Mordecai Rode Through Susa Singing Psalm 30

Three days earlier, they had been wearing sackcloth. The decree was still active, the gallows still standing in Haman's courtyard, the death date still approaching like a fixed point on the calendar. Now Mordecai was on a royal horse in royal robes, and the city of Susa was watching.

He could have kept silent. A man who has just been pulled back from the edge of execution, who has just watched his enemy publicly humiliated, who has just seen the machinery of power tilt in his direction -- that man could be forgiven for riding in stunned silence. But Mordecai did not ride in silence. He burst into song.

Which Psalm He Chose and Why

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, drawing on the rich tradition of rabbinic Purim commentary, records that Mordecai sang Psalm 30. Not a new composition written for the occasion. The psalm of King David, the ancestor whose cry Esther herself had borrowed days earlier when she froze in the fourth chamber. "I will extol You, O Lord, for You have raised me up, and have not made my foes to rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to You, and You have healed me. O Lord, You have brought up my soul from Sheol (שְׁאוֹל), the realm of the dead; You have kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit."

The choice was not arbitrary. Psalm 30 is a psalm about the experience of being lowered toward death and lifted back out. David wrote it from inside exactly the kind of reversal Mordecai had just lived through. The psalm was there waiting for this moment, the way Psalm 22 had been waiting for Esther in the corridor.

The Students Who Joined In

His students caught the spirit before he finished the first verse. They had been studying Torah with him in the courtyard when Haman arrived to lead him on the royal procession -- the Talmud Bavli's tractate Megillah (6th century CE) records that Mordecai had been teaching about the laws of kemitzah, the handful of flour used in Temple offerings, when everything changed. They had watched their teacher be clothed in royal robes and paraded through the city. Now they added their voices to his, picking up the next verses of the psalm: "Sing praise to the Lord, O you saints of His, and give thanks to His holy name. For His anger is but for a moment; in His favor is life. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning."

The Midrash Rabbah, compiled in 5th-century CE Palestine, understood this communal singing as a theological statement. The Jewish people of Susa had wept as a community when the decree went out. They sang as a community when the reversal came. The tradition insists that both the grief and the gratitude belong to everyone together -- not to individuals processing their own survival, but to a people experiencing their collective history as a single ongoing thing.

The Voice No One Expected

Then Haman added his verse.

It is the most unexpected detail in the entire retelling, and Ginzberg preserves it without comment, which is itself a kind of comment. The man who had built the gallows, who had paid ten thousand talents of silver for the right to exterminate an entire people, who had spent years of his life meticulously constructing Mordecai's destruction -- this man, in the middle of Mordecai's victory procession, added his own verse to the psalm. His choice was verse seven: "As for me, I said in my prosperity, I shall never be moved. You, Lord, of Your favor had made my mountain to stand strong. You hid Your face; I was troubled."

It is a verse about the illusion of permanent security. A man who believed his power was unshakeable, and discovered it was not. Haman singing it in Mordecai's procession was Haman, in his last coherent moment before the final reckoning, telling the truth about himself.

Esther's Verse and the Crowd's Answer

From somewhere in the city -- the tradition does not specify where she was when Mordecai rode through -- Queen Esther added her verse. It was the desperate heart of the psalm, the verses she had been living inside for days: "I cried to You, O Lord; and to the Lord I made supplication. What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise You? Shall it declare Your truth?"

The crowd answered with the ending. All of them together, the whole community of Jews in Susa, found their voices: "You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness, to the end that my glory may sing praise to You and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever."

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the 8th-century CE midrashic text, notes that the psalms were given to Israel precisely for moments like this one -- not as liturgy to be recited at fixed times, but as a grammar for the extremes of human experience, available when regular language fails. The city that had been weeping found the words already written. The words had been waiting there since David, who had his own long night before his own morning.

What Happens When Mourning Turns Into Song?

The Zohar (c. 1280 CE), written in Castile, Spain, teaches that joy and grief share the same depth. A shallow grief turns into a shallow joy. But the kind of grief that went down to Sheol and came back -- the grief of three days without food, of sackcloth, of a whole people weeping on Passover night -- when that grief turns, it turns into something that fills the same enormous space. Mordecai's song in the streets of Susa had that quality.

Every voice in the city joined in. Even the one that had no right to. Even the one that had caused all of this. The psalm was large enough for all of them, which is perhaps what psalms are for.