I thought I understood Purim. Not the typical version—carnival celebration of good over evil—but a more sophisticated and nuanced one that recognizes the story’s actual turning point: not Esther’s bravery but Vashti’s refusal. Before any intrigue, before any hidden identity, before any saving of the Jews, the Persian empire faces a smaller crisis…a woman walking away. This analysis goes back at least hundreds of years; in 1878 Harriet Beacher Stowe wrote about Vashti as a symbol of resistance against patriarchy.
But this year, with the release of the Epstein files, Vashti’s relevance is more potent than ever. And I believe it has the potential to lead us toward a new kind of power.
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I have written and spoken for years about sexual violence as one of the primary mechanisms through which patriarchy maintains itself. It is not an aberration, not a collection of isolated monsters, but a feature of a global order. Violence against women and children is thus not collateral damage, but enforcement. It disciplines bodies and speech, narrowing the imagination of what is possible.
I had conceptualized, analyzed, and synthesized all these ideas.
Then, the week the Epstein files were released, confirming undeniable widespread sexual abuse and degradation at the hands of a cabal of powerful men and women who serve them, my brain stopped cooperating. Metaphorically and neurologically. My amygdala swelled. I could feel the shutdown happening in real time, like some internal circuit breaker had flipped. My phone kept lighting up. The radio kept talking. My algorithm on every platform filled with stories about sexual violence. Everywhere. Commentary. Public radio segments about mass rape used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Billboards about sexual assaults in Ubers. Articles about Gisèle Pelicot and the unfathomable betrayal she endured. Protests over femicide. Institutional cover-ups. The same pattern repeating in different accents across the globe.
Though none of the information was new to me, though I know how abuses hide in plain site and how often men are protected, suddenly, it felt like everyone could see it. This was what I had been trying to name for years: the true prevalence of sexual violence in the maintenance of global patriarchy.
But instead of feeling galvanized, I felt despair. Alongside the recognition came the familiar patterns: confusion, denial, spectacle, conspiracy, the quiet protection of powerful men. Names hidden. Victims exposed. Endless commentary circling the reality without ever quite touching it. The saturation became impossible to metabolize. Stories bled into one another until the scale of harm felt atmospheric.
At a certain point, my nervous system shut down. I could not fix what had happened to anyone. I could not fix what had happened to me. And the years I had spent trying to understand and explain all of it suddenly felt less like power and more like exposure. Like standing in the middle of a storm with no shelter.
I did something that felt almost impossible. I unplugged. I deleted the social media apps from my phone. I stopped tracking the news cycle I had been obsessively following. I withdrew from conversations I desperately wanted to keep having. For several days I barely left my bed, waiting for my body to settle. I wanted to bear witness. But to what end?
Only later did I remember that there is a name for this kind of refusal. Her name is Vashti.
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Still, walking away did not answer the deeper question. I went to see my rabbi and told her I felt powerless in a world so saturated with male sexual violence. Powerless against something so ancient and so global. I cried as I asked: what can I actually do with this knowledge besides feel pain? She listened and then asked me a question that startled me: What could power feel like for you?
Not what does power look like in the empire. Not how do you win. What does it feel like in your body? She told me about leaving established institutions when they no longer aligned with her values, about building her own congregation from a place of spiritual calling and agency. She did not seize power; she created space. Instead of dominating, she gathered.
She told me about her mother, too, who experienced violence and chose not to replicate its logic. Instead, she built community for mothers and children in need. She became an educator and a champion of nonviolent parenting. She turned harm into protection. She created spaces where the most vulnerable were respected and centered instead of extracted from and abandoned.
That is another kind of power. Creating spaces led by matriarchal values, protecting the vulnerable instead of exploiting them, building community instead of hierarchy, may be where hope actually lives. Perhaps it has always been this way. In opposition to empires and decrees and spectacles of domination, there have always been architectures of care: kitchens, classrooms, congregations, shelters, circles. Spaces organized around care rather than conquest.
Maybe this is where Vashti got to go. Beyond Esther’s efforts to navigate and negotiate. She left the paradigm entirely. She didn’t persuade the empire to behave better or endlessly react to its violence. She built outside its logic, creating empowerment instead of power over.
These are the only spaces I want to inhabit now. The ones that have stepped out of domination. The ones that do not require someone else’s diminishment to function. The ones that protect children and believe women and refuse to treat harm as inevitable.
The decree only works if people believe it. The empire only survives if we keep reenacting it. Perhaps the deepest threat to patriarchy is not exposure alone or even refusal but steady construction of something else. What terrifies authority is not only rebellion but the realization that the rules were never inevitable to begin with.
In a moment when resistance to patriarchal rule is rising globally, from protests to declining birth rates to movements like 4B, I find myself returning to the quiet space Vashti opens. How do we cultivate safety and possibility in our personal lives while maintaining a clear-eyed view of systemic harm? How do we refuse participation in systems that socialize men into entitlement and sexual access, without surrendering to despair?
I hope we get to find out. Until then, more of us will continue to refuse, and in that space of refusal, we will build something ancient and new.
Image credit:The Wrath of Ahasuerus, manner of Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, 1640 – 1724. http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/SK-A-3489
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