“Each time I read Esther, I increasingly realize how this fictional, imaginative text is capable of holding my own deconstruction better than almost anything else I’ve encountered. …
Can we go on without the (g)od and religion of our youth?”
For my last two posts, I’ve been diving into the fascinating book of Esther, the book that Jews read during their festival of Purim (which, for 2023, is taking place yesterday/today). And of all the things we could pick up from this short-yet-highly-sophisticated story, I debated the motifs of 1) identity conflict (what did it mean for diaspora Jews to live away from Jerusalem?) and the 2) power that fictional stories can have in sustaining that identity against empires.
For this third and final piece, I wanted to bring up what is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the book of Esther: a book that, though included in the biblical canon, makes no mention of the name of God. Yep – absolutely none. Zero.
God is absent, at least literarily speaking.
(Which could be one of the reasons that Esther was the only book from the Hebrew Bible with no fragments found among the Dead Sea scrolls. The absence of God’s name in the book might’ve resulted, for later communities, into a lack of credibility.)
And to say that this author left God out by accident is to try and fix something only because it makes us uncomfortable. But the discomfort is exactly what we must listen for in order to intelligently speculate what could be behind this extremely bold literary move – that is, to ascertain a Jewish identity (again, a diasporic one) that does not directly involve the God who inhabited the Judean temple.
Without a doubt, the author(s) of Esther is raising some difficult questions in this process of identity-reinvention, and one of them seems to go something like this:
“Can we go on without the God that used to define us?” Or perhaps, we might ask it like this,
“Can God’s presence be encountered outside the temple walls, and if so, what would it look like for us to cultivate this presence in ways that used to be forbidden?”
These are tough questions. And the thing is, many of us are asking something very similar right now, as we leave the Christianity from our youth in search of more robust, mature identities beyond the religion that used to define us.
Can God’s presence be found and cultivated away from the “gatekeepers”?
Each time I read Esther, I increasingly realize how this fictional, imaginative text is capable of holding my own deconstruction better than almost anything else I’ve encountered. When I made the difficult decision to walk away from institutional religion – after having been ordained within that institution! – I constantly wondered whether I had left behind pieces of me that I could never regain, whether I’d ever be whole again.
Well, it turns out I was never really “whole” in the first place; I was always fragmented, split into several pieces that could find no home within the constraints of church politics. And over the years, my identity as a Christian has been regenerated in ways that I could not have anticipated but that, if compared to what I left behind, resemble my true self a lot more closely. I wasn’t sure that I could live without the (g)od of my comfortable religion.
But I have and I can. And I will.
And like the writer of Esther, I have no need to name the God I’ve found while here, in the margins of Christianity. Because perhaps this God has no name after all.