Yaakov and Esther: How Fatalistic Optimism Defines the Jewish People (Miketz)

וְאֵל שַׁדַּי יִתֵּן לָכֶם רַחֲמִים לִפְנֵי הָאִישׁ וְשִׁלַּח לָכֶם אֶת אֲחִיכֶם אַחֵר וְאֶת בִּנְיָמִין וַאֲנִי כַּאֲשֶׁר שָׁכֹלְתִּי שָׁכָלְתי

(And may the Almighty God grant you compassion before the man, and he will release to you your other brother and Benjamin, and as for me as I am bereaved, I am bereaved.)

Bereishit 43:14

לֵךְ כְּנוֹס אֶת כָּל הַיְּהוּדִים הַנִּמְצְאִים בְּשׁוּשָׁן וְצוּמוּ עָלַי וְאַל תֹּאכְלוּ וְאַל תִּשְׁתּוּ שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים לַיְלָה וָיוֹם גַּם אֲנִי וְנַעֲרֹתַי אָצוּם כֵּן וּבְכֵן אָבוֹא אֶל הַמֶּלֶךְ אֲשֶׁר לֹא כַדָּת
 וְכַאֲשֶׁר אָבַדְתִּי אָבָדְתִּי

(Go, assemble all the Jews who are present in Shushan and fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, day and night; also, I and my maidens will fast in a like manner; then I will go to the king contrary to the law, and if I perish, I perish.)

Megillat Esther 4:16

There is a remarkable, even breathtaking parallel, between Yaakov’s resignation to fate in Bereishit, when he consents to send Binyamin to Egypt per the demand of the Egyptian Viceroy (Yosef), and that of Queen Esther when she agrees to approach Ahashveirosh on behalf of a Jewish community threatened with extinction.

The grammatical structure is identical, and unique as a fingerprint. A literary critic from Mars world instantly assert that both passages had surely been authored by the same hand.

And yet, among all the classic commentators, only Rashbam notices this astounding anomaly. And even he offers only the most perfunctory explanation, although he is certainly on the right track in his commentary on the story in Bereishit; 

כאשר שכלתי שכלתי. כמו וכאשר אבדתי אבדתי.
כלומר על הספק אני שולחו מה שיארע יארע

(“If I am bereaved, I am bereaved” is like if “I perish, I perish”; i.e. I am sending him (Binyamin) despite the doubt, and what happens, happens)

The likelihood of these phrasings being merely a coincidence is absurd. Yet these episodes occurred over a millennium apart. What’s more, the stories are completely different. In Megillat Esther it is an existential threat to the entire People of Israel in exile, while the earlier story of Yaakov is one of possible, and only partial, familial loss.

If we disconnect the authorship of Megillat Esther from that of Bereishit, clearly whoever wrote Esther’s words was deliberately choosing to have her echo Yaakov’s frame of mind. Hence, we must ask why. What did he see in Yaakov’s utterance that fit so perfectly with the thinking of Queen Esther?

Taken literally, both these sentence endings are not essential to their basic stories. We would not be missing very much if Yaakov had not said “if I am bereaved, I am bereaved”, nor would we have a very different understanding of the Megillah story had Esther not said “if I perish, perish”.  I would suggest that you read each narrative with and without these finials. You’ll come up with nothing that will alter your take on the narrative.

Hence, if the author of Megillat Esther made it a point to have Esther echo Yaakov he must surely have attached great significance to this turn of phrase. And he was absolutely right.

What is happening here – in both cases – is something both paradoxical and uniquely Jewish. I would call it FATALISTIC OPTIMISM, two sentiments that are polar opposites. A fatalist is someone who is resigned to fate, and has pretty much abandoned all hope of being able to affect an outcome. An optimist never doubts that things will work out favorably.

Herein lies the key to Jewish survival. On the one hand, we realistically expect the worst to happen. At the same time we have an equally immutable faith that things will somehow work out.

Both Yaakov and Esther are expressing this sentiment by declaring that by all logic they know things will go bad, but they will not allow this to deter them from doing what needs to be done.

Jewish history is an endless series of such episodes when all hope seems to be lost and yet we still give it our best shot. Perhaps the best proof of this was the surge of marriages and pregnancies among survivors of the Shoah. While still living in refugee camps where they were jobless, stateless and bereft – their only industry was making babies. And many of these people had already lost their first children to the chimneys of Auschwitz.

Can there be any greater manifestation that this of faith in tandem with fatalism ?

The Book of Esther never mentions God. Our tradition is that God’s presence is inferred by way of a miracle in which he had no visible hand. Yet in the story of Yaakov God is very much present in that very verse;

וְאֵל שַׁדַּי יִתֵּן לָכֶם רַחֲמִים לִפְנֵי הָאִישׁ
And may the Almighty God grant you compassion before the man

The author of the Megillah must have had his reasons for not mentioning God by name. Yet by inferring the verse from Bereishit he is clearly injecting that very element which explains Yaakov’s readiness to defy realism. He is telling us that Esther’s action was bolstered by the same paradoxical Jewish faith. And thereby, he does indeed bring God in to the picture.

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I have previously commented on other aspects of Parshat Miketz which you can read here.