Imu Shalev: Welcome back to A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and made possible through the generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. 

So Rabbi Fohrman and I spent the last three episodes noticing these parallels between the Megillah and the Garden of Eden, building out what Rabbi Fohrman called a cast of characters.

We saw how the Megillah can be read as a kind of replay of mankind's failure back in Eden, of mankind's striving to be the arbiter of good and evil, and God's reaffirmation that He is the One in control. And if you recall that, then you'll probably recall how Rabbi Fohrman threw a real curveball right at the end - a turnaround, if you will.

Apparently, Rabbi Fohrman had discovered something dizzying - a competing Tree of Knowledge story in the Megillah. Now, when he says competing, he doesn't mean that it's replacing the first cast of characters. It just means that there's another layer of meaning embedded in the Megillah waiting to be discovered.

In this episode, we're going to focus on the new cast of characters, but don't worry. By the end of the series, Rabbi Fohrman's going to bring it all together for us, and our overall understanding of the Megillah's wisdom will be so much richer for it.

Rabbi Fohrman: I know the notion that a competing Tree of Knowledge story in the Megillah sounds really weird, but let me explain what I mean by that. We found something fairly internally consistent in our last couple episodes where we started from what the Sages say. They identify Haman as an Adam-like character having just eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and with the skills of algebra, we were able to infer he existence of other “Tree of Knowledge” characters.

We said that Zeresh seems to be playing Eve giving forbidden fruit to her husband. Mordechai is the forbidden fruit. We worked everything through, starting from that starting point. If you start with that idea, that the hint to Haman from the Torah is הֲמִן־הָעֵץ, then there's a whole story that follows from this.

But Imu, once you see that, you know, when you look at the Megillah, you're thinking, “Garden of Eden, Garden of Eden, Garden of Eden.” Once you start doing that, what I found is that there are other Garden of Eden themes that seem to appear in the Megillah that aren't consistent with the story we've told. Like, how inconvenient. 

Imu: So what you're saying is, once you start to see the Garden of Eden in one part of the Megillah, once you've calibrated your intertextual detector to “Tree of Knowledge,” you start to see it in other parts of the Megillah.

Normally that's a very pleasant thing that happens. Like, oh cool, now I can see all these cool things. But you're saying it's unpleasant because it seemed to contradict the other stuff that you saw. Is that what you're saying? 

Rabbi Fohrman: It didn't fit. There were clashes. Like, I thought that character was playing someone else. 

Imu: Why don't you show me what you mean?

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, so let's just start from the position that The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil seems to have something to do with the Megillah, because you've listened to the last few episodes. Then someone comes to you and says, “You know, there's this really interesting scene back in the Garden of Eden. It's a beauty contest. There's Adam and he's all lonely and God's like, ‘Well, We shouldn't keep him lonely.’ And so God lines up all the animals and has him name all the animals in hopes of finding a mate. Then, you know, he can't find one, and then there's this one-in-a-million mate, and he's very joyous and he's thrilled, and it's his bride. That's Chava, that's Eve.”

“So we already know that there's Garden of Eden motifs scattered all over the Megillah. Can you find that motif in the Megillah anywhere?” Imu, what would you say?

Imu: Normally when I think “beauty contest” and “Tanach,” the first place I go is not Adam and the animals, although I remember that was a hilarious parsha video that you made; I think the very first parsha video we made here at Aleph Beta. I remember our animator made a hilarious fashion runway and had all the animals kind of trotting down there. I remember the hippopotamus with a blonde wig and lipstick.

But yeah, when I think beauty contests, I don't think Genesis - I think the Megillah. So if you're saying, is there any part of the Megillah that reminds you of that? The king is alone, his advisors are really worried about him being all alone, and they suggest, “Hey, why don't you do this grand beauty contest and find yourself a new mate?”

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly, and the king is all too happy. And remember, also, even the language, right? לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ — God declares, “It's not good for Man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18)

Well, when we hear about this beauty contest and that the king's going to select a mate:  וַיִּיטַב הַדָּבָר בְּעֵינֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ וַיַּעַשׂ כֵּן — The king thinks it's a really good thing because this is his way out of loneliness (Esther 2:4). It even seems to echo the garden a little bit.

Imu: Like, לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ turns into…

Rabbi Fohrman: וַיִּיטַב הַדָּבָר, yeah.

Imu: Right, yeah. He likes it, it's good for him.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. Like, you could argue with this, but there's not a lot of beauty contests in the Bible. You'd be hard pressed to find others besides the one that happens in the garden with all the animals and the one that happened in Shushan where the king selects his mate. 

So, you know, what do you do with this information? It doesn't quite fit with the paradigm we had before. And Imu, why doesn't it fit with the paradigm we had before, to think that the king has this beauty contest just like the beauty contest in Eden? The problem is a Cast of Characters problem. 

Imu: Yeah, I mean, in the last Tree of Knowledge story you told us, Achashverosh was playing the role of God, and he's playing Adam. So it's just, he's inhabiting an entirely different character.

