Earlier this fall I heard from Rachel Held Evans, who describes herself as "just a small-town writer asking big questions about faith, doubt, culture, gender and the Church." She has a very well-read blog and she's spent the last few years studying what the Bible teaches about women as she's been working on her forthcoming book A Year of Biblical Womanhood. (I wonder whether I'll enjoy it more, or less, than I did A.J. Jacob's A Year of Living Biblically...)

Anyway, she recently launched a series of posts about Esther, beginning with Esther Actually: Princess, Whore...or Something More. (I also quite like her post Esther Actually: Purim, Persia, Patriarchy.) Most of her readers, she tells me, are evangelical Christians, and she wanted to counter some of the disturbing ideas about Esther she's seen promulgated in the evangelical world. She asked whether I would be willing to write a guest post, a few hundred words about what Esther means to me as a Jewish woman and as a rabbi.

I'm honored, and humbled, to be asked to provide what may be the only Jewish perspective her readers have ever encountered on this story. Anyway, my guest post is now live on her blog:

Like most Jewish kids, I grew up hearing the story of Esther in the court of King Achashverosh each year at Purim. But I didn't appreciate the subtle humor of the story, or the wonders of her character, until I was entering my thirties.

I don't think any Biblical figure can or should be read in only a single way. But I like to read Esther as the hero of her own story -- and also the hero of the story shared by the whole Jewish people. She's an orphan who rises to power in the court of the king. She knows how to live in an assimilated society -- she goes by the name Esther, which has resonances with the Hebrew word nistar, hidden -- and yet she also knows her own true nature...

Read the whole thing here! Esther Actually - Rabbi Rachel.

Thanks, Rachel, for opening your doors to another Rachel. And to anyone who finds your way here from Rachel Evans' blog, welcome; take a peek at the VR comments policy; feel free to browse the "greatest hits" posts in the sidebar (here are excerpts from my favorite ten posts from last year); and I hope you'll stick around.