Esther 4:16

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I like the Bible. It is filled with great dramatic stories and it shows that Jews didn’t just become great storytellers when they created Hollywood. Great storytelling has been a part of Jewish culture for millennia. People debate back and forth about the miracles in the Bible and whether or not they actually happened. But the reality is that the miracles in the Bible are relatively rare. Most of it is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. More than anything else, it is a book of Jewish history. My view is that the miracles are mostly primitive people attempting to explain events beyond their understanding. But if you think about that from another perspective, what is God but something beyond our understanding?

But while interpretations of what happened can vary, and every account has a spin, I believe that the Bible is mostly accurate history and that its authors were mostly honest brokers. I mean, if you sit down and read all those long genealogies and census results in the Old Testament, and you really think someone just made all that up? O-K.  Fact is, Levi’s son Gershon was probably actually Gina Gershon’s great great grandad...That’s so hot. 

Anyway, I had hoped that the success of The Passion of the Christ would lead to Hollywood mining the Bible for all the great stories to be found there to further cultivate the huge audience of former non-theater goers that Mel Gibson hand-delivered. There were a few efforts but the fundamental problem is that because the Bible is written as a book of history and not an entertainment narrative, details are sparse, and if you fill in those details with creative license, religious people get irked, as they were irked with the flawed but interesting Noah.  And then it turns into this big antisemitic thing because there are so many secular Jews in Hollywood, and antisemites say they shouldn’t be making religious-themed stories, even though the Bible was entirely written by Jews and even though I would bet the average secular Jew has spent more time reading the Bible than the average self-identified Christian. 

What you have to have is these scripts being written by someone like...I don’t know, maybe...ME, who is historically knowledgeable enough to flesh out these stories with things that are likely to be historically accurate, but theologically knowledgable enough to flesh them out in a way that will appeal to people of faith, whether protestant, Catholic, Jewish or whatever. And at the end of all that, it still has to be entertaining.  

I believe there are literally about a thousand great movie ideas in the Bible. Just in the books of Chronicles and Judges alone, you’ve got dozens of stories that are only a handful of verses long, but that are dramatically compelling. 

One of the books in the Bible most ripe for a film production, and most inspirational to me at this time in my life is the Book of Esther. Now, if you’re not a religious person, the book of Esther doesn’t contain any miracles, unless you think people doing the right thing is a miracle, which it often feels like it is. God does not appear as a character. It’s a totally human story. 

If you don’t know it, I suggest you go read it. It might give you a different perspective on the Bible if you think its all theological. But I’ll summarize it briefly. 

During the Jewish captivity in Babylon, the king, Ahasuerus decides to get rid of his queen, Vashti, because she refuses to present herself at court when he calls for her. So he sets about the task of selecting a new queen who will be more obedient. 

Esther is a beautiful Jewish orphan girl being cared for by her older cousin Mordecai, who wins this contest to be the new queen. Shortly thereafter, Mordecai raises the ire of Haman, one of the king’s henchmen, by refusing to bow to him. Haman then lobbies with the king for the right to murder all the Jews in Babylon. 

The king approves this, and sends out orders, not knowing that his new queen is Jewish because her guardian instructed her not to tell.  When Mordecai learns of this early Holocaust plot, he sends word to Esther to appeal to the king. She is initially reluctant to do this, because it is against the law to approach the king uninvited, under penalty of death, and the point had earlier been made that this king was a stickler for law and order.  If he had deposed his former queen over such a small transgression, why would he hesitate to execute the new one?

Mordecai appeals to Esther that in the end, her position in the royal palace will not protect her. She sends him back the message that appears in Esther 4:16:

“Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise, and so I will go in unto the king though it is not according to the law. And if I perish, I perish.”

When Esther does go in to the king, he receives her, and after some plot machinations, the plot to murder the Jews is foiled and the day is saved.  Haman is hung on the same gallows he had built for Mordecai. The Jews live to fight another day. When you see the Jewish holiday Purim pop up on the calendar, this is what it commemorates. The story has a very typical end for Jewish people. The final result is that Esther and Mordecai’s lives are saved...and the king gives them a whole lot more work to do than they had before. 

I love this story for many reasons. It shows that the courage, dignity and resourcefulness of Jewish girls is not a new phenomenon. That’s been true maybe not forever, but for a mighty long time. It also demonstrates that Jewish culture has long had a higher level of respect for women than other cultures, and I believe this is one of the foundations of Jewish prosperity, that they’ve always had more of a gender partnership than a gender war. The story of Esther is also a great love story—long before Cinderella, an orphan girl who becomes a queen. 

I don’t know if this story has been filmed or not, but I know it hasn’t been given the treatment it deserves. I’m sure Natalie Portman would have loved to do this like 25 years ago. Maybe I could get Gal Gadot interested in it if she’s not busy running around in her silly latex suit. If not, there’s no need to worry: there will always be another smoking hot talented young Jewish actress as long as we don’t let the Nazis take over. 

