In many countries around the world it is required by law to put warning labels on products, activities or places that can cause injury or death. Thus the labels of many medications and foods or items, such as cigarettes and alcoholic beverages, contain strong warnings on them saying that they are harmful. Likewise beaches that are unsafe to swim in due to a strong current, lack of a lifeguard, or high bacterial count also have signs posted cautioning people not to go swimming. Hospital rooms that contain radioactive products have signs warning about entering.
In a similar vein, it thus behooves governments, religious leaders, heads of universities, unions and professional associations etc. to warn its citizens, students and members that hating Jews can be harmful to their health; that they are also jeopardizing the wellbeing of future generations; and that they should think long and hard before indulging in behavior that can be seriously detrimental to them.
To that end, every man, women and child should be required to read Megillat Esther, the Book of Esther at least once a year – or whenever the urge to harm Jews starts to obsess them – which for some may be a daily occurrence.
I invite those who are skeptical about that statement to take some time out and leaf through the Megillah in whatever language they best understand, be it English, Arabic, Farsi, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, etc. I’d list them all – but I would run out of space.
They should in particular focus on Chapter 9. For in that chapter, it is mentioned five times that the sons of the rabid Jew-hating Haman were annihilated. Now it is known that the Holy Scriptures does not waste words, and that each word has a purpose. The question that begs to be asked then is why the Megillah repeats the fact that the 10 sons of Haman were killed. Having read it first in Verse 10, we know what happened to them, so why say it again and again in the ensuing verses?
Even more intriguing, after the King of Persia tells Esther that the 10 sons of Haman were slain (Verse 12) and tells her he will do whatever she requests, she tells him in the next verse (13) that she would like the Jews to do “tomorrow what they did that day [wipe out their enemies] and specifies hanging Haman’s 10 sons. But they were dead already! And yet, in Verse 14, we are told again that they were dead. Why is that fact repeated?
A clue is in Verse 25, which again mentions that the 10 sons were hanged but with the statement that the “wicked scheme that Haman had devised against the Jews, recoiled on his own head.”
And that explains it all.
Haman put all his energies into wiping out Mordechai and the Jews. I have no doubt that the reason he wanted to hang Mordechai – on a 50-cubit-high gallows yet – was because it must have been the way murderers or other despised people were killed, and then humiliated in death by being left swinging on a gallows.
Earlier, Haman had put in much thought when the king asked him how to honor someone that the king wanted honored. Thinking the king was talking about himself, he painted a rather pretty picture of the honoree being led through the streets of the capital dressed in the king’s royal robes astride a royal steed. No doubt he put in a similar amount of thought on how best to destroy Mordechai’s life and dignity. In the end he and his children – his future – suffered that degrading fate and were erased. As it says in Chapter 9 Verse 25, what he plotted on the Jews boomeranged onto him and his family. Despite his power, and wealth and high placement in the king’s court – his devious scheme backfired – and he, his family and those of his ilk, were the recipients of the evil he had planned on Mordechai and the Jewish people.
Those who are Jew-haters (anti-Semites is too politically correct and parve a term) might say that what happened to Haman was an isolated incident, that he was a victim of bad circumstances. After all, how often does a Jewish girl win a beauty pageant, marry the king, and be related to the guy the king’s favorite wants to kill?
They are so confident it won’t happen to them, that their evil won’t fall on them. But it will. And that is why they should read the Megillah, especially Chapter 9 and the verse where Esther, after being told by the king that Haman’s 10 sons were hanged, asked that they be hanged the next day. It’s a warning to future Jew haters and their ilk that their nefarious schemes will be foiled and they will be the ones decimated. The message is clear. Hating Jews is bad for your health.
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