Which, like, if you and I were learning this b’chavrusa (as study partners), my brain would turn to fuzz and I'd probably walk away from my desk and go on a long walk and say, “This is too many pieces. Fohrman's crazy. Not sure he's onto anything.”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, and that’s what I thought about myself when I first noticed this. It’s like, aw man, there goes my theory to pieces. It was all great, everything was fitting, and now there’s this jigsaw puzzle piece that, no matter how many hammers and I take to it, doesn't fit with the last story. I thought Haman was the guy who was occupying the Adam role, who ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Suddenly, I've got this very suggestive, seductive kind of evidence that there's a way in which the king, Achashverosh, is occupying the Adam role.

Imu: What Rabbi Fohrman called suggestive, seductive, I was willing to write off as coincidence. I mean, I saw that the plot in the Megillah where the king finds his mate does share some similarities with Adam’s own search for Eve, but, hey, Tanach is a long book. I expect that motifs repeat. You don’t always have to run and make a whole theory out of it.

Rabbi Fohrman’s textual observation was interesting, the language in both stories that to have a mate is טוֹב, is “good.” But still, not yet enough to convince me that there really was a second Eden story playing out here. But of course, as he always seems to, Rabbi Fohrman had a convincing case to make, starting with more textual evidence for this idea of Achashverosh as an Adam-like character.

Rabbi Fohrman: And there's other textual supports, by the way, that reinforce the notion that Achashverosh really is playing Adam trying to find his mate among these many people or beings convened in this beauty contest. Look at the way that he would find the mate.

Verse 14 in chapter 2: לֹא־תָבוֹא עוֹד אֶל־הַמֶּלֶךְ כִּי אִם־חָפֵץ בָּהּ הַמֶּלֶךְ וְנִקְרְאָה בְשֵׁם — Once a girl in the harem had her night with the king, he would never come back unless he called her by name. Well, back in the garden, how did Adam select his mate?

Imu: Name-calling.

Rabbi Fohrman: Name-calling, right? That's what he's supposed to do. God says, “Here's all these animals. You name them, Adam. You see if any one's going to be for you, if you can develop some sort of personal relationship with one such that it feels right, and you'll know by calling them by name.”

The king has to take this dizzying array of commoners and find one that seems special and say her and call her by name and that's how he indicates that he sees her as special.

So the themes of the garden really seem to be coming back in this alternative Tree of Knowledge story that seems to have nothing to do with our first Tree of Knowledge story.

Imu: Actually very cool. Just to belabor that for a second, if we would have taken that out of the Megillah, no one would have said, “Whoa, where's ‘naming?’ We need the king to name somebody.” Meaning, you could easily forget this detail, that the way the king expressed his desire in this particular mate is he would call her by name, which is pretty cool because that is how Adam chooses his mate. He, you know, wakes up with his mate and calls her the name of אִשָּׁה because he sees her as a partner, as an equal to Man in contradistinction to the animals (Genesis 2:23). So that's pretty cool, that connection.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Imu: First the beauty contest, then the language of טוֹב, and now this interesting point about naming. The evidence for an Achashverosh-Adam connection was starting to accumulate.

But if Rabbi Fohrman really was onto something, if there really was a second Cast of Characters here with Achashverosh starring in the Adam role, then it wouldn’t only be Achashverosh. There would be more Megillah characters who line up in new ways with Eden, and that’s where Rabbi Fohrman took me next.

Rabbi Fohrman: And then what happened, Imu, is that I began to notice more Tree of Knowledge themes in the Megillah, and something really cool emerged; which is that, even though these other themes that I began to notice are not consistent with our last Cast of Characters (very sad face), they are consistent with this new insight about the king being Adam who's lonely and is convening a beauty contest, just like Adam had his beauty contest to find a mate.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. If Adam, if the new Adam, so to speak, is Achashverosh making himself a beauty contest to find a mate, so when he lands on Esther, who would Esther be in this new telling in the garden? What character in the garden is Esther occupying?

Imu: And that's pretty easy, right? Adam's mate ends up being Chava. Ahashverosh's mate ends up being Esther. So Esther would be playing the Chava role.

Rabbi Fohrman: Esther's playing the Chava role. Here's the cool thing. There's some evidence that Esther's playing the Chava role because we know Esther has this issue where there's this forbidden knowledge that she isn't supposed to share with her husband, right? It's her identity, the fact that she's Jewish. מׇרְדֳּכַי צִוָּה עָלֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר לֹא־תַגִּיד — She's not supposed to divulge this forbidden knowledge to her husband (Esther 2:10).

So let me ask you this. Can you find that motif in the garden?

Imu: I’ve got to be honest. When Rabbi Fohrman first asked me this question, I was drawing a big, fat blank. Esther hiding from Achashverosh the fact that she’s Jewish? There’s nothing like that with Adam and Chava.

But I replayed Rabbi Fohrman’s words in my head, that Esther has forbidden knowledge that she wasn’t supposed to share with her husband, and that did have some resonance in the Eden story. “Forbidden?” Definitely an Eden word; forbidden fruit.

“Knowledge,” too. Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  “Not supposed to share with her husband,” that was also ringing bells. Chava wasn’t supposed to share the fruit with her husband. 

