Originally published in Washington Examiner

As the summer came to an end, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel stood before a room of Jewish Democrats and reached for the Book of Esther. Jews, she intoned, have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.” It is, she said, “perhaps up to us now to follow in Esther’s path and sacrifice the comfort, safety, and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”

For many decades, I have read the Book of Esther at least twice each year, following along on the holiday of Purim as it is read from a scroll in the original Hebrew. And to say that I do not recognize the story Nessel is telling would be an understatement. It seems far more likely that Nessel went to the Bible in desperation, as she sought to defend the unconscionable as somehow moral.

Esther, needless to say, did not sacrifice her people. On the contrary, the cause for which she risked her own life was their survival. When Mordechai first asked her to approach the king unsummoned, Esther hesitated, because unauthorized entry to the throne room was punishable by death. Mordechai’s admonishment to her is one of the most quoted lines in the entire book: “Who knows whether you have attained royal position for such a time as this?” Her obligation was to save her nation.

That is not a minor detail that Nessel got backward. It is the whole point of the story. Esther used what power she had, at personal risk, in open and unapologetic defense of her people. To invoke her name while asking American Jews to set aside “even our own survival” for someone else’s cause inverts the text entirely.

It also inverts the American ethos, which recognizes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable human rights, with life first among them. No person should be expected to sacrifice the safety of his or her community for some purportedly noble cause. Given Jewish history, to make such a demand of Jews is particularly vile. One could hardly find a better example of demonizing Jews for being Jews than to cast Jewish concern for our own survival as a failure of virtue. Nessel may be Jewish, but what she said was unquestionably antisemitic.

And if she wishes to “save the rest of humanity,” she should note how previous groups and governments have fared after they acted with hatred toward the Jewish community. No elected official should advocate for America to follow a millennia-long, unmitigated record of disappearance into the dustbin of history. When Esther saved the Jewish people, she also, for a time, saved the empire that had turned against them.

The great sage Hillel taught all humanity a better approach with three simple questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Note the order. Self-preservation comes first, not as selfishness but as the precondition for everything else a person or a people might contribute to the world. A community with no desire for survival has nothing left to give.

Nessel’s underlying message was stunning: in order to support her party, one must disregard Jewish survival. She claimed that permitting bigotry and hate were prerequisites in order to back her ideology. And while I would argue that, overall, this is certainly not the case, it is most emphatically true regarding several of its candidates, including in her home state. In that regard, at least, the citizens of Michigan would be advised to listen carefully.

Photo: Dana Nessel by Showtime, licensed under CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons