Hadassah was a Victorious Secret model. She may not have wanted to be. She may not even have known that she was. Most Jewish girls considered showing themselves off as immodest. Becoming a model and having to walk the runway, especially for a foreign king, was the last thing on the mind of a devout, young Jewish girl. And yet here she was.
It all started a while back. The king had been manipulated into hiding away his First Wife. The chauvinists of the kingdom thought that their control over their wives would be compromised by the First Wife talking back to her husband. (And they may have been right.) So the former First Wife had been demoted and hidden away. Now the king wanted a new First Wife, and not one from his current harem. Every unmarried young woman in the country had been brought in to be trained as a model, even the Jewish girls. The king wanted a new First Wife, and the only qualifications seemed to be that she was a virgin, subservient, and pretty. And Hadassah seemed to be all three.
It is one thing to be a model. It is something quite more important to be a Victorious Secret model. Any pretty girl, and maybe a few not-so-pretty ones, can become a model. Only a select few get to be a Victorious Secret model. Those have to be chosen for a purpose by none other than the God of Heaven. He makes his selections, and even the individual may not know she has been selected. That was the way it was with Hadassah. She just knew she had been taken from her home, given residence in the palace, and was being taught how to be a proper model for the king. She had never heard of being a Victorious Secret model. In fact, nobody had. Perhaps she was the first; maybe not.
Be that as it may, Hadassah (now called Esther, possibly a reference to the Persian worship of the stars) not only became a good model; she became the new First Wife. That was part of the Secret. God wanted her in the good graces of the king because he knew an Amalekite was about to counsel the king against God’s chosen people. God needed somebody undercover in the palace to counter everything that He Who Shall Not Be Named would attempt. That undercover agent would be supermodel Hadassah. This was such a secret that even after the fact, God’s involvement is never specifically mentioned.
That was the secret, but where does the victorious part come in? It looked bad for the visiting team (the Jewish people). The home team was winning and it looked like they were unbeatable. The enemy had arranged, rather easily it seemed, that the Jewish people would be exterminated on a specific day. It was decreed with a decree that could not be undecreed. But if Ahasuerus, the king, could be so easily swayed by a flattering advisor (and such was his character), how much more easily would he be swayed by his new wife? She arranged that the king see the enemy for what he really was. Whether by accident or design, she even gets the enemy condemned to death. And then she reverses the irreversible with a superseding decree that allowed her people to take the offensive. The visiting team took such a lead that the home team could not recover. The Jewish people were victorious.
All because of Hadassah, a Victorious Secret model.
(Purim, the holiday celebrating these events, falls on March 8 in 2012.)