So there was something there, but it wasn’t quite lining up. Until Rabbi Fohrman offered one more hint, and it had to do with that moment when Chava hands the forbidden fruit to Adam.

Rabbi Fohrman: Eve taking that forbidden fruit and handing it to her husband. Because think about it, the forbidden fruit is not just any fruit. It is fruit that embodies this knowledge, this knowledge of good and evil. 

Imu: Oh, that's interesting. So knowledge of good and evil, if you're not supposed to have it, another way of seeing that is that it's something you're not supposed to know is a secret. There's secret knowledge of good and evil that is not for Eve to share with her husband. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. And lo and behold, there's secret knowledge that's sort of forbidden for Esther to share with her husband. And now if you think that, oh, Fohrman's brain is like racing away from him, here's the textual evidence for this. If you go back to the garden, there's a weird way in which God describes the restriction on eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: וַיְצַו יְהֹוָה אֱלֹקים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר. Now Imu, if you had to translate that literally, how do you translate that? וַיְצַו יְקוָה אֱלֹקים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר — And God…

Imu: God commanded upon mankind (Genesis 2:16).

Rabbi Fohrman: Weird thing to say, right? Because what should it have said?

Imu: La'adam. He should have commanded to Man.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's what you would have expected. Most commands are issued to somebody. “And God commanded to Adam the following thing.”

But no, that's not the way the text has it. This really strange formulation instead, we get: וַיְצַו יְקוָה אֱלֹקים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר — And God commanded on the man, saying….

But then, if you look over here in the Megillah, look at Mordechai commanding Esther not to divulge this forbidden knowledge to the king. I'm reading now from verse 10 in chapter 2: מׇרְדֳּכַי צִוָּה עָלֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר לֹא־תַגִּיד. Same language, Mordachai commanding “upon her.” This is not the normal way we have commands in the Torah. It's this unusual formulation in the garden, it's this unusual formulation here.

It sort of sounds like filling out our Cast of Characters. Not only is the king occupying the Adam role, not only is his chosen mate Esther occupying the Eve role, but what role is Mordechai occupying?

Imu: I see where you're going. Mordechai is occupying the role of God. So to slow it down, it sounds like you're saying there's knowledge, secret knowledge of good and evil that Eve wasn't supposed to give to Adam. And you're saying, oh, don't you remember in the Megillah there was secret knowledge that Esther doesn't reveal to her husband?

Which is, okay, I guess you're saying that that secret knowledge is a fruit. Which is weird to me, and I don't want to believe you, but then you're showing me that Adam was commanded not to eat from that tree, commanded not to get secret knowledge. And you're pointing out that Esther, too, it's not just that she has a secret that she doesn't tell. She's commanded by someone not to tell. And not only is it a command, the words that are used for the command are identical and in a weird way, right? It's not just that she was commanded; it was commanded by “צִוָּה עָלֶיהָ,” which is sort of a rare way to get a command.

So all those things are pointing to the fact that there seems to be a strong parallel that there's forbidden fruit; in one case, a literal forbidden fruit that has secret knowledge, and in the Megillah, there is quote-unquote “forbidden fruit” that is commanded this time by Mordechai who's occupying the God role to not reveal secret knowledge. Okay, I'm following.

Rabbi Fohrman: You got

Imu: and I am, I'm intrigued. Intrigued. 

Rabbi Fohrman: As proof of the last thing we just said, take a look at chapter 2, verse 11 in the Megillah. Turns out that when Esther was in the harem, Mordechai would go and check on her, but look at the language for checking on her.

וּבְכׇל־יוֹם וָיוֹם מׇרְדֳּכַי מִתְהַלֵּךְ לִפְנֵי חֲצַר בֵּית־הַנָּשִׁים לָדַעַת אֶת־שְׁלוֹם אֶסְתֵּר וּמַה־יֵּעָשֶׂה בָּהּ. Every day, Mordechai would stroll in front of the harem. He'd be out there in the king's gardens, as it were. What does that remind you of, this person who's strolling around the king's domain? And that language, מִתְהַלֵּךְ, that strange hitpa'el (reflexive action) form of the verb halach, to walk, appears back in the garden, too. Who is מִתְהַלֵּךְ in the garden?

Imu: Oh, gosh. This is the voice of God. קוֹל יְקוָה אֱלֹקים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן — The voice of God is walking in the garden (Genesis 3:8). If you know enough of Genesis, that theme of God walking and who goes on the walk with God shows up a bunch of times. Like, הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי shows up with God's command to Avraham (Genesis 17:1); אֶת־הָאֱלֹקים הִתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹחַ (Genesis 6:9); I think Chanoch was מִתְהַלֵּךְ with God (Genesis 5:22). So מִתְהַלֵּךְ is very much a God word.

Rabbi Fohrman: By the way, not just מִתְהַלֵּךְ, but יוֹם, right? מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם becomes וּבְכׇל־יוֹם וָיוֹם מׇרְדֳּכַי מִתְהַלֵּךְ. Every day Mordechai would stroll, God would be strolling לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם, “by the wind of the day.” It seems remarkably evocative in the  Megillah.

