Esther Prayed Before She Put On the Gold Gown

Rising From the Dust

Three days and three nights without food or water, sleeping on bare floor, wearing sackcloth, face in the dust. Esther had gone as low as a person can go, and now she rose.

She bathed. She dressed herself in a silk gown embroidered with gold from Ophir, worked through with diamonds and pearls brought from Africa. A gold crown on her head. Gold shoes on her feet. The transformation was total and deliberate. She was not moving from humility to vanity. She was moving from one kind of preparation to another. The sackcloth had been armor against presumption. The gold was armor for the throne room. A queen approaching an unapproachable king had to look like a queen, the way a soldier approaches a wall looking like a soldier.

Before she walked out, she prayed.

Who She Called On

She did not open with the formal divine titles of the Temple liturgy. She called on the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, then added the God of her father Benjamin. She was not invoking generic divine power. She was placing herself inside a specific lineage, staking a claim on a relationship that ran through generations of ancestors back to the original covenant. She had a right to ask. Not because she was righteous, but because the chain of which she was a link had been promised something.

And she said so plainly. It is not because I consider myself without blemish that I am making this request. She knew her compromises. She had lived in the palace for years, eaten at the king's table, performed the role she was assigned. She was not approaching God as a person of spotless record. She was approaching as someone who understood the stakes and had nothing else to put on the table.

What She Asked

She asked for speech. Make my words persuasive in the presence of this man. The king of Persia was not a reasonable person in the ordinary sense. He had destroyed Vashti for refusing a command. He had signed Haman's decree without reading it carefully. He was capable of anything in a moment of wounded pride, and Esther was about to walk into his presence uninvited, which was specifically the kind of thing that could get a person executed.

She asked to be turned into a lion before him and into a lamb in the eyes of all who saw her. Fierce enough to hold her ground. Soft enough not to trigger his fear. It is a precise request from a woman who had spent years studying exactly what this man responded to and what he did not.

Grace as a Technical Quality

The tradition around this prayer reaches into territory that Likutey Moharan, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov's early nineteenth-century teaching, would later develop explicitly: the quality of chen, grace, is not a personality trait. It is a force that can be summoned. Torah study generates it. Prayer directed correctly generates it. Esther, in the tradition's understanding, was not hoping to be charming. She was working to produce the specific quality that makes one person want to listen to another, that opens a closed face, that turns hostility into attention. She was asking God to generate chen in the king's response to her, which is a very different request from asking for safety or rescue.