by Annie Sommer Kaufman

A version of this piece was originally shared orally as a devar torah for Parshas Yisro at Congregation Mah Tovu, in Chicago.

My comrades and I have been paying a lot of attention to the Book of Esther lately. We’re writing a theater piece to perform on Purim, and we’re resisting the political project designed by the Heritage Foundation named Project Esther, which is a key component of Project 2025 and its authoritarian agenda. The relationship between our  theater text and the political texts it lampoons finds a reverse echo in the relationship between Megillas Esther and the Torah’s account of the Revelation at Sinai, in Parshas Yisro. Both Megillas Esther and Parshas Yisro radically oppose monarchy as a form of idolatry. Megillas Esther conveys the warning through parody, and Parshas Yisro through policy. 

The partnership between these two Biblical texts is well established in a very famous midrash (Talmud Bavli, Shabbos 88a):

 “[And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God] and they stood under the mountain” (Exodus 19:17):

Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: this teaches that the Blessed Holy One  overturned the mountain above them like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, ok, and if not, there will be your burial place. 

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here is a substantial caveat to Torah [since it was given to them under coercion]. 

Rava said: Even so, they actively accepted it in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ratified, and accepted upon themselves and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27), and he taught: The Jews ratified what they had already received previously [through coercion at Sinai].

In having us  affirm our acceptance of the legal system in the most upside down  doppelgänger world of Shushan, Rava shows us the revolution of Revelation. In the mirror world of Shushan, only reversals within a backlash, see-saw dynamic are possible. Who will manipulate the King, hold the ring, and lead the massacre is up for grabs, but there is always a winner and a loser, always someone trying to get his enemy executed.

Revelation at Sinai however, shows us a path out of the absurdist zero-sum game of monarchy. The response to slavery in Egypt is not to install Moses as Pharaoh and enslave the Egyptians. Instead, Jethro and God decentralize power  and cancel the  position of earthly ruler by putting us in reciprocal relationship with the Heavenly God, by instating a horizontalist legal system in which all are addressed equally.

The structures of Parashas Yisro and Megillas Esther form a chiastic parallel, as follows:

Yisro

• • Amalek (Exodus 17:8-17) – The war with Amalek is the Israelites’ last activity before receiving a legal system. Amalek exemplifies what not to be and manifests the terms that the Revolution of Revelation rejects. Revelation, not Pharaoh that rules by hierarchy. Revelation, not lawless marauders who take advantage of weakness.
  • Administrators (Exodus 18:13-17) – The Torah as we have it rearranges the timeline to make sure we learn the necessity of a decentralized court system before we receive the law. This is the full lesson against monarchism and the idolatry of treating someone or something as greater than God or God’s law. The Rabbis see corrupt judges as a form of idolatry and a decent court system as a guard against it. One sage, Rabbi Mana, disparages judges appointed for money. Another, Rabbi Ammi, noticing that the word for God, “Elohim”, can also sometimes refer to human judges, even applies a Biblical prohibition against idolatry to judges compromised by money, reading “Do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold” (Exodus 20:20) as “Do not make for yourselves judges from silver or judges from gold” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Bikkurim 3:3). Autocrats of today know this function, and that’s why they bribe, co-opt, and dismantle courts and administrators in Hungary, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, to enable their consolidation of power.

• God – God’s particular dominion over the Jewish people here is based on redeeming them from slavery (Ex. 19:4 and 20:2-7), but is also grounded in God’s dominion over the whole world– “for all the earth is Mine” (19:5), alluding to God’s creation of the world. As Hakham  Jose Faur wrote, “The Hebrew scripture puts forward the principle that God’s sovereignty is grounded on the fact that He is the Creator of everything. His Dominion is positively different than that of the Rex. The latter’s claim for Dominion is based on might” (Horizontal Society, p. 106). The very gemara that teaches that the Revelation at Sinai was ratified in the time of Mordekhai and Esther continues by teaching that the Israelite acceptance of Torah was a condition of God’s creation: the natural order depends on covenantal responsibility.  
• Rulership – Crucially, this covenant is reciprocal. God follows the Torah, too: “Ordinarily, when a human king issues a decree, if he chooses, he observes it, otherwise [only] others observe it; but when the Blessed Holy One issues a decree, God is the first to observe it” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Rosh HaShanah 1:3/57b). In some ways Torah is above all the players and can play a firm, stabilizing role as a Constitution. The elevation of an accessible and transparent Torah to which even God is accountable amounts to a  rejection of a ‘might makes right’ style of rule. God will not replicate Pharaoh’s system of slave and master. Accepting the Torah is not a reversal of roles but a rejection of the system itself., facilitating direct relationship between the people and God without an earthly king.  

Esther

• Rulership – The empire centered in Megillas Esther’s Shushan is ruled by a capricious monarch, who issues unpredictable decrees, replicated without participation, consistency, reliability, or checks. The book gives no indication of any sort of Constitution limiting the king’s power or offering  stability. Can you imagine what it would feel like to live in Ahashverosh’s empire? Receiving a barrage of announcement after decree after order, declaring hierarchical gender roles, kidnapping and deporting people, authorizing massacres, or whatever else tickled the king’s fancy?

