Purim 2024

Purim begins on Saturday night. Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It feels like we’re ready.

And it also feels like we couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from somewhere. When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim. That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually does come from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place. Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs and haters.

But much-younger-me was unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details, of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia. And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad people being defeated instead of the good people.

Eventually, much-younger-me grew up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere.

So I was in. But not entirely. In 1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for years after reading Schindler’s List (then still called Schinder’s Ark) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was always with me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade.

And that brings me to Purim 2024, the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical, quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable.

Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we can surely observe it eighty years later too!  But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to speak as current-me, as who I am today.

We live on the razor’s edge, all of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought. As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there if they wished—they all seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim and, yes, having great fun at the same time.

Living on a razor’s edge is uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from somewhere. And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all. That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least eventually, from somewhere.