34 THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP
chosen for her obedience: The previous queen had been dethroned and
exiled because she refused to appear when the king commanded.
The ‘‘irony’’ is that this young woman was thrust into a royal posi-
tion so that she could risk it all to save her people. Haman, the king’s
evil prime minister, had hatched a plot to exterminate all the Jews, after
he had been insulted by the Jew Mordechai, Esther’s cousin. Morde-
chai’s crime? Holding fast to his purpose, he refused to bow down to
Haman and would bow down only to God.
Mordechai knew that there was only one person in the entire king-
dom who could save the Jews—his cousin, the newly appointed queen.
He also knew that she would have to have a strong sense of purpose to
accomplish her mission. After all, the previous queen had been exiled
for daring to assert herself in the smallest way. Esther could have taken
the easy way out by hiding her Jewish identity, letting her people be
destroyed but continuing to live royally herself.
Mordechai appealed to his young cousin’s larger sense of purpose and
destiny. His inspirational speech to her called her to a higher purpose,
much like Steve Jobs asking John Sculley if he wanted to be remem-
bered for sugar water or for revolutionizing the way people communi-
cate: ‘‘If you remain silent at this time... you and your father’s family
will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position
for such a time as this?’’ (Esther 4:14)
The young queen immediately responded to the challenge of pur-
pose. ‘‘I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. If I perish,
I perish.’’ (Esther 4:16) She alerted the king to Haman’s plot against her
people. The king, no doubt moved by the purposefulness and bravery
of his young wife (not to mention her beauty), hanged Haman on the
very gallows that Haman had intended for Mordechai. Esther had saved
the lives of thousands of people and the future of a great nation.
A modern example of someone who also saved the lives of thousands
of people, even when those people were in far-away lands and there
was (believe it or not) little or no chance to make a profit is Roy Va-
gelos, ex-chairman of Merck. Vagelos was not saving anyone he knew
personally when he decided to develop Mectizan, a drug to cure ‘‘river
blindness’’ (onchocerciasis), a disease peculiar to river regions of Africa,