jewishhenna:Now that it’s the month of Adar, Purim is coming up in less than two weeks! The book of
jewishhenna:Now that it’s the month of Adar, Purim is coming up in less than two weeks! The book of Esther has one of my favourite verses in the whole TaNaKh:“And who knows — perhaps it was for a moment like this that you became a queen?”Let me try to explain why I love this verse so much. The book of Esther is the only book in the Bible where the name of G!d does not appear even once. The story is entirely driven by humans, their actions, and their choices. The Jews in Persia face annihilation under the decree of the wicked Haman (boo) and Esther has to make the difficult choice of risking her life in order to try to save her people. This moment in the story (4:14), pretty much right in the middle, is the turning point. Esther makes her decision, reverses the trajectory of destruction, saves the Jewish people… and the rest is history.But at this moment she doesn’t know that! She decides to step forward and change the course of the narrative, not knowing whether she would survive. “If I perish,” she says, “I perish.” It is that attitude of courage, I think, that carries us through a world where we don’t know if we will manage to save the day — but we do know that if we don’t step forward, no-one else will. This verse is my mantra: “perhaps it was for THIS moment that I became a queen!” Maybe this is the moment that I have been waiting for.As a queer Jew, there is something especially empowering about the language of ‘queen-ness’. That while we all may wear a variety of masks and disguises in our day-to-day, we are, in fact, royalty. We are queens! A term that I have chosen to wear with pride. And maybe there’s a purpose — maybe I have become a queen just in order to reach this moment. That my life has given me the tools to prepare me, precisely for a moment like this.“And who knows — perhaps it was for a moment like thisthat you became a queen?”Happy Adar!Calligraphy by me — see more at my website! -- source link
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