Post date: Mar 10, 2019 5:31:42 AM
Chur karpas us’cheiles achuz b’chavlei vootz v’argaman
There were hangings of white, fine cotton, and blue wool, held with cords of fine linen and purple wool
(1:6)
When Mordechai and Esther wrote the Megilah, they described the lavishness of Achashveirosh’s party in great detail. What was the purpose of spending so much effort at describing the opulence of the palace and the décor at the party? Couldn’t they have sufficed to simply write that the party was very fancy?
To understand this, we’ll first examine a cryptic phrase in the beginning of Devarim (1:1) where the Pasuk ends with the words “V’di zahav.” In the Gemara (Berachos 32), R’ Yanai tells us that Moshe said to Hashem, “Master of the Universe, the silver and gold (Zahav) that You gave so generously to Bnei Yisroel to the point that they said, ‘Enough!’ (Di) is what caused them to sin with the golden calf.”
So by describing the lavishness of the banquet in such tremendous detail, Mordechai and Esther were drawing a parallel to what the Gemara brought out from the Pasuk in Devarim. They are showing us that Achashveirosh’s intention with planning such an esthetically pleasing atmosphere was to not only make the attendees of the party comfortable, but it was primarily to cause the Jews to sin. So what Mordechai and Esther were relating, was that Achashveirosh should be punished for the sin of the Jews attending a most inappropriate party because that was his intention from the very beginning.
[The King's Treasures, p. 21]