When Silence Is Evil

'If you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will come from elsewhere, but you will perish. . . .'

On Thursday evening begins the Jewish holiday of Purim which is detailed in the Bible’s Scroll of Esther.

The famous challenge to Queen Esther from her relative Mordechai was this:

“. . . if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Yehudim from another quarter, while you and your father's house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis.” —Esther 4:14 (The Israel Bible)

Esther’s resolve to help her people was firm: “If I perish, I perish.”

That was roughly 2,500 years ago when the Jews were threatened with annihilation while exiled among the Persians.

Today Persia (Iran) is once again the mortal enemy of the Jewish people.

The Jewish people are again dangerously threatened.

Christians in my generation are often asked— during the Nazi Holocaust would you have remained silent, or would be have been part of the Resistance? Would you have defended the Jews?

The Bible has a lot to say about “if you keep silent. . . .”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident said it best,

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Haman, a high-ranking official in the court of the Persian King Ahasuerus, plotted to kill all the Jews.

As a hidden Jewess, Esther realized she was divinely favored in her regal position to intercede on behalf of her people.

However, according to the custom of the day, to presume to go uninvited into the king’s presence would possibly have invoked a death sentence.
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But she could not remain silent.

Esther fasted and prayed for three days and then approached the king.

The king extended to Esther his golden sceptre, and through her wisdom and strategy she saved the day. She identified the wicked Haman as the perpetrator of evil against her people. The dire situation was reversed.

Esther therefore is the heroine of the Purim holiday.

According to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a towering figure in Jewish thought, the Megilla, the scroll recounting this saga, is not called “Megillat Mordechai” after the sage who guided Esther, nor ‘Megillat HaYehudim” after the Jewish people who were saved. It is called “Megillat Esther,” the scroll of Esther, because of her courage.

Esther holds a timely message for believers today: both the Saturday people and the Sunday people are being persecuted. There comes a moment when each of us must decide whether we will stand up and take action on behalf of God’s people or remain passive spectators to history.

Every enemy of Israel: Haman, Hitler, Hamas, Hezbollah will be vanquished.

As Isaiah 62: 1 proclaims,

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,

and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep still,

until her righteousness shines like a bright light,

her salvation like a blazing torch.

To contact Christine Darg, visit www.JerusalemChannel.tv

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