adds, there is method to Mordechai’s meshugass: “In making public his opposition to the decree, the only thing that Mordechai can know with certainty is that he courts immediate punishment. Nevertheless, he chooses to take his anger and grief to the broad places of the capital to the king's gate...for a political reason. And that is the claim lodged in silence, an appeal made in silence, an interest defended in silence, is one that is not lodged, not made and not defended.”Or as they say in couples therapy 101, communication is the key. People are not mind readers, so we have to tell them in no uncertain terms how we feel about matters for the message to get through. In the case of brutal tyranny, then and now, resigned silence or muffled complaint is not the better option. Though there have been scenes of protest in multiple countries from the moment Russia invaded Ukraine (most notably the brave protesters in Moscow), one is truck by the relative paucity of public ripping of clothes and screaming Mordechai style. Item: one report praised the hundreds of protesters at a rally in Trafalgar Square in London (this in a city of close to ten million people).Every decent individual I know is without exception horrified by the unfolding events. But there is a kind of paralysis that sets in—“and the city of Shushan was perplexed;” Esther 3:15)--as the feeling of powerlessness takes hold. None of us have any sway over the workings of the Kremlin, but does that mean we have no agency at all beyond a charitable donation? The anti-vaxxer folks were able to rally thousands in Washington a couple of months ago, and Canadians do not need to be reminded of border crossings and cities being held hostage last month. Somebody out there has lots of motivation to get arrested in the name of preventing mask mandates. Do we have the energy as a planet to protest the mass killing of innocents?Mordechai fervently believed that somehow, ultimately, the situation would resolve itself, the good guys would win, and salvation would unfold. “Relief and deliverance will come from another place” he tells Esther. I wonder if we can afford the luxury of his faith in unseen forces. As the text is the only one in the Bible where God is not mentioned even once, perhaps the message of the Megilla is that sometimes you cannot wait for help from Above. It’s our world and we cannot afford to be quiet.