JewsByChoice.Org

Some years ago, on a group tour of Poland, I visited the town of Kazimierz Dolny.  A miniature version of old Warsaw with its ancient buildings and cobblestone paving, this sleepy, medieval town is overlooked by an impressive castle.  As our group walked through the town, we were told the story of how once upon a time, a Polish prince who lived in the castle had an underground passageway dug to connect it with the village below.  The reason for this, as the story goes, was so the prince’s mistress could pass back and forth between the castle and her home in the village at any hour without being seen.  We were also told that this mistress was Jewish, and was nicknamed “Esther” by the town’s Jewish population.

I have always found this story disturbing and full of questions.  Was this Jewish mistress in love with the prince?  Or was she, like Esther, taken from her family at the request of the medieval ruler and put at his disposal?  Was she ashamed by such a role in her own community?  Why was the passage dug?  To hide her own embarrassment or the prince’s?  And why was she nicknamed Esther?  Was her compliance with the prince the price of the welfare or survival of the Jewish community?  Could she have been nicknamed Esther if she had gone to him willingly?

After studying Megillat Esther with a group of women from my shul in the U.S., I studied some of the commentary of the Malbim (Rav Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michal) on the subject.  He takes great pains to point out clues in the text which suggest that Esther did everything she could to put off her fate.  She and Mordechai resisted the edict calling for young women to be taken for Ahashverosh’s choosing, that in the end she was taken forcibly, and that even while in the palace she resisted the custom to the extent that she could.  By hiding as long as she could she was willing to risk death; by refusing to reveal her descent, she hoped to be rejected by the king; and by not requesting the gifts to which concubines were entitled, Esther signaled that she was there under duress.  Furthermore, she resisted three attempts by Ahashverosh to get her to divulge her secret: a banquet in her honor; a reduction in taxes intended to benefit her native province; and an offer of gifts, including to her relatives.  She maintained her secrecy until much later in the story, finding favor with the king with nothing other than her beauty.

We know how Megillat Esther ends, with the saving of the Jewish people by the sudden revelation of Esther’s background.  Most of us are probably also familiar with the megillah’s claim to fame as the only text in the Tanakh with no mention of God.  God’s hand, perhaps, was hidden behind the actions of the characters in the story.  Despite Esther’s resistance to the circumstances facing her, her background did surface at the correct time to save her people.  Haman’s rash words earned him the lesson “what goes around comes around.”  And an apparently foolish king did the right thing in spite of himself.

So did the Esther in Kazimierz Dolny resist the advances of a powerful Gentile king?  Did he know she was Jewish?  Did her liaison with him in some way protect the Jewish community in the village?  What would have happened if she had not done what she did?  We know from the story of Pinchas, and from other places in Tanakh, that marriage with non-Jews is forbidden and carries heavy consequences.  Yet we also see instances where it is not only not punished, but saves the Jewish people, and—dare one say it—is orchestrated by God.  We may never know the whole story behind the Jewish woman in the Polish village, but perhaps, to have earned the nickname Esther, she too was helped by the invisible hand of God.