Imu: I'm with you on that, and it's pretty cool. By the way, I’ve just got to tell the listeners - Rabbi Fohrman teaches me one whole piece of Tree of Knowledge stuff, as we did in the previous episodes? I'm in. I bought it, anytime. He teaches me something new that threatens that peace? I don't want to hear any of it. I'm like, “Don't break it for me. Please don't break it for me.”

So I'm begrudgingly following you in these parallels, even though they kind of - I hate to admit it - they bother me.

Rabbi Fohrman: They bother you because it's an entirely other structure. And it's not just like, oh, there's some outlier element of the Tree of Knowledge that you can't put into the other story, even with a sledgehammer. What we're starting to see is that there are multiple pieces that are internally consistent, that don't belong in our other Tree of Knowledge story. Which is where I land on the notion that what we're actually seeing here is competing Tree of Knowledge stories in the Megillah. It's almost like there's two ways to see it.

I remember that picture in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; that picture of the old lady, but if you look at it a certain way, it's like this really pretty princess. You can see it one way and you can see it the other way, but as hard as you try, you can't see it both ways at the same time, because they're contradictory ways of seeing something, right?

Imu: Oh, fascinating.

Rabbi Fohrman: So we've got these sort of two Tree of Knowledge stories, and our question is, what do we make of that? How do we even understand that? I think if we extend the second Tree of Knowledge story a little bit more, we'll start to find some answers.

Imu: Can you just reassure us all that eventually you're going to integrate these two visions together?

Rabbi Fohrman: Actually the whole point here is, is there some point of connection between these two Tree of Knowledge stories? But before we get there, we've got to sort of fill out the story, so let's try to do that.

Imu: For the time being, Rabbi Fohrman’s reassurance helped to put me at ease; enough at least to focus on the work at hand, completing the second Cast of Characters. There was one more important character that Rabbi Fohrman wanted to add to the cast.

Now some of what we are about to say may sound crazy a little at first, but listen to how we develop the connection and see if you are convinced by the end.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay. So far, our Cast of Characters, Imu, really does look like Ahasuerus is matching up with Adam. It really does look like Esther is matching up with Eve. It really does look like Mordechai is matching up with God. But there's one really important character in this version, in this Megillah, which doesn't seem to have a place in. 

Imu: talking about, right, the horse,

Rabbi Fohrman: It's the guy who's supposed to ride on the horse. Our archvillain, our Voldemort: Haman. Who's Haman back in the garden? He's a villain. The garden has a villain, a snake. But it was hard for me to see how the villainy of Haman matches up with the villainy of the snake. Is it true that Haman is snake-like? And if so, what about Haman's actions do match up with the snake back in the garden?

Imu: Well, one thing that, if you understand conceptually what the snake was trying to do, I think one way to read the story is seeing the snake as trying to depose Adam, right?

You have to ask, what was the motivation of the snake in the garden? There he is, working with Chava, seemingly to get rid of Adam. If you see things that way, I think things line up pretty nicely as well in this version of the Tree of Knowledge. Because you have the king, Achashverosh, as Adam, and is there anybody trying to kind of work behind the scenes, manipulate to take his power? That's Haman through and through. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Chazal seemed to say a similar kind of thing, that the motivation of the snake seems to be that he was a rejected mate for Eve. He's like, “Why should I be rejected?” The snake is described by the text as עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה, more cunning than all the other חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה (Genesis 3:1). The other time you have that phrase חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה is in the beauty contest. God convenes all the חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה for Adam to choose the mate, and then all the חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה are rejected, and Eve is crowned the bride of Adam (Genesis 2:19-20). Immediately after that, we hear that there was one חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה who seemingly wanted a second chance at the bat. [hebrew]. There was somebody who was crafty, who was more intelligent than all the other חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה; more human-like, maybe of human-like intelligence, and thought that, “I could be the mate,” right? He wants that chance to have that supreme role, to not be ruled over by some apex predator human being, but to depose humanity. Yep.

Imu: It's pretty cool because we don't read the story of the Tree of Knowledge together with the story of the creation of Eve in the beauty contest. But if you just look at the verses in the Torah, they're right next to each other. So you've got Adam and Eve, this beautiful union, and then that story ends with: וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים…וְלֹא יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ — The two of them were naked and not ashamed. The very next verse is, “but the snake is עָרוּם,”  right? Which is a clear play, exact same letters as the words for “naked.” The snake is the most clever from all the beasts of the field.

So what you're saying here is a really interesting way of seeing the snake who had just showed up, right? All the animals showed up in the beauty contest. He was rejected. Man and woman are עָרוּם, they're both naked, and the snake is, “Hey, what about me? I'm עָרוּם. I'm the most עָרוּם. I should be the apex animal in the kingdom.”

So it seems the text is nudging you to read those stories together, and perhaps in them you get the motivation of the snake.

Rabbi Fohrman: And in fact, the motivation of Haman couldn't be more similar to that, right? What is Haman trying to do this whole time? I mean, one way of seeing it is the way we saw it the last time around, right? The way we saw it the last time around in the first Cast of Characters. Haman was the one who wants the forbidden fruit; the forbidden fruit is Mordechai. Trying to get rid of Mordechai, but to what end? Because he eventually wants to become like God, that's why he wants the forbidden knowledge. 

