Turning Obstacles into Opportunities (Shabbat Tetzaveh)
On Purim, the holiday we celebrated today, we read a story in which God was notably absent. The name of its heroine, Esther, is a play on hester panim, the concept of God’s hiddenness in the world. Our story’s animating question: What are we to do when events in the world feel like purim, like a lottery, beyond our control and without ultimate meaning?
Many of us are asking ourselves this question as the pandemic’s death toll surpasses the half million mark, and vaccine distribution, though steadily improving, has been interrupted in some parts of the country by storms made all the more catastrophic by climate change.
Some of us may find an answer to this question in the blessing we recited before reading the Megillah. This blessing — acknowledging the One who performed miracles for our ancestors long ago, and continues to do so for us today — suggests the Divine has and always will hold the world together, though at times the Holy One is operating “behind the scenes”.
This is the view of the Jewish mystics, who tell us we can tune into the Divine presence in the world by mindfully joining events around us with their sacred root. According to the mystics, we ought to bless with the intention to connect everyday phenomena with their hidden Source — this is why Judaism has a blessing for everything from eating food, and seeing beautiful things in nature, to going to the bathroom!
But most of us are not mystics, and can’t sense God’s presence in everything we do! To the rest of us, the Purim story gives a different answer: After King Achashverosh follows the villain Haman’s suggestion to enact a genocidal decree against the Jewish people, Esther’s uncle, Mordechai, sends a message to Esther, urging her to reveal her identity to King Achashverosh and plead on behalf of the Jewish people.
He asks: “Mi yodea im la’et kazot higa’at la’malchut?” “Who knows if it wasn’t for just such a time that you became queen?”
Especially during times of great uncertainty, we may not buy into the mystic’s belief God’s hand is literally or metaphorically hidden in everything — so Mordechai’s question invites Esther — and by extension all of us -- to focus, not on the power of God’s presence, but on the power of human action! When faced with a challenge, do we, like Haman, fall into victimhood and cast blame? Or, like Esther, do we step up as the person we want to be, find an opportunity to be kind and do good?
Judaism imagines Shabbat as m’ein olam haba, a taste of the world that is coming. As we take the first steps toward a post-pandemic world, many speak about how wonderful it will be to go back to “normal.” But what a loss it would be if we forgot all we learned, and the world just went back to the way it was! That is why the Purim story ends, not with a return to how things always were, but with an invitation to engage in a new set of sacred behaviors: mishloach manot, extending expressions of friendship, and matanot le’evyonim, providing needed support.
These mitzvot focus on the power of human action to make visible the holiness that is often so hard to find in our world. In the challenges we may face in the days and weeks ahead, let’s be like Queen Esther, focusing not on the obstacles in front of us, but on the opportunities we can find in them to do some good.
May it be so.