Mordecai Hears in Two Tongues, Schoolchildren Answer Haman

The Book of Esther says that Mordecai learned of the conspiracy of Bigthan and Teresh, two royal chamberlains who plotted to kill Ahasuerus. It does not explain how he learned of it. The rabbis, who distrusted gaps in sacred narrative, filled this one with a detail that changes the texture of everything that follows.

Mordecai knew seventy languages. He sat on the Great Sanhedrin. His qualifications to overhear a conspiracy in an imperial palace were impeccable. But the midrashic tradition on the assassination plot says plainly that Mordecai had no need to make use of his great knowledge of languages. He obtained his information through prophetical channels. Prophecy came first. The languages were beside the point.

What the midrash describes next is a scene that reads like a carefully choreographed miracle. One night Mordecai appeared at the palace. The guards at the gates, by divine arrangement, did not see him. He entered unrestrained and overheard the conversation between the two conspirators himself. The information was real. The method of obtaining it was providential. God had arranged for the guards to look elsewhere at the right moment, for Mordecai to be present in a palace he should not have been able to enter, for the conspirators to speak where they could be heard.

Mordecai's motives for preventing the assassination were, the tradition notes, not purely loyal to the king. He wanted Ahasuerus alive partly to secure Jewish interests, particularly the king's permission for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. And he feared that if the king were murdered shortly after Mordecai's own rise in the state, the court would use the timing as a pretext. The heathen would say that the connection with Jews, the marriage to Esther, the appointment of Mordecai, had brought disaster. He prevented the assassination not out of gratitude or devotion but out of a complex assessment of what the community needed from the survival of this particular king.

This is the man who then walked out of court after learning, from Haman and his allies, that the king had signed the decree for the destruction of the Jewish people. He had saved the king's life. The king's minister had now signed a death warrant for his people. The irony was not lost on the rabbis who told this story.

But the scene the tradition lingers on is not Mordecai's political calculation or his prophetic gift. It is what happened on his way from the court that same day. He met Jewish children coming home from school. He asked the first child what verse he had studied that day, and the child recited: "Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked when it cometh." He asked the second child, and received: "Let them take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught; let them speak the word, but it shall not stand; for God is with us." The third child offered: "And even to old age I am He, and even to hoar hairs I will carry you: I have made and will bear; yea, I will carry and will deliver."

The tradition records that Mordecai, on hearing these three verses from three children, laughed. This is a remarkable detail. He had just emerged from the court where he had been informed, with malicious joy by Haman's allies, of a decree designed to annihilate every Jew in the Persian empire. The situation was the worst any political leader could face. And he laughed, because three children had recited three verses that, taken together, constituted a complete theological statement: do not fear what the wicked plan, because their plans will fail, because God carries his people through old age and beyond.

The Ginzberg tradition is careful to note what the Jews of Shushan were experiencing while Mordecai was processing the decree. If a Jew ventured outdoors to buy something, he was nearly throttled by Persians who taunted him: "Never mind, tomorrow will soon be here, and then I shall kill thee and take thy money." Jews who tried to sell themselves into slavery to protect their lives were turned away. The Persians did not want Jewish slaves whose lives they would then be obligated to protect. They wanted Jewish corpses.

Against this backdrop, Mordecai's laughter after hearing the children was not denial or delusion. It was the response of a man who understood that the verses children memorize in school are not arbitrary. The midrashic tradition believed that the words of Torah spoken by children carry a weight that adult learning sometimes loses, because children speak what they have learned without the accretion of doubt and calculation that comes with age. Three children, on the worst day of Mordecai's political life, had accidentally delivered a prophetic message. He recognized it, and it held him.