Another way to see that same thing, that drive to be the top of the heap is not just a drive to be like God, but it's also a drive for an animal to be like Adam, which is just simply the plain and simple way to see the snake. The snake wants to be the one who's at the top of the heap.

Imu: It's actually interesting. I didn't see this before, but the snake is referred to as עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה, right? He's elevated, more cunning than all the beasts of the field. And Haman's promotion story describes him, right, גִּדַּל הַמֶּלֶךְ אֲחַשְׁוֵרוֹשׁ אֶת־הָמָן בֶּן־הַמְּדָתָא הָאֲגָגִי וַיְנַשְּׂאֵהוּ וַיָּשֶׂם אֶת־כִּסְאוֹ מֵעַל כׇּל־הַשָּׂרִים אֲשֶׁר אִתּוֹ.

Rabbi Fohrman: Very fascinating. Yeah, that's cool.

Imu: Yeah, he's promoted, right, not above all the other animals, but now above all the other ministers of the king; in the same way that, you know, the snake held this interesting place, almost like he was the viceroy to humanity. He was essentially above all the other animals. Here, Haman is the viceroy to the king, promoted above all the other ministers, all the other שָּׂרִים. That's pretty cool

Rabbi Fohrman: Fascinating, right? So Haman really is, in a way, snake-like. 

Imu: Now that we’ve sketched out all of the major players in this second cast, we’re ready to unpack it; to ask, when we read the stories of the Megillah and Eden through this lens, what insights are illuminated for us? 

That’s exactly what we did with the Megillah’s first Tree of Knowledge story. We filled out the Cast of Characters, but we didn’t stop there. We didn’t stop at, “Wow, behold the literary genius of the Torah. Such intricately crafted parallels. So impressive!” We mined those parallels for meaning, and when we did, we saw that, through the characters of Haman and Zeresh, the Megillah seemed to actually replay the sin of Adam and Eve in an even more violent rendering; and in doing so, it amplified for us the lesson of Eden. That when we inappropriately reach for knowledge of good and evil, God will put us in our place.

So if that’s what was happening with the first Cast of Characters, what is happening with the second? How might we conceptualize it? Is it also a replay of the sin of Adam and Eve? Is it something else? How is it engaging with the garden’s core themes of good and evil, of humans and God, and what lesson might it be amplifying for us? 

I couldn’t yet see the full answer to that question, but one thing seemed clear - that in this second cast of characters, the ending is different. Yes, Esther and Chava were both in possession of so-called forbidden knowledge that must not be shared with their husbands. But Chava actually shared the forbidden knowledge with her husband; Esther didn’t. So if we were looking to mine the meaning of this second cast, focusing on that aspect of Esther’s story seemed like a good place to start.

Rabbi Fohrman: What I want to do is take a look at what Esther does here in the story. What Esther does is trippy; it is mind-blowing. If Esther is playing Eve, her forbidden knowledge that she's not supposed to give her husband, according to Mordechai, is her identity. She must not tell him who she is.

Well, that's true up until a certain point, because there's this moment in the story where Mordechai comes and says, “By the way, Esther, all bets are off. Do you know what you have to do now? There's been this terrible decree by Haman. We're all going to be killed, and you have to actually tell the king who you really are.”

“You have to divulge that secret knowledge. Everything I told you until now? It's the reverse now. Remember I told you to keep quiet about who you are? You’ve got to tell the king who you are.”

And so there's 

Imu: Interesting. Mordechai is the guy who originally commands her not to tell, and then he goes around and says, “Actually, you should tell.” Which, if you're right about the connection to God in Genesis… No, it's sort of mind-bending because that doesn't happen in the Garden.

God says, “Don't eat from the tree, don't eat from the tree.” He doesn't turn around and be like, “Hey, remember when I said don't eat from the tree? I really need you to eat from the tree now.” 

Rabbi Fohrman: And so, what happens in the garden is that people disobey God. They do it wrong. Well, Esther never disobeys Mordechai. She keeps to exactly what he says until he comes and tells her otherwise.

It makes us wonder… Back in the garden, what would have happened if we never disobeyed the command? We only know what happens when we do disobey. If we never disobeyed, might it have happened exactly the same way it happened here? Is the Megillah revealing to us a perfected version of the Tree of Knowledge story?

Here's what would've happened if Eve had never disobeyed, if Eve had never taken from the fruit and given it to her husband. At some point, God would've done exactly what the Mordechai character does - flipped the script. “Now it's time to have the forbidden knowledge,” which, by the way, is so much more satisfying, right? Because knowledge of good and evil doesn't sound like such a terrible thing to have.

Right, Imu? Aren't you better off for knowing something about good and evil?

Imu: You know, Rabbi Fohrman, I've learned so much of your Torah that I can't answer that question honestly.

