What the end of the Purim story teaches us about Israel’s war against Hamas
Why are some Jews are so uncomfortable with the concept of Jewish strength and power? Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images
The Purim story I remember hearing as a child always ended in Haman’s death. Ditto for the way the Megillah is recounted in our synagogue’s annual Purim spiel.
It turns out things get much darker in Persia after the villain’s execution. Freshly in favor with the king, the Jews hunt down Haman’s sons and all other enemies in the kingdom.
Megillat Esther records the death toll at 75,000. Notably, despite having permission from the king, the Jews do not take their enemies’ spoils, nor kill their women and children.
In recent years, I’ve been alarmed to see liberal Jews doing a lot of hand-wringing over this. My own rabbis seem to contort themselves into Gordian knots of moral quandary as they teach about the dangers of vengeance and worry about the Jews of Persia going too far.
Apparently, seeing Jews hold the knife makes them uncomfortable. It’s as if a narrative in which Jews are unambiguously triumphant just doesn’t feel right. Hanukkah is safe from this scrutiny, it seems, because after the Maccabees win they are stuck with the ruins of the Temple and humbled by the miracle of light.
It shouldn’t be this hard. We like to joke that our Jewish holiday celebrations can be summed up as, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” But what’s wrong with the alternative, “They tried to kill us, and we opened a can of whoop-ass on everyone who stepped to the line”?
Of course it’s not just about the stories we tell ourselves at our holiday tables. Discomfort with Jewish strength and power underpins the ambivalence many leftists are grappling with around Israel’s retaliatory strikes against the Hamas terror organization that massacred 1,400 of our people on Oct. 7.
There should be no ambivalence about Israel’s actions in Gaza right now. Lacking ambivalence does not mean you lack compassion, and supporting the actions necessary to destroy Hamas does not mean you support collective punishment.
The noncombatants in Gaza are the tragic inheritors of an age-old reality: nations at war inherently have populations at risk, both on the battlefield and near the battlefield. The inevitable casualties of noncombatants does not mean that Israel’s military campaign to eliminate Hamas lacks a moral foundation.
Megillat Esther does not say that Persia’s Jews went into the towns of their enemies and killed everyone. It does not say they killed their enemies’ children, raped women, or stole things. It says the Jews slew their enemies. It says the Jews fought for their lives.
In a 2010 article in Commentary magazine, Abby Schecter critiqued the growing discomfort with this part of the Purim story.
“Clearly, it is the very notion of Jewish self-defense, not to mention Jewish vengeance against an antisemitic populace,” she wrote, “that is so discomfiting to those present-day Jews who like their faith nice and universal and are made especially uncomfortable by unconstrained nationalist sentiment.”
Somewhere between Shushan and 21st-century America, Jews seem to have developed an aversion to physical self-defense. The descendants of a people who lived for 1,000 years in Europe as victims of their neighbors now thrives in a country that enshrines the right to bear arms in its founding documents, yet I know only a handful of Jewish people in the U.S. who know how to shoot a gun, let alone own one.
Given the pogroms our ancestors survived and escaped, it’s a wonder that the synagogues they built here did not each contain a storeroom stocked with rifles. My grandparents were in the Workmen’s Circle Chorus in the 1930s, but there should also have been a Workmen’s Circle Militia.
If you are troubled by the killing in the Purim story, you’re missing the point. Historically, no one can find a record of this event ever happening. It’s a story we wrote for ourselves — it’s a roadmap for ethical defense of our faith and our families.
Clearly, Megillat Esther is telling us that the necessities of survival are the limit. Right now in Gaza, the necessities of survival are going to hurt and kill noncombatants, but they are still necessary.
There are, tragically, examples in our modern history of Jews ignoring the ethical roadmap Megillat Esther provides. Poignantly, it was on Purim in 1994 that Baruch Goldstein slaughtered 29 Palestinians praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs.
Soldiers and commanders of the Israel Defense Forces have also been guilty of excesses. No army can avoid such moments.
But there is a huge chasm between battlefield excesses and a political doctrine of terroristic slaughter, just as in Persia there was a difference between state-sanctioned genocide and Jewish self-defense.
As long as anyone from Hamas breathes Levantine air, no one in Israel — Jewish or not — will be safe. Israel’s paramount need is to exterminate Hamas, and the lessons of our tradition support this. Ideas matter, and I worry the squeamishness about Purim will trickle into our discourse and erode our resolve.
A few years ago when my daughter became a bat mitzvah, her Torah portion was Ki Teitzei. The portion is a jumble of unrelated laws that suddenly pulls up short at the end when the text invokes the story of Amalek, demanding that we remember what our enemies did, even as we should blot out their name.
The Jews of Purim remembered this demand. Will we?
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