Déjà Vu All Over Again. And Again. |
Purim 2020. My family had just made aliyah a few months earlier. We were finally in Israel, ready to celebrate our first Purim in the homeland. The costumes were bought. The mishloach manot were packed. The kids were buzzing.
Then COVID shut everything down.
Megillah reading on Zoom. Abbreviated prayers. No gatherings. No school parties. No parades through the streets. The rabbis told us to stay home. The government told us to stay home. We read the story of Jewish survival from our couches, masked and isolated, celebrating deliverance while locked in our houses.
We told ourselves: next year. Next year will be different. Next year we will celebrate the way Purim is meant to be celebrated in Israel.
And eventually, we did. Purim came back. The streets filled with costumes again. The kids went to school dressed as superheroes and queens and IDF soldiers. Mishloach manot overflowed on every doorstep. The music was loud. The joy was real. We had made it through.
Then came October 7, 2023.
That Purim, just months later, was gutted. The country was in mourning. Soldiers were deployed across every front. Fathers were gone. Families were shattered. Communities that had been evacuated from the north and south were living in hotels, trying to explain to their children why Purim felt so hollow this year. We dressed up because the kids needed us to. We read the megillah because we always do. But the laughter was thinner. The joy had a weight to it that no costume could hide.
We told ourselves: next year. Next year the war will be behind us. Next year will be different.
It is now Purim 2026. And I spent today writing from a bomb shelter while Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel.
Three Purims. Three crises. A pandemic. A massacre and a grinding war. And now a full-scale conflict with Iran. Each time, we were told to limit gatherings. Each time, the celebrations were abbreviated, adjusted, moved indoors, moved online, or moved to shelters. Each time, we told ourselves it would be different next year.
I am tired of next year.
My kids are tired too. They know the drill by now. My oldest remembers COVID Purim. My younger ones mostly know Purim as the holiday where something goes wrong. They still want to dress up. They still want to deliver mishloach manot to their friends. They still want the noise and the candy and the graggers drowning out Haman’s name. But there is a difference between celebrating and going through the motions, and kids can feel that difference even when they cannot articulate it.
This year, the school parties will happen. They always do. Israeli schools are stubborn that way. The teachers will put on brave faces and the kids will wear their costumes and there will be music in the hallways. But some of those kids have fathers who got called up this week. Some of them spent last night in a mamad. Some of them have been doing this since they were in kindergarten and do not know what a normal Purim feels like.
We do it anyway. We read the megillah. We dress up. We send the mishloach manot. We make the seudah. We pour the wine. We do it because that is what Jews have always done. We celebrate even when the world tells us we should be afraid. Especially when the world tells us we should be afraid. That is the entire point of Purim.
Haman tried to destroy us. He failed. We celebrated.
A pandemic tried to isolate us. We adapted. We celebrated.
Hamas tried to break us. We buried our dead and stood back up. We celebrated.
And now Iran is firing missiles at us from the same land where the original story took place. And we will celebrate.
Not because we are naive. Not because we are ignoring reality. Because celebration in the face of destruction is the most Jewish act there is. It is defiance dressed in costume. It is faith loud enough to drown out the sirens.
Over the past two and a half years, I have helped organize close to 80 carnivals and events for evacuated communities and military families. I have watched kids who lost their homes light up when they saw a bouncy castle. I have watched mothers cry with relief because for two hours, their children forgot about the war. Those moments are not frivolous. They are the frontline of normalcy in a country that has been denied it for too long.
And I think about the soldiers spending this Purim on a base or in the field instead of with their families. Some of them are the same young men and women I hosted at a barbecue in Modiin three years ago, the night before Yom Kippur, days before October 7 changed their lives forever. They will read the megillah in uniform. They will eat hamantaschen between shifts. And they will do it with the same stubborn joy that has carried the Jewish people through every empire that tried to erase us.
So yes. Déjà vu. Again. The costumes are smaller. The gatherings are quieter. The celebrations are squeezed between sirens and shelter runs. Purim in Israel has not felt normal since 2019, and I have stopped waiting for normal.
Instead, I am choosing to celebrate anyway. Loudly. Deliberately. With my kids in costume and my wife making mishloach manot and my phone on loud in case the unit calls.
When this war ends, and it will end, we will throw the loudest Purim this country has ever seen. The music will shake the streets. The costumes will be ridiculous. The wine will flow and the graggers will be deafening. We will celebrate not just the ancient miracle but the modern one: that we are still here.
Until then, we do what Jews have always done. We show up. We read the story. We remember that we survived. And we refuse to let anyone, not a virus, not a terrorist, not a missile, take our joy.
Chag Purim Sameach. Even now. Especially now.