Jewish holidays are unique. They are not only opportunities to recall past events – such as the exodus from Egypt on Passover, the giving of the Torah on Shavuot, or our victory over the Syrian-Greeks on Hanukkah – they also carry with them eternal messages that are as modern and meaningful as the day they occurred.
And so it is with Purim. Though its story is almost 2,000 years old, it contains several impactful insights into the crisis now being experienced by the Jewish world.
Hiddenness. The events of Purim would seem to occur in a rational, random manner: A virulent antisemite gains power and is determined to eradicate the minority Jewish presence in his land. Nothing, alas, all too uncommon about this. A clever Jewish girl wins a beauty contest and captivates the king; this, too, is not extraordinary – after all, are not all Jewish women both beautiful and brilliant?! Ultimately, assisted by a daughter in the palace, a hero emerges to save the day, and we survive another near catastrophe.
Yet could this all have happened by coincidence?
As the Book of Esther opens, we are a privileged community, favorites of the king. We are honored guests at a lavish royal banquet, where we enjoy the finest cuisine, made glatt kosher just for us. How could we so rapidly fall out of favor, such that the monarch would happily sign our death warrant? And of all the ladies in the kingdom, why would Esther be chosen? Why would Mordechai “just happen” to save the king’s life and be publicly paraded? And why would a gallows – built to hang Mordechai – be right at hand to accommodate the villainous Haman’s neck?
Clearly, the hand of God is pulling the strings, but in a decidedly concealed fashion. God’s name does not appear outright anywhere in this book, an anomaly in rabbinic literature. Although every aspect of the narrative is painstakingly orchestrated from above, God is conspicuously absent, hiding behind His own Purim “mask.” The megillah is named for Esther – which means “hidden” – while the holiday itself is called Purim, which means “lots” or “random tickets of chance.” The truth is right in front of us, but either it is shrouded in clouds of mystery, or we have misplaced our eyeglasses.
The horrendous events of Oct. 7 are now in the public record, yet the facts, though firmly established, are other-worldly. How is it possible that our state-of-the-art technology, our early-warning systems, our billion-dollar defense mechanisms, broke down all at once? How did we ignore the many danger signs that the lookout teams warned about weeks and months before? Why did it take interminably long to react to the crisis as the enemy simply walked across the “impenetrable” border and massacred civilian and soldier alike?
Yes, there may be rational explanations for every piece of the puzzle, but the combined event boggles the mind. Could it just be a confluence of bad planning, bad tactics, bad luck? Or is it what my wife, Susie, calls a “negative miracle”; that is, a divine happening that facilitated evil rather than foiling it. And is it, ironically, just one more bit of evidence that the Jews are a miraculous people and Israel a land of miracles?
Flight or fight? The Purim story is exceptional in that it represents the first – and perhaps the only – time in history that the Jewish community was allowed to establish an independent army within a foreign diaspora.
While Ahasuerus refused to cancel the now-executed Haman’s genocidal decree, he amazingly permitted us to take up arms and defend ourselves. We had the opportunity to flee, but we chose to band together and fight. We killed more than 75,000 of our would-be murderers, and may have amazed ourselves as much as the local inhabitants in the process.
The megillah records that when word got out that there was to be a pogrom, ha’ir Shushan navocha, the capital Shushan’s Jewish inhabitants were bewildered, at a complete loss as to what to do. But when our forces triumphed in battle, ha’ir Shushan tzahala v’sameha, the city rejoiced. The play on words sings out to us: Without the will and ability to fight for our freedom, we were nebuchs, nobodies. But when we assembled an army and fought back, tzahala – as in Zahal (IDF)! – we prevailed and celebrated.
Purim – striking as it is (no pun intended) – is just one more example of how, in times of need, even the most religious among us must stand up and fight. Abraham went to war to save his nephew Lot; Jacob’s sons avenged the rape of their sister by decimating Shechem; Joshua and King David were brilliant generals in the field; Joab, head of the Sanhedrin, was David’s chief of staff; Samuel the Prophet took out his sword to kill Agag, the Amalekite ancestor of Haman. The list goes on and on of the most pious of Jews putting aside their Talmuds and joining – if not leading – the war effort.
United we stand. The megillah opens on a sad note, depicting a Jewish community severely divided. Many had chosen to identify with Persian culture rather than our own, and Mordechai’s fervent plea to disassociate with Ahasuerus fell on deaf ears.
It would take a major crisis – as, sadly, happens all too often – to convince us that our strength lies within, and not without. As the Talmud says so succinctly, Ahasuerus’s handing of his signet ring to Haman – thus validating his plot to wipe us out – engendered more prayer and penitence than the pleading of all of history’s prophets combined.
Wisely, Esther told Mordechai that she would not petition the king for our deliverance unless and until all of her co-religionists joined in the effort. And so, we fasted and we prayed for three full days, a magnificent show of unity by the very same men, women, and children whom Haman sought to murder. Buoyed by their backing, Esther risked her own life to save us. This communal effort of Psalms, study, and soldiering – “Guns and Moses,” I call it – was the key to our victory.
We all know how divided we were on Oct. 7, and we have made the cause of unity our national imperative. But have we really learned the lesson? Have we created common ground and bridged the differences between us? Or have we just traded the dispute over judicial reform for the dispute over hostages vs continued warfare, and now over replacing the government mid-tenure, or not? Each side, dug in, may have plenty of justification to make its case, but do we see the bigger picture?
The “last word” in the Purim story, of course, is “hope.”
God emerged from “behind the curtain” and turned His benevolent gaze in our direction once more. We proudly banded together, and so a looming holocaust became instead a day of “light and joy,” a stunning reversal – mahapah – from fasting to feasting, from mourning to merriment, such that multitudes of non-Jews clamored to convert and become part of our culture. We turned things, in the words of the megillah, “on their head,” and what looked to be a disaster was transformed into a grand deliverance.
Here’s hoping that we can do it once again.
Dedicated to Capt. Daniel Perez, H”yd.
The writer is director of the Ra’anana Jewish Outreach Center and leads the annual Passover program at Ramot in the Golan. jocmtv@netvision.net.il