Purim Songwriters Havdalah
In a combination Purim and International Women’s Day celebration, we entered the space to JoDee Messina’s Bring On The Rain, did a close reading of Esther 7, 2-4 and Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” is the thing with feathers.
Drash
What do you want? What do you want? It’s the easiest question to ask, but, often, it is a quite difficult question to answer. We ask people to define what they want without preconditions. But almost nobody can answer without passing the information through a series of socially acceptable, tone-policed, considerate filters to be as judgement-proof as possible. Similarly, we filter our hopes through the lens of possibility. Sometimes out of caution, or fear, but nevertheless sitting in the silence of knowing that hope can be misconstrued as feckless wishful thinking, lacking agency or willpower. The reality is that hope is a muscle that can atrophy when it is not used and a strategy to create possibility when possibility defies logic.
Thought Starters
The Book of Esther is one of two books in the Tanakh that don’t explicitly mention God, what does that tell us about the agency with which we are forced to reckon in difficult circumstances?
When considering the idea of hope as an agent of strategy, how can we push against the narrative of hope as a nebulous feeling of simply wishing for a savior or an unlikely outcome?
Even in positive circumstances, hope can be viewed as an unrealistic, perhaps even toxic, concept, putting it at odds with
social constructs that reject willfulness as strength. What path is there for hope to be symbolic of strength rather than frivolity?
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