Our Ukrainian Purim

What an interesting experience it’s been having Purim in the foreground—even if just for a day or two—while the Ukrainian War rages in the background. The two stories are disparate and unrelated, of course. But there actually is  a common threat that binds them together and I thought I’d write about that this week. (I promise soon to write about something other than the Ukraine situation, but not quite yet: it’s still in the forefront of my thinking about the world and our place in it. As it is, I’m sure, in all my readers’ as well.)

The last three chapters of the Megillah are in many ways the most interesting ones as the various story lines come to their natural conclusion. Esther reveals her identity and gets king Achashveirosh to order Haman’s execution. Haman himself is gone almost instantly, his lifeless body pathetically impaled on the very giant stake he had previously had prepared for Mordechai’s execution. And Mordecai has already been given the ring that the king took from Haman’s finger, thus moving up in the Persian hierarchy to a position of influence and importance. Furthermore, Esther has been made the executrix of Haman’s estate, an important job given the immense wealth the man appears to have accrued in his lifetime. (This was, after all, a man who declared himself able to part with ten thousand talents of silver to encourage the king to do his bidding.) So all loose ends have been tied up except for one: the pogrom that the late Haman scheduled for the following year has yet to be cancelled.

It feels like this is a mere detail: the king granted Haman the right to annihilate the entire Jewish population and can, we suppose, just as easily withdraw that order. That would  certainly do the trick, but then we find out that it’s not going to be that simple because, it turns out, an edict promulgated over the king’s name and sealed with his signet ring cannot just be withdrawn. In fact, we learn, it cannot be withdrawn at all. And so that leaves Esther and Mordechai with only one reasonable route forward: they need to get the king to issue a new edict not annulling his previous one but instead formally permitting the Jews of the Empire to strike back. And that is precisely what happens as the king authorizes “the Jews in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand up for themselves, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate, any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, infants and women, and to plunder their goods.” Readers are now fully relieved of their anxiety as all seems well: Haman is dead, Mordechai has been elevated to a position of power, Esther is firmly in the king’s good graces, and, although the pogrom has not been cancelled, the Jews have at least been granted formal permission to defend themselves. Does the text mean to imply that the Jews would otherwise not have had the right to defend themselves? It says that almost clearly, leaving readers to wonder how and when the Jews were deprived of the natural right to defend themselves and their families.

And then thing start to happen, but not quite what readers have been primed to expect. (When reading any book, but especially a book of the Bible, readers must force themselves not to know what comes next no matter how many times they’ve been through the narrative in the past: like any book, the Megillah needs to be read from beginning to end without the reader somehow knowing in advance what plot twist is just around the bend.)  The notion that the Jews will not go like sheep to the slaughter but are actually going to defend themselves comes as a huge shock to Persia, one so ominous and worrisome that the Megillah notes in passing that people began to disguise themselves as Jews so as to be safe when the fighting begins. (There are different possibly ways to interpret that reference, but the one proposed here seems to me the most likely.)

And so we reach the end of the story, but without any of the most obvious questions being raised or resolved. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel’s book, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires suggests that the population of the Persian Empire in the time period during which the Megillah is set could easily have been as high as thirty-five million people. The Jews were a tiny minority. The death squads of anti-Semitic hooligans mobilized by Haman must certainly have outnumbered the entire Jewish population—let alone Jews of fighting age—and many times over. So if the king lacked the ability to rescind his own decree, then why didn’t Haman’s people just move forward with the pogrom and defeat the overwhelmingly outnumbered Jews who just recently were busy pre-sitting shiva for themselves in the streets and broad places of the empire? They could certainly have won!

But then, when the big day finally comes, the impression we get from the Megillah is that the sonim are so demoralized that they fail to take up arms at all. The Megillah actually says that in almost so many words. But we would have known it anyway: how else could the death toll as given in the Megillah be 78,500 losses for the Persians and exactly zero losses for the Jews? If that reminds you of the deliverance of Israel at the Sea of Reeds back in the days of Pharoah and Moses (where the millions of Israelites crossed the sea to safety without any losses at all while all of Pharoah’s soldiers, including Pharaoh himself, drowned in the sea when the walls of water collapsed), it’s suppose to!

And so there is lurking behind the familiar story, a less familiar one. The familiar one is about how days that could have spelled doom and disaster were turned into “days of gladness and feasting.”  But behind that story is a slightly different one. Haman’s willing executioners outnumbered the Jews in every conceivable way: in numbers, in arms, in ammunition, in chariots and horses, in back-up, and in training. Yes, the Jews have been granted permission to fight back. But the endless phalanxes of Jew-hating ruffians could surely have prevailed nonetheless! They had the numbers and they surely had the ammo. But something amazing seems to have happened: when the Jews, encouraged by the king’s countermanding decree, finally found the courage to shuck off their timidity and their apparently natural sense of themselves as victims and losers, the enemy responded not by doubling down and making sure they had plans in place to guarantee their victory, but by panicking, losing confidence in themselves, and wondering (maybe) if they were not on the wrong side of history. When the big day came, in fact, the Megillah suggests they were so paralyzed by the specter of Jews defending themselves vigorously that they forgot to fight at all! And so, in the end, numbers proved not really to matter much at all. What mattered was courage born of conviction…and a willingness to call the bullies out and see if they could stand being stood up to.

And that brings us back to Ukraine. The Russians certainly should win. They have the numbers. They have a huge storehouse of nuclear weapons. They have a giant navy and their GPD—because, in the end, everything, even war, is about money— is more than nine times the GPD of Ukraine ($1.658 trillion vs. $181 billion). And they have a limitless number of potential recruits: there are about three times as many Russians in Russia as there are Ukrainians in Ukraine (146,000,000 vs. 43,000,000). So it couldn’t be clearer that the Russians should win. Maybe even they will win. But they also expected the war to last hours, not days and certainly not weeks or months. They expected Ukraine to crumble when the first Russian tank crossed the border and for the invasion to result in a quick, almost effortless victory.

But they failed to take into account the Ukrainians’ lack of interest in going quietly into the night. Once the Ukrainians found the courage to stand up for themselves, the Russians’ superiority in every measuredly military way came to mean significantly less than it would have appeared—to them and to everybody—just a few days before. In other words, the Megillah’s point that what counts when facing the enemy is courage and self-reliance—that turns out to be a truly relevant lesson for all concerned. The Jews of Persia should have lost but didn’t. And on this strangest of Shushan Purims, all decent people across the globe can hope will be the case is that Ukraine, which certainly should not be able to succeed, will turn the tide of battle and end up victorious over enemies who only have numbers, guns, and wealth.