A tragic failure of imagination: On the Megillah’s bloody ending

It’s common in liberal Jewish circles to agonize over the ninth chapter of Megillat Esther, which describes the slaughter carried out by the Jews after Esther foils Haman’s evil plan. Some synagogues skip reading it altogether – or at least decline to translate it. Few include it in the version of the story presented to children. This year, the Shalom Center even published a compendium of imaginative alternate endings to the Megillah. I, too, wrote a piece a decade or more ago struggling with the extreme bloodshed.

We could simply dismiss this chapter as a revenge fantasy by a persecuted people. Indeed, no actual human beings were harmed in the writing of Megillat Esther. It’s a farce, not a historical document.

Yet it’s clear why many modern readers feel uncomfortable with easy explanations about a chapter that describes a massacre of more than 75,000 residents of King Achashverosh’s empire, possibly including men, women, and children. The revulsion may especially be heightened after Israel’s war in Gaza killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – not only the Hamas fighters who carried out the brutal terror attack of October 7, but also women, children, and other civilians who had nothing to do with these atrocities.

And we can’t ignore the fact that over the course of history some Jews have carried out violence on or around Purim in a disturbing attempt to fulfil the mitzvah of wiping out Amalek, the tribe from which Jewish tradition understands Haman to descend. Most famously, in 1994, Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Purim day. In his groundbreaking book, Reckless Rites (2006), historian Elliott Horowitz z”l describes medieval and modern Purim celebrations as a kind of Jewish Carnival, sometimes including riots, desecration of Christian symbols, and in some cases violent acts. Those who carry out such heinous acts claim to be pious but ignore the preponderance of Jewish thought that determines the tribe of Amalek no longer to exist.

It’s a grave mistake, then, for liberal Jews to accept the reading of chapter nine as a celebration of indiscriminate slaughter, and to conclude that the only response must be to erase or ignore this part of the story. This approach only validates those who also read this chapter in this way and take it as permission for hatred or violence.

Instead, we should engage in a close reading and teaching of the story. It may still leave us distressed, but perhaps in a different way and revealing a different human tragedy – our failure of moral imagination.

A new decree

In the Purim story, Haman beseeches King Achashverosh to decree the annihilation of the Jews, promising to pay a hefty sum into the king’s treasury in return. The king agrees, though surprisingly lets Haman keep the money, and issues an edict “in the name of King Achashverosh and sealed with the king’s signet” to “destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women” on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. (Esther 3:12-13)

In the end, Esther reveals the plot, and Haman is hanged on the stake he erected in order to kill Mordechai.

But the danger remains. The king’s decree has already spread throughout the kingdom. Esther begs the king to annul his previous order: “Let dispatches be written countermanding those which were written by Haman son of Hammedata the Agagite, embodying his plot to annihilate the Jews throughout the king’s provinces.” (8:5)

But it appears that he cannot countermand an order, only issue new ones. So Mordechai dictates a new decree to the scribes: “The king has permitted the Jews of every city to assemble and fight for their lives; if any people or province attacks them, they may destroy, massacre, and exterminate its armed force together with women and children, and plunder their possessions—on a single day in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, namely, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, that is, the month of Adar.” (8:11-12) The language of this permission almost precisely echoes that originally given for the extermination of the Jews, including men, women, and children, and for the plundering of their possessions. (3:13)

This new right to self-defense isn’t exactly what Esther wanted. If the king had heeded her request and sent new scrolls revoking the first, the story could have ended here – or moved directly to the feasting and celebration. The medieval commentator Ibn Ezra imagines Achashverosh explaining, “I can’t revoke the first scrolls that Haman wrote in my name and sealed with my signet, for this is the law of Persia and Medea.”

This interpretation seems to be the plain meaning of the text, as signaled by the king’s need to mention at this point that an edict that he has sealed may not be revoked. The nineteenth-century commentator Malbim even suggests that Esther reminded the king that the local officials had not yet even seen the original letters and did not know what they contained and that these missives could, therefore, be recalled without any insult to royal power. But to no avail.

Certainly, the people of Persia and Medea seem to understand the king’s first orders to remain in effect. The text describes the Jews gathering “to attack those who sought their hurt.” (Esther 9:2) If not for the new decrees permitting the Jews to defend themselves, it seems that the slaughter that Haman devised would have taken place even in his absence.

But it didn’t have to be this way. After all, Achashverosh is the king. He could have dispensed with precedent and issued a new ruling calling for calm. It’s clear from his actions until this point that he possesses no moral core and little concern for his subjects. He already proved himself willing to decree the murder of an entire group of his subjects, seemingly without a second thought. Why would we expect him to care about the deaths of more than 75,000 others? Indeed, later on, his response to the news of the death toll will reflect more wonder than distress.

