‘For such a time as this’

LOUISVILLE — Earlier this month, the Rev. Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams provided insight on how the Book of Esther can be used as a modern-day survival guide.

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Fentress-Williams, Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Virginia Theological Seminary, spoke as part of the McClendon Scholar-in-Residence Program at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Her presentation, “For Such a Time as This,” is here. She’s introduced at the 13:30 mark.

We may have been introduced to the Book of Esther in a variety of ways, she said. It could have been the animated story in “Veggie Tales” or the film “One Night with the King.” “Perhaps you know about Esther through the celebration of Purim, or perhaps you know this is part of a small group of biblical books that bears a woman’s name,” she said. “Or maybe you’re one of the few who know this is a book where God isn’t mentioned at all, and that this book gets revisited in the Apocrypha.”

Fentress-Williams invited those attending her talk in person and online to think of the Esther as a survival story. David M. Carr’s book, “Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins” makes the case that “the reason we actually have the Bible today is because the people of the religions that are represented in the Bible suffered trauma and felt completed to preserve their traditions,” she noted. “The reason they were written down and preserved was so that they could survive.”

If we’re in a space where “we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, if you’ve had the exilic experience of waking up and feeling like you’re in a foreign land, and the place that you knew as familiar and home is away from you, then you might know what motivated the children of Israel,” she said.

As a storyteller, “I believe the stories that we have were preserved to be told,” Fentress-Williams said. Such biblical stories were told not just to instruct and warn and help people form an identity, “but they were told to delight us,” she said.

Esther is dated between 400 and 300 BCE, “a couple of generations into the exile,” Fentress-Williams said. We can think of it as a story in three acts: how Esther becomes queen, the crisis that evolves and the resolution.

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Storyteller that she is, Fentress-Williams read chunks from Esther and interspersed the readings with her insights. Esther is a court tale, she explained, where the king “is always mercurial … making rules that can’t be changed and being subject to his advisors, who have their own ambitions going on.” It’s a similar dynamic in the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, “where the king makes a rash decision he can’t undo,” she said.

Esther “is a story about a people who find themselves where the world they used to know no longer exists,” she said. “If they want to survive, they have to figure out how to assimilate.”

Fentress-Williams introduced each of the important characters, including King Ahasuerus, Vashti, Mordecai and Haman, before turning to Esther. Reading Chapter 2, she warned against letting “anybody tell the story of Esther as if it’s a beauty pageant. That’s not what’s happening here. This is the king exercising his power to go herd up young women who will spend the rest of their lives in the harem of the king.”

When Vashti won’t come after she’s summoned, Esther is selected as the new queen and undergoes 12 months of beauty treatments. “Sign me up!” Fentress-Williams said.

Esther is a Jew, “but nobody knows,” she said. “Part of this story is about identity and hiding one’s identity. … If you are excluded from the full human experience because of your appearance, but you can slip in to the other side, what is it like to benefit from what’s on the other side?”

Another thing we struggle with in these court tales is “the concept of exceptionalism,” she said. “What happens when you have access or opportunity and others don’t? How do you sit with that?”

Esther is now in a place of privilege, “but the world hasn’t changed,” she said. “While she’s being introduced to the duties and privileges of being queen, she has a people who are still exiles in a foreign land who are subject to whatever the king might do next.”

The crisis comes, of course, when Haman is introduced in the second act. He’s “depicted as a character whose hatred for Mordecai is almost insatiable,” she said. “The other thing we have in the narrative is that Mordecai doesn’t bow down to Haman.” That could be because Haman is descended “from people who have historically shown a lack of hospitality toward Israel.”

Other Jews may have bowed down to Haman, “but Haman cannot help but focus on this one person, as though one person’s defiance somehow threatens his entire being.” In response, Haman “is willing to eliminate an entire people over one offense.”

One of Fentress-Williams’ favorite Bible scholars, Dr. Regina Schwartz, says that the first act of violation is “the creation of other.” Haman tells the king the Jews are “a people who are not like anybody else. They don’t obey your laws [which Fentress-Williams noted ‘is a lie’). He forms a narrative and uses these words: ‘It is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them.’”

“Other human beings are not here as commodities to serve our purposes,” she pointed out. “Remember the genre of the story. It is the role of the king to be duped into doing whatever Haman wants, which means that in these stories we have this figurehead, the king, but power is really in the advisors, the people who surround him, OK?” When her audience laughed, Fentress-Williams smiled and assured them, “it’s all in the Bible. It is.”

Think about “these two separate worlds,” Fentress-Williams suggested: the world of the palace, “which as we know is over the top with abundance,” and the world of the Jews, “where these people … are in exile, where there is less. Both of these realities exist, and the characters of Mordecai and Esther create the intersection and force interaction.”

Mordecai tells Esther about the crisis that threatens to destroy all the people, and Esther’s response is, “I have not been invited,” Fentress-Williams noted. Like Esther, “many of us look around and see things in the world that are not right and are waiting for somebody to invite us to do something. We’re waiting … to see a situation that looks like it’s just right for us.”

“When we experience that moment, I want you to hear Mordecai’s response” in 4:14, she said: “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

“For an Esther who comes from an oppressed people, is it possible that she was given access to this space not because she was the best or the prettiest or that she deserved it,” Fentress-Williams said, “but because she needed to be in a position to do something for others?”

“We enter dangerous territory when we begin to believe we deserve the blessings that we have, that somehow we earned them and other people didn’t,” she said. “Perhaps every single one of us is where we are because of the grace of God.”

We live in a world where “privilege is currency,” she said. “We have to decide if we have been blessed with some privilege, what are we going to do with it? Who are our people, and what do they need?”

Once Esther exposes Haman, his “whole house of cards falls apart,” Fentress-Williams said. “Because this is a comedic story, he dies in just the way he planned on killing the Jews.” Then comes “the part of the story that’s tricky: the Jews get to defend themselves, and they kill a whole lot of people.” It’s an example of revenge fantasy seen more recently in “Inglourious Basterds” or “Django Unchained.”

“Part of the reason people don’t talk about the end of Esther is we don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “It is a reminder to us about what happens when people experience fear of annihilation for a very long time. … Stopping the threat isn’t enough.”

The story serves as a survival manual, she said. “Whenever there’s an evil that is bent on eliminating a people, it will not stop there,” she said. “Mordecai’s question to Esther reminds us that everybody has something that they can do.”

Storytelling is itself liturgical, she said, because “we re-enact God’s ability to change the world. Storytelling and repeating is a way for us to remember who we were. Storytelling is a way we survive.”

“When we cannot see our way forward, tell the story of Esther,” Fentress-Williams recommended. “Tell the story of people in unlikely places that God uses to change the world, so that we can ask ourselves at every moment: ‘Is it my time? Is it my turn to stand up and work for those who need my help?’”