Vashti: A Hero Or A Villain

Queen Vashti (in the Book of Esther) helps explain what it means to be a 'hero' and a 'villain'. As the story of Purim begins, King Ahasueros of Persia prepared a banquet. On the seventh day of the festivities, he summoned Queen Vashti so that the ministers and guests could admire her beauty. He commanded that she come wearing only the royal crown. Queen Vashti refused and was executed. This brought Esther to the palace where she was in position to save the Jewish people when the chief minister of Persia, Haman, plotted for their total annihilation.

Vashti, whose refusal to obey the king set the action in motion, played an interesting role in this drama. At first she seemed like a heroine -- a woman who had too much dignity to be paraded naked before a drunken croud. But heroism is not determined from the outside in, but rather from the inside out. From that perspective, Vashti, as we shall see, was a villain.

Scriptures define heroism as an act of overcoming an obstacle that stands in the way of a spiritual objective. Such obstacles are placed before all of us by God, but the level of sacrifice demanded to overcome each obstacle varies. In the case of one person, genuine heroism may go as far as sacrificing one's life for the sake of another. For another person, genuine heroism may mean sacrificing ego or pride. When assessing Vashti's heroism or villainy, the question is: What was she reaching towards and what stood in the way of her achieving that goal?

Who Was Vashti?

Vashti was born to Babylonian royalty. Her grandfather was Nebuchadnezzar, who had destroyed Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and driven the Jews into exile. Her father was Belshazzar, the last in a line of great Babylonian kings whose dramatic death is described in the Book of Daniel.

Belshazzar threw a party and commanded that revelers drink from the holy vessels of the Temple and then praise "the gods of gold and silver..." At that moment, a large unattached finger appeared and started to write on the wall: "God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end... Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians." That very night invading hoards of Persians and Medes attacked; Vashti was the only survivor. But the spirit of conquest that had doomed her father lived on intact within her.

We learn more about Vashti from the Talmud (in Megillah 12). It tells us that Vashti ordered that Jewish women be brought before her, then forced them to undress and coerced them into working for her on the Sabbath. The Talmud then asks why did she refuse to come before Ahasueros ~ not being known as a modest woman? The Talmud gives the answer - because tzaraat (a skin ailment resembling leprosy) erupted on her body.

Whether this is true or not, Jewish women must have presented a threat to Vashti because they were different. By observing Shabbat, they demonstrated that there is a Ruler who is beyond the reach of any monarch. By maintaining their basic modesty they proved that they defined themselves internally rather than superficially. It was for that reason that Vashti felt an almost compulsive desire to break them, and by doing so she sealed her own fate. Why did she refuse the king? The Rabbis tell us that she esteemed herself 'higher' than the king himself and put him down in front of his guests. There was no heroism here. There was only arrogance.

Purim is the holiday in which everything gets turned about; falsehood is shaken off and Truth is revealed to all. May we be worthy of using this day to discover the part of ourselves that is false and the part that is genuinely heroic.