The Queen I Now Know Better Than I Did Before

Over the weekend I finished Rabbi Fohrman's sefer "The Queen You Thought You Knew", and it is better than I could have imagined.  (For those of you who have the book, and will be writing an essay within the next couple of weeks, here is the list of questions to choose from.)  Without exaggeration, it is far and away the best thing I have ever read on the Megilla.  


For some background, the most disappointing shiur I've ever heard was about the Megilla.  It was my first year in Yeshiva in Israel, and the Mashgiach who was constantly teaching us interesting, original, insightful material about all parts of Tanach was giving a shiur about the Megilla.  He spent about an hour asking tons of great questions about how no one acts in rational ways and nothing make sense, and then (ala Esther at the dinner party) said that it was "to be continued", and that we needed to come back next week for the conclusion.  OK - back we come the following week for 45 minutes of more great questions, and then a climax of something like "and that's how we see that it was all from Hashem."  To be fair, it's possible that my memory is imperfect or that I wasn't that intellectually mature, and it wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be, but since then my impression of the Megilla has been of a sefer that is not tightly written, difficult to analyze because of the imprecision of both language and plot.  This book makes all of those assumptions look absurd.  Finally, an analysis of the Megila that makes it make sense - I cannot recommend it any more enthusiastically. I lent it to my neighbor who sent me an e-mail the next morning that said "Thanks for the recommendation (and loan) – it was phenomenal.  Besides offering a very compelling interpretation of the story, it was an inspiring reminder that there is still plenty of room for creative scholars to come up with new Torah thoughts."


Some points of interest:

• Rabbi Fohrman also had an article in the Forward on a different aspect of the Megilla not addressed in the sefer.
• One of his key points in unlocking the secrets of the Megilla is that Esther appealed to Achashveirosh because she wouldn't talk about her history and nationality.  This allowed him, and his kingdom to view her as a "Mother Persia" figure, an everywoman who the entire empire can relate to, as opposed to a someone attached to a particular ethnic or national past.  On that point, one night I heard a piece of a report on NPR about how almost all national news anchors had no accent and used no regional dialect (localism) in their broadcast, for this very reason.  It was bad for business for any viewer to think of the anchor as the other.
• The first part and majority of the book is a step by step analysis of the Megilla, but after that he gives a brilliant chiddush about the name of the holiday, drawing on a well-known but seemingly irrelevant portion of the Torah.  It is a crucial reminder that in order to be creative, you first need to know a lot.  The first step towrds creating your own ideas is accumulating a knowledge base of different texts to draw from which  allows you to recognize allusions and patterns.