The Book of Esther impacts me profoundly right now because recently I’ve been recognizing the fact that I feel that Jewish girls are the social group I relate to most closely, and I imagine I feel right now a lot like Esther was feeling in those days when she was trying to decide what to do. Christians like to put “John 3:16” everywhere. I’m going to have a t-shirt made that says “Esther 4:16”, because that one verse to me encapsulates so much of what is beautiful about Jewish culture and Jewish girls—the courage to stand up for what is right, no matter the risk it requires. 

A few months ago, there was an article in The Forward about a statement Natalie Portman made comparing immigrants hiding for ICE to Jews hiding from the Nazis. Natalie’s right, as usual. The reason we are in such a dangerous place as a nation is that everybody is looking around for Nazi Germany circa 1939 and you won’t find it. We aren’t that far gone yet. But if you start looking for pre-Nazi Germany circa 1925, you’ll find a lot of commonalities. 

One of the respects in which we have failed to learn the lessons of history with respect to World War II and the Nazis is that we don’t talk enough about the fact that the Nazis weren’t just bad for Jews, they were ultimately bad for everybody. Gentiles have this macabre fascination with the Holocaust because it is one of the most outlandish, perverse and sadistic things that any organized group of human beings has ever done. It may be number one on that list. 

But the Nazis attacked and murdered lots of groups of people besides Jews. The Nazis wanted to kill you if you were Polish, they wanted to kill you if you were Slavic, they wanted to kill you if you were Roma, they wanted to kill you if you were gay. There is a great book about that called The Pink Triangle. Little known historical fact: the Nazis made gays wear pink triangles just like they made Jews wear the yellow Star of David. 

The Nazis had the Jews first on their hit list, but their ultimate goal was to exterminate all but a very narrow slice of humanity. Ironically, many of today’s neo-Nazis would have been on the hit list too. 

So we make a mistake in looking for antisemitism as a marker for fascism when antisemitism is not a core requirement for fascism. Most people don’t know: fascism didn’t arise in Germany. It emerged from Spain and Italy primarily and it was an anti-labor movement disguised as populist. Mussolini actually coined the term fascism, and what he said was, “Fascism is corporatism”. So what kind of government do we have?

People would understand that America and the world are in a dangerous dance with fascism right now if they understood fascism as more than simply pathological antisemitism, but rather as a system of thought wherein the pathological antisemitism of early twentieth century Germany was able to thrive. In the end, fascists will target everyone who doesn’t conform to a narrow norm that they define. The relentless fight against fascist ideologies that the Jewish community has maintained is not just to stop it from happening to them again; its also to stop it from happening to us. 

There are a lot of elements required to stop fascism. It is a dangerous and powerful mind-virus. Fascism isn’t only about misdeeds by the government, or by those with corporate power. Fascism also requires a breakdown of the civility of public society which makes it easier for politicians and corporate leaders to run amok. It requires the creation of a total climate of fear—fear of militarized law enforcement, fear of “criminal” fellow citizens, fear of internal conspiracies, fear of foreign enemies. Sound familiar?

There are many parts of the battle to be fought. Right now, I am only fighting one. America now has dozens of federal agencies and thousands of state and local agencies that have police powers. Everyone seems to recognize that our court system is broken and the prison-industrial complex has become an albatross around our nation’s neck. But no one seems to have to power to do anything about it. 

More than one out of every hundred adults in America is currently incarcerated. But that doesn’t tell you nearly how bad things are. Most of the people who are incarcerated have profound behavioral problems that need to be dealt with in some way. 

But what is far more shocking is that about one third—that’s one in three—young Americans have been arrested. Nearly ten percent of Americans, and a shocking third of Black men, have felony records. A professor at Harvard (Natalie Portman’s alma mater!) wrote a book where he argued that we now have so many laws on the books that the average American commits three felonies per DAY without even realizing it. 

If you had cited any of those statistics to an American in the 1950s, they would have said, “That must be Communist Russia, or some dictatorship somewhere”. 

In the space of several decades, America has gone from being a country where citizens (White citizens at least) truly did enjoy a greater level of freedom than people in most other places, to being toward the bottom of that list. And like the proverbial frog in warming water, most Americans haven’t noticed and go on spouting “greatest country in the world, land of the free” propaganda, even though they have never traveled outside the United States. 

The police and the courts have become a part of our everyday lives to an extent that I think would shock even people in North Korea. Have a third of young North Koreans been arrested? I doubt it. I was in Sweden for a week and I saw one police car—and I was walking around the city for hours at NIGHT when I got off work. When I got back to America, it was shocking to notice how the police are EVERYWHERE!

I believe a lot of people missed the real importance of the James Comey fiasco. I’ve got no idea what James Comey thought he was doing. But the fact that the country was waiting with baited breath for the country’s ostensible top law enforcement official to swing the election one way or another tells a lot about where we are. It showed and proved that our political establishment cannot control our law enforcement establishment any longer. And what is that but a police state?