Imu: But if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, yeah, totally. I remember you did a video on this in “Genesis Unveiled,” one of the first pieces I ever saw, and I remember I laughed out loud when I first saw it. Rabbi Fohrman asked this question: Imagine you have a neighbor. Let's call him Bob, right? Bob is a great guy. Parks his car in the two-car garage in the suburban place where you live, and he has the kids over, barbecues every Sunday.

Only thing that's kind of interesting about Bob is, he doesn't have a knowledge of good and evil, right? Like, how thrilled would you be to live next to your neighbor who has no knowledge of good and evil? We have a word for people like that. We call them psychopaths. Today he's grilling beef, and tomorrow he might grill you, right?

Like, if you don't know the difference between good and evil…pretty scary. So yes, knowing right from wrong, I should say, feels like really important knowledge for humans to have.

Rabbi Fohrman: It sounds like something that God would eventually want to give humans, even if there was this certain moment in the infancy of mankind when it wasn't good for them to yet use their minds to think about such sophisticated concepts. Eventually, in the evolution of mankind, it would be an important thing to share that divine knowledge with us. And once you begin to see that, I think this is where we begin to see these two Tree of Knowledge stories really helping us understand the Megillah.

Because if we're right about this, the second Tree of Knowledge story is actually giving you a redeemed version of the original Tree of Knowledge, right? Our original Tree of Knowledge story is a failed story. It doesn't work out well. Nothing happens well. Adam and Eve, they both are exiled from the garden. God is mad. It sets the stage for history, which is, at some level, some attempt to redeem that story.

Well, an interesting question is, what would it look like to redeem that story? What would it look like to replay that story the right way? And maybe here, we're getting the beginnings of a vision of what it would look like.

Imu: This idea that Rabbi Fohrman had shared, that maybe God’s intent wasn’t that mankind should never have knowledge of good and evil, it was a thought-provoking possibility.

But the larger point here that Rabbi Fohrman was trying to lift up wasn’t so much this or that hypothetical about how the Garden of Eden drama might have played out if… Rabbi Fohrman was making a claim about the meaning of the Megillah’s second Cast of Characters; about how it was in conversation with the Eden story; that, quite apart from the first Cast of Characters, which was - as we said - a repeat of the sin, that maybe the second Cast of Characters was the opposite, a redemption; and in particular, that Esther was leading the way, playing out a redeemed version of Eve; an Eve who obeyed the God character, who didn’t feed her husband forbidden fruit.

As Rabbi Fohrman acknowledged, it was a bit of a crazy theory, but maybe it wasn’t so crazy. To that effect, he had some more evidence to show me, another way in which he saw Esther as redeeming Eve. It had to do with how Esther responded to Haman, the snake in her story, and how that was different from how Chava responded to the snake in hers.

Rabbi Fohrman took me back to that moment in the garden story when the snake makes his grand entrance.

Rabbi Fohrman: Here comes the serpent, right? Adam and Eve have this glorious union together. וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד, right (Genesis 2:24)? And then we hear about a side conversation that occurs between the snake and Eve.

The snake says, “Hey, wouldn't you like to be like God? You're not going to die. It's going to be amazing. You know God's just trying to keep the one tree to Himself, the special tree in the garden. Don't you think you should have some of that power here? Try some.” 

Now, if you could replay the role of Chava, instead of eating from that and then giving the food to her husband, what should she actually have done?

Imu: Interesting. Eve should have just told her husband, “Hey, I was out in the garden today and something really uncomfortable happened to me. The snake, our viceroy, head of our delegation to the animals, came to me and told me to do the one thing we were not supposed to do. How are we going to deal with this, Adam?”

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, exactly. That's what a relationship would…it's not just, like, having the glorious, rapturous intimacy of וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד. That's not the whole of a relationship. Sometimes a relationship is thrown into a crisis by an uncomfortable situation, and you have to figure out what's the right thing to do with integrity at that moment, right?

When some guy comes and has a side conversation with you in the garden, if you want you have, right? 

Imu: Happens all the time. Like, sometimes, you know, there's this question of when a friend divulges a secret, right, is that something that you keep from your spouse? It can be uncomfortable sometimes, and I'm totally fine for there to be a safe space to hear a secret. Not everything that you hear necessarily goes to a spouse.

But sometimes those secrets, especially when they concern the spouse or they're real secrets that concern your marital life, those are secrets that can eat away at your marriage. If you're supposed to be לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד, as you just said, if you're supposed to be of one flesh with your spouse, having a domain outside the marriage can threaten the marriage itself. It's an interesting...

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, that's one way of really seeing the first sin. One way of seeing the first sin is, even before handing the fruit to Adam, there's a sort of subtle collusion between Chava and the snake in the fact that she doesn't take that conversation back to her husband. She hands him the fruit without his knowledge of any previous conversation.

Imu: What you're saying is, I think, revealing a hidden story I'd never seen before. Which is, do you think that when Eve gave the fruit to Adam that she said, “Hey, the snake came to me and made a really great point?”

Rabbi Fohrman: Right.

Imu: I think she probably

Rabbi Fohrman: right, exactly.

