Est Esther Book of Esther, 简介
A note on the Book of Esther. Five books of the Hebrew Bible are known as the Five Scrolls (Chamesh Megillot). Song of Songs is read on the Shabbos of Passover week (Sepherdim read it on Seder night and Friday afternoons). Ruth is read on Shavuos (Pentecost). Kohelet is read on the Shabbos of the week of Sukkot. Ekhah (Lamentations) is read of the Ninth of Av, a fast commemorating the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. And, finally, the book we are studying, the Scroll of Esther, is read on Purim. Both Esther and Job could certainly be produced as plays or musicals with a high professional production level. In writing a musical, the scenario has to be laid out for the story by identifying the points in the play, visualized as a series of scenes, where the conflicts in each scene rise to a crescendo requiring song and/or choreography. Here are a few ideas on how to organize the telling of Estherʼs story in this way. A few possible lyric lines for songs have been put in quotation marks. Why not think of how you could write an original play or musical to be presented every Purim? Try your own creative hand — you can polish the ideas below or come up with better ones: Scene: Persian city of Susa (modern Iran). Time: 483 B.C.E. Possible ideas for a scenario with a few song lyric ideas: King Ahasuerus and company (tipsy): “Queen Vashti, you're not acting very pretty.” Queen Vashti could sing a song to her maidens to go tell the King she is now a “liberated” woman. The chorus made up of King Ahasuerusʼs counselors (“wise men [chachamim]” — Esth 1:13) could lament the rebellious female population of the country and how Queen Vashti will start an insurrection in every home. A national domestic revolt is imminent, right in homes of the nation! These wise men could sing, “Itʼs a scandal! Things are getting out of hand… Queen Vashti refuses to come at the kingʼs command!” (see Esth 1:12). Purim is to be a time of joy (simcha) and feasting and gladness and yontef (holiday) and a time to send gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor (Esth 9:22). Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq, boasted that his scud missiles would burn half of Israel, but then he should have studied the whole megilah of Esther because then he would have understood why his elite Republican Guard tank divisions would suffer a “turkey shoot” from the air and be defeated on Thursday, February 28, 1991 (5751), Adar 14, the very day of Purim (Esth 9:19), proving that any Haman who threatens to destroy Israel can still be brought down by the G-d of Esther. G-d, Whose Name is never mentioned in the text of Esther, is nevertheless a presence felt in every chapter of the story, just as He was a presence felt by that disciple of Amalek, Stalin, Hitler, and Haman — Saddam Hussein — on Purim Day, 1991 — but ironically not on many so-called American believers who are not at all grieved over the ruin of Joseph (Am 6:6), not at all gladdened over the reading of this whole Hebrew megilah, not at all aware of what the G-d of Israel is doing, even now under our own noses, even, in the case of the U.S. military and Purim, 1991.