Tisha b’Av, which falls this Sunday, is a day of national mourning that marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples, while Purim celebrates the salvation of the Jews of Persia as described in the book of Esther. Yet Laura Lieber points to a link between them: two ancient poems that, while written in the style of Tisha b’Av dirges (kinot), are attributed to Queen Esther:
It is difficult to imagine two holidays with more disparate moods: the giddy joy of Purim juxtaposed with the bleak solemnity of Tisha b’Av. There are, however, points of connection. . . . [W]hile the book of Esther does not name God, it does refer to the exile and the loss of Jerusalem, particularly when introducing Mordechai. . . . [There is even a] custom of chanting those verses that recall the exile of the Judeans from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar to the melody of Lamentations, which is read on the Tisha b’Av. . . .
A potent affinity between the book of Esther and Tisha b’Av can be found in the composition of kinot placed, as it were, in the mouth of Esther. These works expand upon the moment in the biblical story when the Jewish queen embarks on a fast and calls upon fellow Jews to engage in penitential rituals with her, as she is to risk her life by visiting the king uninvited. Her community, already vulnerable in exile, faces another existential threat.
Esther’s laments . . . lack any of the carnivalesque irony or frisson of the subversive humor that we expect in Purim poetry. Instead, Esther’s two laments sound authentically penitent. The rhetoric and aesthetics of Tisha b’Av kinot provide the author of these “literary” Purim poems . . . with a set of norms to which Esther’s prayers should conform.
Read more on TheTorah.com: http://thetorah.com/tisha-bav-with-queen-esther/