Zero-sum thinking

The king’s response to Esther displays a complete and tragic failure of imagination. He cannot envision a different possibility in which the safety of one people or another is not a zero-sum game. He cannot imagine changing the rules of the kingdom in order to protect everyone.

Is Achashverosh so different from other leaders, or even ordinary people, in our own time? In the US, we have seen similar dynamics in debates, even in liberal circles, about whether to dispense with fighting for the rights of trans people or immigrants in order to regain political power or in suggestions that one must choose between protecting Jewish students and Muslim students on campus. These debates also stem from tragic and mistaken zero-sum thinking.

Much of the discourse around Israel and Palestine similarly assumes that one must choose between the safety of one people and the other. We saw this recently in the extreme reactions to No Other Land winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. On the one side, right-wing Jews and Israeli government officials declared the movie to be antisemitic for daring to tell a true story of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land in the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta. On the other side, left-wing pro-Palestine activists complained about the Israeli filmmaker daring to mention October 7 during his acceptance speech, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel announced a boycott of the movie for its normalization of cooperation even with Israeli activists. In contrast, the Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, like activists on the ground in Masafer Yatta, offer a different paradigm: the possibility of joint action toward a more just and safer reality for everyone.

The Megillah ends in blood because Achashverosh locks the Jews and his other subjects into a zero-sum game, in which each must either kill or be killed. This stance invites tragedy. Indeed, as generations of readers have noted, there is a lot of blood. The Jews of Shushan kill 500 people plus the ten sons of Haman, and those in the provinces kill 75,000. Was it an indiscriminate massacre? Or a war of self-defense? It’s hard to forget that the Jews are given permission to kill not only men, but also women and children, who presumably have no role in any attack.

While the text does not specifically say that the Jews did not kill women or children, it specifies that they only killed “those who hated them,” suggesting a purely defensive battle. The megillah does make a point to tell us three times that the Jews did not loot the property of those defeated, despite explicit permission to do so. Multiple commentators on the text offer this detail as proof that the Jews fought only for self-defense, not for economic gain. The Vilna Gaon, in the eighteenth century, explains that the inclusion of women, children, and spoils is “in order to annul the original decrees, but in truth, [the Jews] did not desire this, for it was sufficient for them that they were redeemed from great suffering.” (Beur HaG’ra)

The real tragedy

It is possible that the Jews ultimately get carried away. After the initial battles, Esther returns to the king with one more request: that the Jews of Shushan be permitted an extra day of slaughter. (9:13) On this day, the Jews kill another 300 people who, this time, are not described as enemies or aggressors, but again do not touch the spoils. Were the Jews now just taking revenge on other peoples? Had they simply gotten used to killing? After all, as the Talmud warns, “Once permission is granted to the destroyer to kill, it does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.” (Bava Kamma 60a)

Or perhaps Esther responds to the ongoing danger to the Jewish people. Certainly, this is how classical commentators understand her request. Rashi, for example, suggests that “perhaps she felt that some of their enemies who had not been killed remained.” Malbim describes her behest as applying only to the part of Shushan where neither government officials nor the king’s army were present to protect the Jews from further attack. Whether one finds these readings convincing or not, it’s clear that earlier generations of scholars wished to assert that the Jews of Shushan killed only in self-defense, not out of a desire for revenge, power, or money.

In a discussion of why we do not recite the psalms of praise comprising Hallel on Purim, the Talmud compares the conclusion of the Purim story to that of the exodus from Egypt. After the exodus, the Israelites “were not slaves to Pharaoh,” but even after Haman’s defeat, “we are still slaves to Achashverosh.” (Megillah 14a) Many commentators read this as a straightforward description of the Megillah’s plot: The Jews may have been saved from death, but they remained under Achashverosh’s tyrannical rule.

But the Talmud speaks in the present tense here. We, too, remain enslaved to  Achashverosh because we are still too often stuck in the same failure of imagination that he demonstrates. We still too often believe in a zero-sum game in which the safety of Jews is pitted against the safety of other people. This is the real tragedy of the ninth chapter of the Megillah, and the tragedy in which we find ourselves too often trapped today.

By dismissing this chapter as an irredeemable justification for violence, liberal Jews only cede its meaning to fanatics who are too happy to read it as such. By instead engaging the text, reading it closely, and reclaiming its meaning, we can learn crucial lessons that remain as relevant today as in the days of the Megillah.