The strategy of no-strategy

The Purim story, in a nut shell, from Esther’s perspective: she has become queen. And then, for five years, nothing happens. What does the queen of Persia do, after all? Just come to the party when Achashveirosh says to come to the party. Keep your head on your shoulders and your wits about you. Decorate the palace Christmas trees. Maybe some kind of half-hearted and not-ironic campaign against bullying.

And then she gets desperate word from Mordecai that trouble is brewing. Haman is plotting to kill all of the Jewish people in the kingdom, and Esther will have to intercede on behalf of her people. She fasts for three days, and then invites the King, along with Haman, to a party. And then…. she invites them to another party. 

Esther’s thinking at this point is one of the great mysteries of the Purim tale. It turns out to be the precise turning point of the story: in between those two parties, Haman sees Mordecai, Mordecai refuses to bow to him, Haman is incensed, he consults with his wife and advisors, realizes he must have Mordecai killed NOW, builds a gallows (in the middle of the night!) and goes in the middle of that same night to tell the king about his new plans.

Meanwhile, the King Himself cannot sleep - some say he is bothered by the fact that Esther invited Haman, and he wonders if Esther and Haman are conspiring to kill him, and then he wonders if maybe there is some bad karma that would put him in danger, like maybe some unpaid debt, and he discovers that he never rewarded Mordecai for saving his life 6 years ago. In a rare moment of clarity, Achashveirosh connects his suspicions about Haman and his debt to Mordecai and devises a plan to take care of both: he will ask Haman how to reward a “man whom the king wants to honor,” offering a kind of Rorschach Test to see what’s on Haman’s mind. The rest, as they say, is history.

Looking back, we can see that Esther’s plan worked out perfectly: she invited the king and Haman to a party, and at that party invited them to another party, and in between the two parties, everything changed. But what was her strategy? What was she thinking? Why plan for two parties? 

Ibn Ezra (medieval commentator on things that need commentating) suggests that Esther waited to tell Achashveirosh that the threat to the Jewish people included her because she didn’t see any indication that anything had changed as a result of the three-day fast she had undertaken. And when she saw Mordecai paraded through the streets of Shushan the next day, she was encouraged. 

For Ibn Ezra, the plan was to get to Point A and then wait for an indication that it was safe to go to Point B. Her plan was to put herself in the situation she needed to be in and then to feel the textures of the moment, to trust herself that she would know what to do when she felt clarity, and then to move forward when she knew it was time to do so. Her plan was to be completely OK not acting if the time wasn’t right. She bought herself more time because the time wasn’t right. 

I suspect that there are a lot of moments in which we are expected to show up with our talking points in hand. Elevator speeches rehearsed, responses anticipated, counter-responses prepared. Lesson plans must be formulated. Agendas for the meeting sent out in advance. Clever questions are conceived in case the conversation wanes, calibrated to include the right level of intimacy and curiosity. We are supposed to know how the song goes and what the plan is. We should know our lines, and when we are supposed to say them.

Sometimes, however, we cannot know in advance what will be needed of us. We are venturing into something novel and uncharted. It is a genuinely unprecedented, definitionally unknowable  moment, and to know how to act within that moment requires total unobstructed presence and presence of mind, alert, open, empty.

At these special times, we realize that our plans and strategies are defenses against the demands of presence and spontaneity, that our frameworks and vocabularies and heuristics are as good at preventing beautiful moments as they are at facilitating them. That all the work we do beforehand betrays a lack of trust in ourselves, and in the moment, to open up at its own pace. That our analyses are attempts to fit the round peg of demanding moments into the square holes of our narrow perspectives. And we may well have built up our lives to protect ourselves from exposure to the unknown. 

We’re all invited to Esther’s parties this Purim - both of them. The invitation is to spend a few hours in Infinite Time, fully present - with Haman in the room, with Achashveirosh in the room, not panicking or lurching toward solutions, not pressuring ourselves or each other to do anything or say anything or change anything until we are ready, until we genuinely sense that the time is right.