It is a simple fact: Our law enforcement infrastructure in this country is OUT OF CONTROL. When ordinary citizens can no longer trust the system, it leads to an increase in lawless behavior, which creates the appearance of a need for MORE law enforcement power. It divides citizens into two groups—those who think more law enforcement power is the answer, and those who are the victims of that law enforcement power. This is not happenstance—it is something that people in power with fascist leanings intentionally orchestrate. 

There must be people willing to stand up against government power. My fight is nowhere near the most important one going on. But I’m in a privileged position to take a stand for a great many reasons. But it doesn’t mean its easy. It’s incredibly hard, and I’m lonely and afraid nearly all the time. 

I am at this moment technically a fugitive. I was released from jail on January 19 and I was supposed to check in with parole by January 21. I didn’t do it. I was supposed to register as a sex offender by January 27. I didn’t do it. And incidentally, not registering is a “new crime” that can carry four years in prison (with a brand new three-year parole term after that). Now, failure to register can be charged as a misdemeanor, and often isn’t charged at all beyond the parole violation. But the court system already hit me with the maximum possible penalty once, when I had never been arrested before, so now I expect the worst when I’m in a position of legal vulnerability with no support. 

When you really examine the sex offender registration laws, essentially, the position of the state of California is that if you refuse to comply with parole and sex offender registration, every crime defined as a sex offense should effectively carry a life sentence. I believe that is absurd and appalling and I’m calling. I initially said “I’m calling their bluff”, but I don’t think they are bluffing. Left to their own devices, the cops and the courts would do that. But would Californians rather spend tax payer dollars to keep me locked up rather than let me go to another country?!?

I feel all the psychological pressures of being a fugitive, but I’m hardly hiding. If the police wanted to find me, it would be easy for them to do so. In fact, I spent the last week at one of only three addresses where I had previously registered. The police aren’t actively looking for me because they know I’m not a public danger. As long as I don’t make myself pop up on their radar, I’m the least of their worries. 

I believe that what the law enforcement infrastructure would most love for me to do is disappear, run. I know how. It would be easy. I know the methods people of means can use to cross borders and change identities with minimal risk of detection, even in this modern digital age. Finding me would be such an enormous amount of work and expense that no one would want to embark on the project, and even if I was found, I know how to make extradition such an enormous amount of work and expense that no one would carry it through. But I can’t run. That would spare them from ever having to admit that they did anything wrong. And I won’t let them off the hook on that. 

I dread going back to jail. Read my post “Underworld” and you’ll get a bit of a sense of how much I hate it, but that still doesn’t capture it.  I was going to go turn myself in on the day I was supposed to report, refuse to let them put the ankle monitor on me, refuse to comply with parole, and get arrested right then. But I was emotionally incapable of doing that, even though I thought it would have made a powerful point. I needed more time to clear my mind of the toxic torture of jail. 

I can’t remain in this place forever. I can’t afford to keep paying for hotels, but more than that, I can’t live with the stress of being a fugitive, even a light-weight one like I am.  Something has to happen, and fast. I sent an email to a lawyer who I thought might be willing to help me, and that I know has the power to help me, but I haven’t heard anything. 

But I keep hoping that something, anything, will save me from the choice of returning to jail, or returning to life as a registered sex offender on parole, which was even worse than jail. 

At times like these, the Bible is like a horror story because I think of Jesus praying to be spared in the garden of Gethsemane and there was no help for him, so there certainly won’t be any help for me. I just keep trying to listen for that small still voice, hoping that it will provide me with some option other than life as a fugitive, life as a social pariah or returning again to jail. I just want to win my fight for a good life, so that I can fight for the good life for others. 

I hope that somehow this moment in time will transition to my happy ending, as it did for Esther. I hope that this day will be my Purim, and I will be able to live again.  

Throughout these last seven years, I’ve had the feeling that there were powerful people watching over me, that they were allowing these things to happen to me to make an important point. But that feeling comes and goes, and in my moments of greatest doubt, like now, I tell myself it’s just my imagination, my way of coping with this horrible, shockingly unlikely way that things have come to be in my life. My fear lately is that I always feel like I’m on the cusp of a mental and emotional breaking point from which there is no return. I see homeless people shuffling along the streets, dirty and disheveled, talking to themselves, discarded by society, and I wonder if I’m seeing my own future. The horror of living through that thought seems almost as bad as the horror of living through that outcome would be. 

Right now, I need a savior, but not Jesus. I need a Jewish GIRL with a law degree and/or the resources to help me. I say a girl not only because of my general position on girls, but because only a woman can fight my battle the way I want to fight it: by making the point that what has happened to me is fundamentally an injustice perpetrated by the MALE world under the false pretenses of protecting women. 

When the sun comes up in the morning, I hope that it will somehow be the dawn of a new brighter era in my life. I hope I will be spared a return to being incarcerated. I hope these seven years of suspension of my rights as a citizen and as a human being will finally come to an end once and for all. 

But if there is no other way, I will submit myself again to the whim of corrupt authority, and back into prison I will go, and if I perish, I perish. 

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