Imu: And I think the evidence for that is probably when God comes to Adam and he says, “Hey, did you eat from the tree?” Adam doesn't say, “The snake came to us with a great proposition. We sat down on the couch. We heard him out. We thought it made sense.” He says, “No, it was Eve,” and then Eve has to do something really uncomfortable, which she hadn't done.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. That's when Eve says, “Oh, but I forgot to tell you about the snake.” It's almost as if there's an act of unfaithfulness there that's subtle but is there, which might be what Chazal are getting at when Chazal talk about the snake having some sort of romantic designs upon Chava. This is where you see it playing out a little bit in the text, but what you said she should have done is taken the conversation back to her husband, told her husband about this malicious advice.

Well, isn't it interesting? What does Esther do at the denouement of the Megillah? Doesn't she tell her husband about what the snake character has in mind? She finally goes to the king and says, “Here's what he's really trying to do,” and so at some level maybe that's part of the redemption of the story.

Imu: Wow, fascinating. She makes the king aware of the designs of the snake, which is not what Chava did in Genesis, but it's exactly what you would want her to do. So, fascinatingly, in Esther itself, she's redeeming the Chava role by marching directly to the king and saying, “Hey, there's a snake in our midst.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, right. “You need to know about what he's really doing, and it's my job to tell you that because if I keep it from you in some way, not only am I sinning against my people, not only am I in jeopardy, but there's actually a problem in our relationship if I know something about what he's doing and it has to do with our marriage and I don't bring it to you.”

“In bringing it to you, there's a certain kind of integrity that I'm bringing into our relationship that might not otherwise be there.”

Imu: I was taken with Rabbi Fohrman’s depiction of the redemptive Esther, but there were a couple of things about his theory that were nagging me.

The first is that it sort of sounded like Rabbi Fohrman was holding up Esther and Achashverosh’s relationship as some kind of marital ideal, which really threw me. This talk about “bringing integrity into our relationship;” I don’t usually think of Esther and Achashverosh as being this inspiring example of a beautiful marital relationship. Their “marriage” was far from ideal, wasn’t it? And even if we say that he’s not really idealizing their marriage, he’s just idealizing Esther; just saying that whatever Chava did wrong, Esther did right.

Well, was it really that simple? Was Esther a completely, thorough-goingly perfected Chava? With this Book, are things ever that simple? So I responded to Rabbi Fohrman, acknowledged his theory, but I pointed out a potential wrinkle in it.

This actually reminds me of your book that you wrote on the Megillah. You have this really interesting theory that there's all sorts of things that Esther does for the sake of inspiring the king's jealousy, including inviting the king to a special feast and also his best friend and advisor Haman over and over to these parties, that possibly interfere with the king's sleep at night. He's not so happy with it, ends up putting Esther in a really good position to call out Haman as a threat to the king.

But seeing these connections to Chava and the snake makes me wonder if another way of seeing what happened there was Esther choosing to play a really good political game.

Rabbi Fohrman: Precisely. Isn't that interesting, what you're beginning to see now? In other words, if I had to rewrite the Megillah, I could have rewritten it along these lines, to make Esther a fully perfected version of Eve.

Now, if you could imagine that you erased the Megillah and Imu could write his own Megillah along the lines of Esther being a fully perfected version of Eve, what should she have done? When Mordecai said, “It's time for you to tell the king who you really are,” what would your move be?

Imu: In the perfected version, she would just march to the king, reveal her identity, and say there's a snake in our

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly - but she doesn't do that. She's too afraid to do it. She doesn't know what will happen if she tells the king who she really is. And for those of you who are interested, read The Queen You Thought You Knew. 

She's afraid. She saw what happened to Vashti. Will the king really be able to handle her true identity? Mordechai says, “You must tell him,” but she's scared to do it. So instead, she falls back on another plan - parties. She starts being really coy with the king. The king says, “I'll give you half the kingdom, just tell me what you want,” and the Reader is reading that it's like, “Just tell him. Tell him. Just say.”

Imu: Right. This is like, why not just at the first party? Why do you need a second?

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. “There's a snake in our midst. I need to tell you about something I know. It affects our marriage. It affects who I am.” But she's too scared. What will the king do if he really knows? She just doesn't have that security. And so instead, creates a false narrative in the mind of the king.

And you see it - I believe Rashi says it - you see it just there in the text with these two stories. She invites the king, but not just the king. She invites Haman to this banquet and doesn't tell the reason, and just says: יָבוֹא הַמֶּלֶךְ וְהָמָן הַיּוֹם אֶל־הַמִּשְׁתֶּה אֲשֶׁר־עָשִׂיתִי לוֹ — Let Haman and the king come to this feast that I've made for him (Esther 5:4).

Now the problem is, which “him?” And isn't it interesting that the king has a sleepless night that night? Well, why can't the king sleep? I mean, if you were the king, who's the “him?” Was this party for me? Then what's Haman doing invited to my romantic little feast? Is the party for Haman? Well, why is she celebrating his birthday, and why do I have to play second fiddle to him?

Either way, it's bad, and then the time finally comes for the feast. And Esther still won't say what's on her mind. She invites them to another feast. She says, “You know what, come back tomorrow because I'm making another feast tomorrow.” אֶל־הַמִּשְׁתֶּה אֲשֶׁר אֶעֱשֶׂה לָהֶם — You and Haman, it's a feast for both of you this time; both of us (Esther 5:8).

