A new understanding of the miracle of Purim
Purim is hard this year, because it's happening in real time.
Jews around the world will be celebrating Purim this Sunday (and Monday), one of the most joyous holidays in our calendar where we commemorate the thwarted genocide in ancient Persia.
The story, in its most simplified version, goes like this: Haman, an advisor to king Ahaseurus, is insulted by a Jewish man named Mordechai and decides that he wants to murder all the Jews in across the empire’s 127 provinces. The king okays this, because Jews are different and genocide isn’t considered evil in the ancient world. As luck would have it, Ahaseurus’s new wife Esther is secretly a Jew, and the niece/charge of Mordechai. He had advised her not to disclose her Jewish identity, because even then being an out and proud Jew wasn’t the best idea. But when he learns of Haman’s plot to have all the provinces wage war against the Jews, he tells Esther that maybe the reason she was randomly selected from all the women in the empire to be the king’s new bride is to save the Jewish people. Esther hatches a plan to invite the king and Haman to two dinner parties, and at the second one, she accuses Haman of wanting to kill her people and discloses her Jewishness. The king gets mad that his beautiful bride is in peril, so he hangs Haman. But the decree to rise against the Jews still stands. Esther and Mordechai ask the king to revoke the decree, but that’s not how things work in Persia. But he compromises! He allows them to send decrees out to the empire that say whatever Esther wants, and she writes that the Jews will be allowed to defend themselves against anyone who rises against them. The Jews were super happy with this, and feasted in celebration. Sure enough, an uprising came, and the Jews fought back, and won the battles.
It always bothered me that the decree couldn’t be overturned. Wouldn’t a better miracle be that there was no uprising, no war?
But here we are in 2024, about to celebrate Purim on what will be 170 days since October 7, which (not coincidentally, just ask Hamas), was Simchat Torah, the second-most joyful holiday in the Jewish calendar and also the day of the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust.
This war has been devastating for months. Our people are still being held hostage in Gaza. We’re fighting a war we didn’t want to fight, and the battlefield has erupted beyond the borders of Gaza and Northern Israel, into violence against Jews globally and a global discourse where antisemitism is celebrated. The images out of Gaza are heartbreaking and horrific, and at the same time, the rhetoric that relies on ancient antisemitic ideas and absolving Hamas against all evidence to the contrary is also horrific. Most of the non-leaders involved in this war wish it was over, that it had never started.
But wars can’t just end because they’re horrible. Once the decree is set in motion, it can’t be overturned, even within a framework of Biblical miracles.
We are in a war started by a terrorist organization with genocide of the Jewish people baked into its charter. We’ve decided to fight back, and the world hates us for it — with many even blaming the Jews for the October 7 to begin with, either that it was well-deserved or staged.
What I wouldn’t give for a miracle like in the days of Purim! A decree that says, “You know what, if someone tries to kill you because you are Jewish, you have the right to fight back.”
For years, we were gaslit by antisemites that we went like sheep to the gas chambers (historically inaccurate, but antisemites don’t care). Now, we’re rebuked by antisemites for not accepting Hamas’s right to slaughter, dismember, and rape us.
The world letting Jews be empowered to fight back against those who wish to eradicate us feels like such a far-fetched idea right now. An impossibility. A miracle.
The miracle of Purim is that we were given official permission to exist.
I wonder what that might feel like.
Many of us are struggling with how to feel joy this Purim. It feels unattainable, tone deaf, and incongruous. Perhaps there is a solace-type joy in knowing that Jews have survived this kind of rampant antisemitism for millennia. That we have the strength of our forefathers within us, while Haman’s clan has long since died out. But that kind of sad-tinged joy might also feel suffocating. “In those days, and even now,” the prayer refrain we say with regard to the miracle of Purim can feel uplifting — with God’s help, we will survive this, too! — or defeatist — nothing has changed, nor will it change, and the time loop of genocide against Jews is eternal.
These mixed feelings are valid. Maybe this Purim won’t feel the same as last year’s or next year’s. But the same way we force ourselves to be sad on Tisha B’Av even if we’re not, we must force at least a modicum of joy into Purim — our rituals tether us to these emotions so we won’t lose our essence, our peoplehood, our spirituality, our distinctiveness.
I’d like to share a prayer by Rabbanit Esti Rosenberg, adapted from the “Permission to Pray” prayer recited on Yom Kippur (which in a sort of play on words is also Yom K’-Purim, a day like Purim). Read the Hebrew here, and the translation below:
With the agreement of the Almighty and with the agreement of the congregation, we give permission to rejoice; we give permission to Purim to be present, to enter the gates, to respond to the Beloved Who knocks. And all those hunted and terrorized, injured or kidnapped, civilian or military casualties, from last Purim to this one, stand before me, and I ask of them that they give me permission, with kindness, with compassion, with commitment.
And like the permission for prayer composed by the liturgists of Spain and Germany, I ask permission – permission to rejoice, even permission to laugh; permission to no longer distinguish between “cursed be Haman” and “blessed be Mordechai”; permission to give thanks with a broken heart; permission to come before the Royal Throne dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and to cry out a great and bitter cry, to hear Odelia and to have my heart cleansed as though there was no war in the world at all.
Permission from the fallen, from the widows and orphans, permission from the bereaved parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. Permission from the injured and the hostages, from the families in the Square, and from the heart full of worry. Permission from the families evacuated from Kiryat Shmonah and the survivors of Be’eri and Nir Oz, the residents of the Gaza Envelope and the targets of the missiles in the north. Permission from the bleary-eyed forces – the combat soldiers from Khan Yunis and Rafiah, the women soldiers from Military Intelligence; permission to give strength and to be strengthened; to pray for miracles and wonders in these days, at this time; permission to simply be together and rejoice together; permission to gather and to dance even if you don’t join me, and the song and the laughter get to be too much.
Esther and Mordechai, the miracle and the king, the royal garb and the upending of control, all join me in promising and reassuring you: we won’t evade all the Jews by being in the king’s palace. We will gather together and cry out; we won’t be quiet until it is all turned around and transformed.
It’s all permitted to you, it’s all valid for you; there is no forgetting here, and no prohibition. Just as we give permission, through the earthly beit din, so permission is given in the beit din on High.
I hereby give notice to you that all our dancing will be for good, for prayer, for a cry, for longing for the revelation of the Divine Presence, for salvation and for consolation, for Am Yisrael and for our redemption.
We may not have permission to fight back, but we have permission from one another to retain our Jewish joy.