Yaas Queen! Female Leadership in Megillat Esther

Educator’s Guide:

1. Introduce the goal: Megillat Esther provides examples of multiple types of female leadership (here defined as the exercise of power) in the characters of Vashti, Esther and Zeresh. We can look to our traditional texts to find models of leadership for today. Vashti as renegade, Esther as politically savvy. (2 min)

2. Ask someone to summarize the story of Purim. (2 min)

3. Do the first section (Vashti) as a group. (10 min)

4. Do the second section (Esther) in hevruta. (25 min)

5. Come back together for the third section (Conclusion) to discuss. (15 min)

6. Ask people to share a takeaway from the lesson. (5 min)

PART 1: VASHTI

Rabbi Jeffrey M. Cohen, “Vashti – An Unsung Heroine,” The Jewish Bible Quarterly, April-June 1996, pp. 103-106

In that debauched society, sanity was suspended and marital relationships compromised. Queen Vashti, so missed by the king after he had disposed of her, notwithstanding the fact that he had innumerable women at his beck and call, must have been a rare woman to have retained her sense of dignity and morality to the extent that she was prepared to endanger her life by refusing her lord and master’s bidding to show off her body to the assembled throng... She demonstrated that moral conscience was the ultimate arbiter of human behavior, and that human freedom was not to be surrendered under any circumstances, even the most extreme.

PART 2: ESTHER

Aviva Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (p. 123-125)

Throughout her marriage, Esther has remained silent about her origins (Esther 2:20). Now Mordecai, who commanded that silence, urges her to break it. That silence was for the sake of this moment. Now she must speak, take up a position, or else lose her voice forever. This moment is all she has, her chance to make herself heard.... In her crisis, she is alone.... By accepting Mordecai's challenge, Esther fully enters, for the first time, Ahasuerus's world.... With a voice of new authority, she charges Mordecai with assembling the people and having them fast for her. Fasting may seem a dubious preparation for the fateful encounter on which her life depends: her beauty will suffer. But perhaps she is removing her last and most basic source of worldly confidence, as though to acknowledge that even the king's favor is, in the end, in God's hands.... (123-124)

Michael E. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther (p. 66)

4:13-17 is the turning point in Esther’s development. She moves from being a dependent of others (all of them men) to an independent operator who, whatever the objective restrictions on her freedom, will work out her own plans and execute them in order to manipulate one man and break another.

PART 3: CONCLUSION

Rachel E. Adelman, The Female Ruse: Women's Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (p. 76)

The Megillah concludes with Esther, the eponymous heroine of our story, writing the scroll (9.29, cf. v. 32). Uniquely, she becomes the one female author in the biblical canon, engaging in writing as a mode of reflexivity, the means by which the self is reclaimed as subject, free from the view of male ogle, released from the husband’s rule in palace or home. She moves from silence to author-ity, not only as author of the Megillah, but also as a maker of laws and customs incumbent upon her people ever after.

Aviva Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep

In the messianic era... all the festivals that are linked with Exodus will be subsumed into the light of ultimate redemption. But the Purim story, in which Israel has taught itself to recognize the anokhi of God even in darkness -- this, surely, will remain as eternal spiritual gift even after sunrise.