Things are changing, things are dynamic. What's going on? And maybe all of it is Esther trying to create this question mark in the eyes of the king. Is there something going on between her and Haman? Which is this Tree of Knowledge theme. That's the evil side of the story. That's what she's not supposed to do.

Now it's true, she doesn't collude the same way that the actual Eve character does, by listening to the snake and not telling her husband about it. But in a certain way, she's playing with the same themes, and causing Achashverosh to imagine some sort of romantic dalliance that, all of a sudden...

Imu: just Achashverosh, right, seems like maybe even Haman as well, right, like, he 

Rabbi Fohrman: possible, yeah,  

Imu: And he gets all of his friends together, as you talked about in previous episodes, and one of the things he's the most excited about is his connection to the Queen, right? He's telling everybody, “Look, no one else was invited to the feast. It was just me. It's really intimate in there.”

It's not Adam, Chava, and then everyone else. It's Adam, Chava, and the snake. We're all in this together, and maybe one day it's not going to be Adam, Chava, and me. It'll just be me.

Rabbi Fohrman: And the Queen having knocked off the King, something like that. That's right.

Imu: It's also interesting that you see his pent-up frustration at the end of the Megillah when Haman falls on Esther's bed. And the king, he says this thing that he's been keeping inside probably for a few chapters there, which is [hebrew]

Rabbi Fohrman: “Are you trying to seduce the Queen?” She's engineered that, right? This is Esther's carefully laid trap. She's literally playing jiu jitsu with Haman. And why? Because what she should do, she's not comfortable doing. She's too worried about it. It just seems too risky to have that discussion on the couch, which is, “Hey, there's a snake in our midst. I need to tell you about it.”

And so what happens is, if she can guarantee the king's anger, the king's jealousy, and then point out Haman at the last moment, she can get rid of him. She knows that's true, and she executes that plan. But if that's the plan she executes, do we really have a perfected version of the story of Eden, or has the story once again missed its mark?

That, Imu, is the question I want to explore next time. We were so close to a perfected version of Eden. It was all happening. The woman had avoided the great sin of Eve of  giving forbidden fruit to her husband. The God-like figure comes and says, “It's time to have that knowledge.”

And yet, there's this playing around with this notion of a romantic dalliance that's false. And if that's the way the Megillah ends, that Haman dies because Esther was clever enough to frame him for a romantic dalliance that he never had in mind, it makes Esther almost a Machiavellian hero.

What Machiavelli is arguing in The Prince is that dictators should be benevolent, they should do good things, but the means that you need to use in political power to do good things is bad stuff. You need to manipulate people, because you've got good stuff that you need to do, but it's no-holds-barred in terms of how you're going to get that good stuff to happen. And that seems to be Esther. Esther is the spy, the MI6 agent, the double agent in every James Bond movie.

But is that what the Torah is advocating? Is this the way the book is supposed to end? A book that's really about the divulging of good and evil, what good and evil really means? Is Machiavelli the best we can do for a revelation of what good and evil is supposed to be about?

I think, at the end of the day, it's not. I think, at the end of the day, the Megillah stands as a towering monument to what knowledge of good and evil should be in the hands of mankind that is ultimately given that knowledge, and Esther becomes the shining example. The end of the Megillah is not the death of Haman; there's a few more chapters, and those chapters aren't just chapters of political intrigue. They're chapters of working out what good and evil really means.

And we'll try to get to that next time.

Imu: First we said that Esther was a fully redeemed Chava. Then we said, well, not quite. She could’ve played things more straight, been more forthcoming with Achashverosh, instead of playing all these games. And now, Rabbi Fohrman sounded like he was saying that, actually, we could recover this sense of Esther as a fully redeemed Chava.

I wasn’t sure what to make of his promise. It was intriguing, beautiful even, but I just didn’t see what was so terrible about Esther’s Machiavellianism, if you want to call it that. Yes, maybe she was a bit manipulative, held her cards close to her chest, gave impressions that maybe weren’t altogether truthful. But given the situation, what was so bad about that? We’re talking about genocide. Shouldn’t she be strategic, even manipulative? Do we even use the word manipulative when it comes to averting genocide? Shouldn’t she use every means that she has at her disposal? Does that somehow detract from her heroine status?

But Rabbi Fohrman wasn’t coming to knock Esther. He agreed that Esther’s so-called manipulative means were plenty justifiable when facing off against a foe like Haman. His point was simply that we had judged Esther too soon, and that Esther truly does achieve a glorious moral redemption before the story is done. And through her journey, the Megillah achieves a redemption of Gan Eden that is just as glorious.

For that, you’ll have to wait for the final episode.

Credits

This season of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev.

It was produced by Tikva Hecht and Beth Lesch, with additional editing done by Sarah Penso.

Chai Hecht was a consulting producer.

Our audio engineer is Hillary Guttman.

A Book Like No Other's managing producer is Adina Blaustein.

Our senior producer is Tikva Hecht. 

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

Thank you Shari and Nathan, and thank you all for listening.