One of the great mysteries to me is how evil men end up with wives and children.

I’m not talking, of course, about a random rival here or there tha someone doesn’t care for, or even the average mean fellow. That can happen. No, I mean that it’s a mystery to me how a person can be a really, really evil guy, and still find some woman who sees enough good in him to marry him and bear his children.

Haman, for example, had 10 sons and who knows how many daughters. Pontius Pilate had a wife and children. So, apparently, did Attila the Hun. Even Adolph Hitler could have been married if he’d wanted to be; Eva Braun waited until nearly the end of their lives before getting her wish and becoming Mrs. Hitler.

What is up with that? Was it too much alcohol in their daily routine? The lack of comfortable adjustable beds? Or maybe just a screw loose? And where were they when their husbands started doing all this evil crap? Clearly, being nagged back from the edge might have saved some lives.

It’s hard to say. But it’s clear that in matters of the heart, not only is love sometimes blind, it’s deaf, mute and outright stupid, to boot.

There was never, in Biblical times, a need for anything as specialized as a truck accident lawyer, but there were a few “train wrecks” in the annuls of Bible history. One such example is the rise of Haman; if King Saul of Israel had listened to Adonai and obeyed with without question, Haman never would have been born.

You see, G-d ordered King Saul to wipe out the Amalakites completely, leaving no one alive. Shocked at the thought of such genocide, King Saul substituted G-d’s command for his own sense of mercy, sparing many lives that G-d told him to end.

One such spared like was that of King Agag, who went on to have his wife conceive and bear children; several generations from that family tree, Haman arose, carrying a generational hatred of the Jewish people with him, and rose with the threat of wiping out the Jewish people in their entirity, in the closing days of the Babylonian captivity.

Haman was Hitler long before Hitler was Hitler; both desired greatly to wipe out the chosen people of the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and both had shocking success before they were stopped at last. While King Saul believed he was showing greater mercy than Adonai, the merciful G-d, himself, Saul’s mercy was grossly misplaced; in the wisdom of Adonai, He was trying to prevent a great enemy of Israel from arising.

If only Saul had obeyed, there might never have been an occasion for the story of Esther, or the feast of Purim.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Purim lately. My synagogue is holding a Purim play and celebration this week and it’s been a huge production. It’s turned out to be a huge success, with the first two shows becoming sellouts. Thursday’s looks promising to do the same.

The woman who was cast as Queen Vashti was joking around recently, pretending to be self-absorbed, and said, “Ha! This play should be all about Vashti. The tragedy of Queen Vashti!”

Even thought she probably thought her comment had as much relevancy to the story of Purim as online auto insurance, when I was researching the festival while preparing a bar/bat mitzvah lesson, I found out she was closer to the truth, perhaps, than she realized.

You see, Queen Vashti is often portrayed as self-centered and heedless of her husband, the king, because she’d rather hang with the gals than be shown off to the men for her beauty. But the truth, suggested by the Jewish sages, may go deeper.

Vashti was not only the wife of a king, she was also the daughter of one, and therefore quite versed in the art of statecraft. Her husband’s position on the throne of Shushan was not stable, and many of the men who might potentially try to topple him were at the king’s feast.

Many of the women Vashti was hosting - at a separate location - were the wives of the men the King Achashverosh was hosting. The line of thought goes that Vashti and Achashverosh had planned this event just so; by her having control of the wives of the guests in a separate locations, any attempt to overthrow Achashverosh would result in Vashti holding those wives as hostages against the usurpers.

Remember, the king was drunk when he ordered his wife to appear before him. Perhaps he’d forgotten their strategy; but not Vashti. It is entirely possible she chose to stay with the women to protect her husband’s throne from his guests, as well as from his own foolishness.

Of course, her wisdom was not well-rewarded; she was demoted as queen and eventually the Jewish girl, Ester, takes her place. Vashti had to be made an example of because of appearances; she had openly defied her husband’s wishes, even if by doing so she’d saved both his life and his throne. By then, the only alternative would have been for the King to admit to his guests the hostage plan he’d hatched with Vashti. And that simply would not happen.

Vashti may have been a minor hero in the story of Esther after all!

There are a lot of things I don’t understand.

The one that has me thinking a lot lately is why some people attend one house of worship, when all they do is spend time talking about the teachings of everyone but the place where they are a member. Now, I’m not suggesting one should never question the teaching of their pastor or rabbi. Quite the contrary; that’s fine.

What I’m talknig about is being part of a community of faith that holds a certain set of values, but then spending time at that church or temple talking about a teacher or set of teachings that simply does not line up with anything that community stands for. I’ve seen it in nearly every church or temple I’ve attended.

I’ve run into people who do nothing but talk about miraculous healing in conservative churches that don’t believe G-d heals peopel today, as well as seeing the reverse of that dynamic. I’ve run into people who enter churches that are open to many types of Bible translations, trying to convince people there that the King James Version is the only “reliable” word of G-d, as well as the opposite of that dynamic also.

I can understand having disagreements; what I can’t understand is swimming completely against the tide like that. Wouldn’t it be a better experience to seek out a congregation of the like-minded? Seems like that would be as simple as installing tail light guards, rather than having your first mechanical challenge be to rebuild an entire engine.