• God – There is no relationship with God in Megillas Esther.  The King wears the High Priest’s garments (Talmud Bavli, Megillah 12a),  co-opting God, interrupting the human relationship with God, and even attempting to supplant God and all that God stands for.

• Administrators – Corrupt advisors manipulate the king easily. This means that anyone is a target. We’ve seen this dynamic in Parshas Yisro, as well, where. Jethro kind of manipulates Moses:  Oh, Mo, it will be better for you if you don’t do all the work; spread it out, so you don’t burn out! (Ex. 18:17-19).  Esther echoes this manipulation of the ruler to change the law: oh Akhie if it pleases you, revoke Haman’s edict! (Esther 7:3-4).  Human kings can be manipulated,  so power needs to be decentralized through the court system. Yisro shows the formation of that sound policy; Esther satirically shows the dark dystopia in which that does not happen. In Ahashverosh’s Shushan, the king is an idol with no inherent worth or principles. All you can do as a subject is jockey for position to harness the king’s power against someone else,  so that it is directed away from you. It will swing back around, though. This is the game played nowadays through Project Esther.
• Amalek – The last chapters of the Book of Esther show what happens without a Constitution, without rule of law, under the law of capricious monarchical whim: revenge. Victim and victimizer are reversed.. Taking the parody all the way shows that within the zero-sum game of monarchy Jews are not protected from becoming the Haman. “For Mordekhai the Jew was second to the king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted by the majority of his brethren” (Esther 10:3). The Talmud picks up on the subtle parody: “‘By the majority of his brethren,’ but not by all his brethren. This teaches that some members of the Sanhedrin parted from him (Talmud Bavli, Megillah 16b), because he traded in Torah for political power (Rashi, ibid.). The Jews killed Haman and his followers, but not his office.

 While the Megillah of Esther opposes monarchism through the genre of parody, we have a policy document showing the Persian Empire as the setting for the ratification of the Torah as Constitution. Ezra’s assembly, which gathered all classes horizontally, “as one person” (Nehemia 8:1), featured a public reading of the Torah of Moses, reaffirming the messages of Revelation that Torah is king, outside of human monarchy.  Unlike the book of Esther, which worries about who will play the required roles of slave/master and killer/killed, Nehemia models how to set up a political system with the Creator, even within and extending throughout the Persian Empire.

The monarchists at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 who are working on annulling the US Constitution and consolidating power in the Executive are reading the Book of Esther as policy, not as parody. Their summary of the Megilla concludes that Esther  “convinced King Ahasuerus to reverse course. The result: Haman and his family were hanged, Mordecai replaced Haman as the King’s Vizier, and the Jewish people were saved” (Project Esther). Project Esther, which is written by a consortium of reactionary political and evangelical hands, plus AI, heightens the narrative of Jewish Victimization as the rationale for weakening civil rights, our education system, and non-governmental organizations. It treats any respect for Palestinians as a threat to Jews, but also enacts antisemitism by treating Jews as incapable weaklings who, like white women within the system of white supremacy, need a violent savior to rescue us from savages. The fear of Palestinian existence that it builds intensifies the kinds of fears present in Ahashverosh’s empire that anyone can be the next victim, so we must play the role of perpetrator instead.

These kinds of competitions build fear and wars that amplify fear. Fear empowers the king. Benjamin Netanyahu plays this strategy well. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance drum up our fear of immigrants, trans people, Palestinians, educators, vaccines, Diversity ( meaning Black people, women, etc., etc.), in order to strengthen the power of the Executive and fully annul the US Constitution. This is the pahad fear that is a major theme at the end of Esther, when the Jews become the source of other peoples’ fear (Esther 8:17, 9:2-3). 

Torah, with its Revolution of Revelation, offers us a way out of this trap. It offers us yirah, a grounding, egalitarian fear of reverence. Yirah is not the fear of others, the fear of revenge, or the fear of victimization, but the transcendent Fear of Heaven, Yiras Shamayim, an awe of the Creator. It is just this dignified fear of God which Jethro names as one of the core requirements for judges in the court system he exhorts Moses to implement before Revelation: “You shall also seek out, from among all the people, capable individuals who fear God—trustworthy ones who spurn ill-gotten gain” (Ex. 18:21). This is the fear the gemara sees in nature itself, in God’s created world, over the question of whether the human community will sustain the life of law, affirmed willingly on Purim,  on which nature depends (Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 88a). After reading the Ten Commandments, Moses understands us and expects us to feel fear, but he asks us not to let it be a chaotic fear, but, rather, an orienting fear of God that can direct us on a good path: “Be not afraid; for God has come only in order to test you, and in order that the fear of God may be ever with you, so that you do not go astray” (Ex. 20:17).

Annie Sommer Kaufman is a Chicago-based Yiddish teacher and translator, as well as Svara-trained Talmud teacher. She spent a year with the Jewish community of Moldova, where she studied Yiddish with Yekhiel Shraybman, before working a decade in the fashion industry as a pattern maker. She organizes with Jewish Voice for Peace. Her English translation of Ben Gold’s Yiddish novel, Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story, was published in 2024 by Wayne State University Press.