The Holiday of Purim is here again, and costumes, parties and fun are sprouting everywhere. Fun is the name of the game. Is there anything wrong with that? I admit that I love to see people smile and all the children and adults dressed up and clowning around! I am not keen on kids eating a lot of candy, partly because I know the health problems that go along with too much sugar, but then that is a personal issue. 

I want to examine, and I don’t claim to be right or wrong, a few things I am uncomfortable with:

• I know that God’s Eternal Name, YHVH, is important in all of Tenakh, but why is he not mentioned in any form in the entire book? People tell me that it is because He had to stay hidden. That does not make sense. When is it right to hide the God whom we worship from stories that we write about our lives? If anything in a story was done by the Eternal, then why is the emphasis placed on the clever Mordecai and his beautiful niece, Esther, who found herself lined up to become queen of Persia? Why not mention that the Hand of God was involved? Why take credit for the Jews being so clever and smart and leave God completely out of it? Was this because they knew they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Were they indeed under persecution at this time?
• If they were not suffering persecution, then what else may have been the reason for hiding one’s ethnicity?
• Is it possible that the story about justifying life for the Chosen People among the nations? No need for a a temple? No need for a Covenant with the Land and the God of the Land?

• Why were the majority of the Jews still in Persia many years after they were commissioned to return to the Land sixty years after the decree of Cyrus the Great? 
• Why did Hadassah become Esther naming herself after the pagan goddess Ishtar? And why did Mordecai take that name since it is also a variation of Marduk, a pagan deity worshiped in Babylon and ancient Mesopotamia? According to Torah it is wrong to pronounce the name of a pagan god, but these went so far as to rename themselves after these idols..
• Perhaps choosing these names was a political move to be able to work and live among the Persians. But the question looms large, why do they want to stay in the Galut? Is it because they are now permeated with the culture? Do they love the customs of the Gentiles more than their own?
• And what else might be the motive to hide at this time before Haman had the decree to kill all the Jews signed by the king? Would Haman have declared the Jews as public enemy number one, if he had known that the queen was Jewish? The story does not say that they were being persecuted. If so, then why not move back to the land? 
• The entire plot of the story of Esther seems to justify working subversively to overthrow the powers that be. When is it right to clearly hide one’s identity to be able to climb the political ladder with the intent of having someone at the top? Were Jews ever commanded to do such things? There is plenty of evidence of this happening throughout history. We see Joseph shaving to appear acceptable to Pharaoh when he was brought before him, but he apparently didn’t hide his parentage, because later in the Joseph story, the Egyptians would not eat with the Hebrews. He apparently was known as a Hebrew even since Potiphar put him in jail. 
• Maybe there are other reasons, but to me, it seems that the Jews who stayed in Persia enjoyed the Persian lifestyle and culture and did what they did to justify living in the Galut 60 or 70 years after Cyrus opened the way for them to leave. (Note that the decree of Cyrus took place in 539 and the events in the book of Esther were between 483 and 473. (See here and here). These dates are estimates. 

I don’t have answers, on this, and I have to admit that I have gone along with things many times so that I don’t make waves. What should we do about this? Is there anybody else out there who is concerned?

So “Happy Purim” and please think deeply when you drink so much you can’t discern Haman from Mordecai!

Ariella