Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza demands a new reading of the Purim story’s final chapter
We can no longer see the Jews’ vengeful murder of 75,800 Persians as fantasy or farce
Left: Purim celebrations in Israel in 2024. Right: The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in October, 2023. Photo by Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Mohammed Zaanoun/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images
When she was in kindergarten, I took my daughter to see a joyfully chaotic puppet show for Purim. On our way out, I asked her what she thought of the play.
“I liked it,” she said, then paused to look back at the little wooden puppet theatre behind us. “But I still don’t know who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.”
At this, an older woman nearby piped into the conversation.
“Exactly,” she said with a little smile. “That means you understood it perfectly.”
At first glance, the Purim story seems relatively straightforward: A beautiful Jewish girl becomes queen of an ancient Persian empire, thwarts a murderous plot against her people, and everyone lives happily ever after. The holiday itself is supposed to be noisy and fun, a raucous carnival in which everything is turned on its head. People dress up, parade through the streets, deliver treats to friends and neighbors. According to the Talmudic sages, you’re supposed to get so drunk you can’t tell the difference between the hero of the story and the villain.
But a closer reading calls us to reckon with thorny and morally uncomfortable questions about violence, power, revenge and the very nature of evil. These questions are especially urgent right now, for Jews, Americans and anyone concerned about the line between right and wrong.
This year — as my now 9-year-old daughter prepares to put on a joyfully chaotic Purim play of her own — I’ve been thinking about the often overlooked end of the story, in which the Jews who were going to be massacred turn around and massacre 75,800 of those whom they feared would kill them. (The Book of Esther, in which the Purim story is told, is very precise about this number).
These vengeful and violent final chapters have traditionally been read as a cathartic fantasy of sorts, a fitting end for a text that the biblical scholar Adele Berlin calls “a comic farce for a carnivalesque holiday.” But after the Oct. 7 attacks and the devastating 16 months of war in Gaza that followed, the idea of a vengeful Jewish massacre has long since left the realm of fantasy or farce.
With Gaza in ruins, tens of thousands of its Palestinian residents dead, and President Donald Trump suggesting the forced removal of those who survived, this Purim demands a different reading of the story. We cannot continue to ignore the violent closing chapters or brush them aside. Instead, we must ask ourselves whether that violence is to be celebrated, mourned, or wholly reinterpreted.
Since the Purim story was written, in about 500 B.C.E., it has generally been read as catharsis or farce, with the Tarantino-esque final chapters therefore seen as little more than a collective revenge fantasy. This makes complete sense if you’re a member of a vulnerable and often persecuted minority living under the thumb of a capricious all-powerful ruler. To such a reader — that is, most Jews throughout the past 2,500 years — the ending serves as a kind of psychological release valve. The idea that Jews in, say, 4th century Babylon or 17th century France, would have been able to exact such revenge was inconceivable. So any questions about the morality of the story’s brutal conclusion were beside the point.
But with the rise of the modern, militarized Jewish state, the destructive power of which has been on full display for the past year and a half, the end of the Purim story can no longer tenably be read as fantasy or comedy. Whether we like it or not, whether we stare directly at it or look away, whatever our relationship to Israel might be, the Jewish state’s capacity to massacre those who might threaten the Jews is now very much a reality.
Which makes the Book of Esther and its gratuitous violence more relevant than ever.
I asked a few liberal American Jews about the Purim story as the holiday approached this year. Most thought it ended with Haman’s plot foiled and the villain himself hanging from the gallows.
This ignorance is no coincidence. In fact, there’s a long history of looking away from the violence at the end of the Purim story.
Elliott Horowitz, an American-Israeli historian, says this erasure has its roots in liberal-minded Victorian Jewish reformers who were reacting to antisemitic Christian thinkers like Martin Luther. Christians of that era, Horowitz has written, saw the Book of Esther as emblematic of Jews’ “bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous greed and hope.” So, in a bid for respectability and acceptance in liberal European society, Jewish leaders of the time dismissed or even omitted the uncomfortable violence at the end of the story. One 1870s Bible, printed under the sanction of Britain’s chief rabbi, went so far as to edit out most of the violence in those final chapters.
I’ve been celebrating Purim for more than 40 years, but had no idea about the violence at the end of the story until a few years ago, when I came across a newspaper article about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving then-President Barack Obama a copy of the Book of Esther for what he called “background reading” on Iran. For Netanyahu, the last chapter of the Purim story may be the most important.
Instead of looking away from the violence, he and other hard-core Zionists, including West Bank settlers and Haredi Jews, read the final chapters of the Book of Esther literally, as a triumph of Jewish power. The massacres — “the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies” — are seen as cause for celebration. The killing of those 75,800 Persians is a victory in the centuries-long war with the descendants of Amalek, that great enemy of the Jews whose offspring included — generations later — the Book of Esther’s villain, Haman.
In the days after the Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu made explicit reference to this archetypal conflict, connecting the Palestinians to that biblical enemy. “Remember what Amalek did to you,” he quoted from Deuteronomy 25. He did not complete the verse, which ends: “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
When South Africa cited this speech in its case for genocide at the International Court of Justice, the Israeli government pushed back, saying the contention was “preposterous.” But ultra-nationalists in Israel have been drawing the same connection for years. “The Palestinians are Amalek,” Benzi Lieberman, then chairman of the settlers’ council, told The New Yorker in 2004.“We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation.”
In this literal reading of the Book of Esther, there are no complex questions about good and evil, right or wrong. The Jews are always good, always worthy of divine favor, while the descendants of Amalek are always evil, always unworthy.
For those of us who reject such Jewish supremacy, the violence at the end of the Purim story is deeply troubling. The text — “the very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened” — could have been written about the vengeful destruction of Gaza that followed Oct. 7, not to mention the recent escalation of settler violence and military raids in the occupied West Bank.
All of which begs the question: How can we celebrate Purim in this upside down moral moment, a moment when Trump’s calls for the wholesale removal of Palestinians from Gaza are met with cheers from Israel and little more than a shrug from much of organized American Jewry?
Some progressive Jewish leaders have tried to reinvent the holiday’s texts and traditions. The Shalom Center’s Chapter 9 Project asked 10 thinkers and activists last year to reimagine the end of the Purim story, and invited readers to do the same. A number of synagogues read those final chapters sitting on sack cloth on the floor, evoking Tish B’Av, the somber holiday that commemorates the destruction of the ancient temples.
In a sermon last year, Rabbi Alana Alpert of Detroit’s Congregation T’chiyah spoke about a phrase near the end of the Book of Esther, “V’nahafoch hu” — “And the opposite happened.” This is the moment in the story when the Jews’ fortunes reverse, when everything is turned upside down, the origin of the holiday’s tradition of getting so drunk you can’t tell the hero from the villain.
“We confuse ourselves to the point of being unable to tell the difference between good Mordechai and evil Haman,” Alpert said, “because there is no actual difference between them, not essentially. When the tables are turned, we have the same capacity for cruelty as anyone.”
Once we recognize our own capacity for evil — and by us, I mean not only Jews, but anyone — once we see our own power and the suffering it can cause, the violence at the end of the Book of Esther becomes something much more meaningful than fantasy or farce. The holiday is an invitation to put on the clothes of another, to forget for a moment who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.
When we can do that, when we can imagine the world from another point of view — perhaps even the perspective of someone who we’ve long considered our enemy — that will truly be cause for celebration.
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