For He Told Them He Was a Jew

Esther chapter 3: Haman has become mighty, and all the king's servants are bowing to him. All except Mordechai.

3. Then the king’s servants, who were in the king’s gate, said to Mordecai, Why do you transgress the king’s command? 4. Now it came to pass, when they spoke daily to him, and he did not listen to them, that they told Haman, to see whether Mordecai’s words would stand; for he had told them that he was a Jew.

So I asked my Bibliodrama participants to be Mordechai, and posed the following question to them:
"Mordechai, you told Esther to keep her Jewish identity a secret. And yet you yourself reveal that you are a Jew - and in a very dangerous context, that of not bowing to Haman, offending him, and breaking the King's decree, to boot.
- At what point did you tell them you were a Jew? From the start, or in the course of time?"

My participant, Viktoria, replied as Mordechai: 
"In the beginning I kept it hidden. I was afraid to reveal my identity. But as time went on, and I daily did not bow, that action strengthened me. And it was during that process that I found myself suddenly deciding 'Enough of hiding, it's time to speak my truth. The time has come for me and us as a nation to stand up and not hide anymore, suffering the consequences if necessary."

I find it fascinating that, according to this interpretation, it was this situation with Haman, something that was the antithesis of all that is godly, that brought out this courage in Mordechai and enabled him to declare "I am a Jew". It reminds me very much of another biblical person who stands up and declares "I am a Hebrew" only because he finds himself in a strange situation that is not, seemingly, the godly route - and that is Jonah (Jonah 1:9):

I am a Hebrew and I fear the God of Heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land.

As I explain in another blog post "The Jonah Epiphany", this entire set of events with the sailors was not meant to occur; it would not have happened at all had Jonah obeyed God. And yet it enabled him to come to this place of growth for him, like Mordechai. 

We can deduce from this that even situations that seem difficult and wrong (and maybe specifically these) can be marvelous opportunities to bring out of us inner strengths we did not know we possessed.

Our Inner Sailors

And back to the story of Jonah, from which I cannot keep away.

A comment in a bibliodrama on Jonah chapter 1 led me to notice how we can read the story as symbolic of our inner processes.

The boat is akin to our psyche, our whole system. Jonah’s falling asleep in it represents repression and denial, two mechanisms that manage to keep us asleep even during powerful storms. They keep us blind to our own inner crisis, which then ratchets up, higher and higher, in a bid to get our attention.

The captain would normally have nothing to do with a passenger asleep in the bowels of his ship. However, he is thrown off kilter by the storm and – in an example of a topsy-turvy order of things, where those above descend below – he leaves his usual post to come down, find the offending sleeper and urge him (1:6): 

"What do you mean, O sleeper? Arise! Call upon your God! Perhaps God will give a thought to us, that we do not perish."

No answer from Jonah.
Symbolically, the captain is the superego, the voice of our conscience. When it sees that the boat, i.e. the psyche, the self, is cracking apart, it tries to take charge of the situation through the means with which it is familiar: rousing words, intstructions, and commands.
But this is not a language that the repressed awareness can even hear. It continues to sleep.

It is only when the sailors arrive, and plead (1:8):

"Tell us, we beg you, for whose cause is this evil upon us? What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?"

that Jonah finally responds, replying (1:9):

"I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."

He is connecting to his identity and to a higher power. This leads to his suggesting a solution. He is now in charge, and knows what to do. This is the healthy ego, the functional self that rejects both the id’s denial and the superego’s unbearable pressure, and listens to intuition that helps the divine voice to come through and give aid.

Our captain, the voice of reason, our adult voice, cannot actually speak to the parts of us that are in distress, that are childish, unreasonable, shut down. If we shout at a child acting from within emotional baggage, we may have all the reason in the world on our side, but they will not hear us. It was the sailors’ approach in a respectful manner, as equals, their actually showing interest in Jonah and his personal history, that successfully elicited a response. Their warmth of approach, their genuine humanity (expressed even more strongly when they do not want to throw him overboard, even to save their own lives) give him the space to wake up to his true self, connect to his identity, connect to God, and get back in the saddle.  

We need to find those sailors inside us – the compassionate voices of our inner loving parent, our inner kind therapist, coach and friend – that can hear us and want to understand who we really are, without judgment. It reminds me of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's story of the Turkey Prince, or (the Option method for treating autism), in which the wise adult figure descends “under the table” to the child's level, in order to genuinely understand and create an atmosphere of trust. This allows the prince to eventually come back up to sit at the table.

The Jonah Epiphany

While doing a Bibliodrama recently on the book of Jonah, I came to a tremendously important realisation that helped me in my attitudes towards myself, and can also help us have compassion on others:

G-d came to Jonah and said, "Go to Nineveh and tell them to repent." Had Jonah been a good little prophet, he would have said "Ok", gone to Nineveh, said "Repent...", they would have repented - and that would have been the end of the story. Very boring story, and no book of Jonah. It was only because he was a bad prophet, running away from his mission, going down...then down... then down some more... that we even have the marvelous story of Chapter 1  of Jonah, with the amazing sailors and the process that Jonah himself goes through, continuing in Chapter 2.

Those sailors came to know G-d because of Jonah. It is only due to Jonah's "malfunctioning" that they all experienced the crisis of the weird storm and rose to its existential challenge. Jonah himself gets to, in the eye of the storm, stand up and declare "I am a Hebrew", which may represent a very important moment in his life - a moment he would not have had, had he been a good boy.

The lesson is that even when we seem to ourselves to be dysfunctional, to be running away, we are still on a meaningful journey and still impacting the people around us, possibly even in a tremendous way, as Jonah did for those sailors, and as the book of Jonah does for us. We are writing chapters of the book of our life, even if we ourselves do not notice any plot and character development in particular.

G-d will send us opportunities from within that escaping place, to be and to do, and we get to choose there too, just as we always get to choose.

For me, quite frequently feeling like I am running away from who I am "meant" to be, this really helps. Perhaps there are some other people out there who feel similarly.

P.s. Jonah (in Hebrew "Yonah") means dove, and my friend Chaviva Speter also notes similar lessons we can learn from the dove in the flood. The first time that Noah sends the dove, it fails to land. The second time, it does not fly far, returning with an olive branch. Only the third time does it fly free and not return. Just as Jonah failed initially in his mission, so did the dove, and so do we. It's part of life and we must keep trying.