This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

Most Americans know that the roots of our liberty are often traced to

enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, and Jefferson, or perhaps to the New Testament,

and the Christian ideas about morality that help shape Western civilization. Far fewer people

know about the Old Testament, the Jewish roots of American liberty, but they should. Here's Dr. Stuart Halpern,

who also happens to be a rabbi, co-author of the phenomenal book, Jewish Roots of American Liberty,

with the story of how a Persian queen changed America forever. This might be surprising,

but the character from the Bible,

who hung out in ancient Persia in the beginning of the 5th century, B.C.E.

Has been a constant source of wisdom in America.

But Queen Esther has been exactly that.

She worked no miracles and commanded no armies.

She was not Moses splitting the sea. She was not David in charge of an entire army, not

receiving tablets on top of a mountain. Rather, Esther was, if I could dare to say,

just like you and me.

All of us find ourselves in those moments in our lives, where we are forced to make a choice.

Do we choose to do what's right, or do we choose to do what is comfortable, what is easy?

King Xerxes, you might recognize him as the bad guy in the movie 300,

was looking for a replacement wife after his earlier wife separated from her head.

So this new queen was selected through the process of involuntary beauty contest of young women being ripped from their homes and forced to spend a night with the tyrannical monarch.

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