If I Perish

When Mordecai learned what had been done, he tore his clothes. He put on sackcloth and ashes and went out into the middle of the city, crying out with a loud and bitter cry. He came only as far as the king’s gate, for no one clothed in sackcloth was permitted to enter it.

Word of it spread. In every province where the king’s command and decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting, weeping, and wailing. Many lay in sackcloth and ashes. When Esther’s attendants and eunuchs came and told her about Mordecai, the queen was seized with anguish. She sent garments for Mordecai to put on in place of his sackcloth, but he would not accept them.

So Esther summoned Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs appointed to serve her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what was troubling him and why. Hathach went out to Mordecai in the city square in front of the king’s gate, and Mordecai told him everything that had happened to him. He told him the exact amount of money that Haman had promised to pay into the royal treasury for the destruction of the Jews.

Mordecai did not stop there. He gave Hathach a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their annihilation, so that he could show it to Esther, explain it to her, and command her to go to the king to plead for mercy and to appeal to him for her people.

Hathach returned and reported Mordecai’s words to Esther. Esther sent Hathach back to Mordecai with her answer.

“All the royal officials and the people of the king’s provinces know that one law applies to every man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned — that they be put to death. Only if the king extends the gold scepter may that person live. But I have not been summoned to appear before the king for the past thirty days.”

When Mordecai’s words came back to Esther, they did not release her.

“Do not imagine that because you are in the king’s palace you alone will escape the fate of all the Jews. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows if perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

The answer went out through Hathach, and it went in through the same messenger, and now it belonged to Esther. She had heard the decree read. She had held, by report, the shape of the money and the day and the death that Haman had purchased. She knew the law of the scepter. And she knew what Mordecai had placed before her: that her place inside the palace would not hide her, and that this moment — this one, with its thirty days of silence and its sealed edict — might be the reason she was where she was.

Esther gave Mordecai her reply.

“Go and assemble all the Jews who can be found in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my attendants will fast as you do. After that, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”

The words carried no bargain and asked for none. She did not send back a question or a delay. She set a fast — for the Jews of Susa, for her attendants, for herself — three days without food or drink, night and day, the whole city of the exiled joined to the queen in her own rooms. And at the end of it she would do the one thing the law forbade.

So Mordecai went and did everything Esther had commanded him. He left the square in front of the gate. He gathered the Jews who could be found. The sackcloth remained, but now it had a direction. The mourning that had filled the provinces narrowed to a single purpose fixed on a single door and a single hand that would rise or stay.