I have been thinking about him ever since.

October 7th cracked something open in Jews across the world: those who had thought of themselves as assimilated and long-disengaged. We gave it a name: October 8th Jews. Jews who woke up.

The numbers were remarkable. Synagogue attendance surged. Jewish organizational giving surged. Young Jews who had never cared suddenly cared deeply.

But Jewish educators will tell you what newer data is beginning to confirm: the surge is stabilizing. For months after October 7th, those of us who run Jewish communal spaces kept having to buy more chairs.

Now things have leveled — still meaningfully higher than before, and some of those who became newly activated have become the new Jewish leaders we so desperately need.

But the acute crisis has softened into background noise, and not everyone who woke up as an October 8th Jew has remained engaged.

As we approach Purim, the question before us isn’t what awakened October 8th Jews. We know the power of shocking antisemitism. The question is what will sustain them. What will keep that necklace on when — God willing — antisemitism fades.

Purim offers an answer. It is, after all, the holiday of the first October 8th Jews.

If we approach the Megillah without a rabbinic gloss, Mordechai and Esther can be read as assimilated, deeply integrated Persian Jews. They bear names linked to Persian culture and move comfortably within palace politics.

Mordechai sits at the king’s gate. Esther conceals her Jewish identity when taken to the king’s harem. Their outer lives reflected the world of the empire more than the world of their people.

And then Haman comes and secures a decree to murder every Jew in the empire.

Mordechai and Esther both face a monumental choice. Mordechai could have made efforts to escape Haman’s plan. Instead, he steps forward publicly fully inhabiting his identity as Mordechai HaYehudi, Mordechai the Jew, a Jewish leader concerned with his people’s fate.

Esther could have remained silent, hidden, safe. Mordechai challenges her with words that still reverberate: if you stay silent, salvation will come from elsewhere — but you and your father’s house will be forgotten. Who knows if it is not for precisely this moment that you became queen.

And Esther chooses. “If I perish, I perish.” In one sentence she stops hiding and claims her place as a Jew responsible for her people.

Antisemitism awakens them. Crisis clarifies their belonging. Mordechai and Esther are the first biblically portrayed diaspora Jews who appear culturally integrated and only publicly assert their Jewish identity when threatened with annihilation. They are our original October 8th Jews.

But the Megillah does not end there. And neither can we.

Because the real legacy of Purim is not a formula for defeating antisemitism — and it is not a claim that we need antisemitism to awaken us. It is something more demanding and more generous: a blueprint for how to live Jewishly beyond Haman.

The clearest evidence lies in what Mordechai and Esther do, and do not do, once Haman is gone.

They do not leave behind a manual for defeating Haman. They portray multiple strategies to fighting Jew-hatred without prescribing one: Mordechai’s defiant public Jewishness, collective fasting and prayer, and Esther’s carefully staged banquets and political maneuvering.

In doing so, Mordechai and Esther refuse to reduce redemption to a formula. Salvation unfolds through prayer and politics, courage and coincidence, human initiative and hidden divine providence — all intertwined. The next Haman will not look exactly like the last. No single strategy can guarantee safety.

Instead, after Haman’s defeat, Mordechai and Esther do something wiser: they establish structures for Jewish continuity. Perhaps they understood something sober: that the awakening after crisis can be real and still be fleeting. They wanted to make sure the awakening that they themselves experienced become lasting beyond any crisis.

They commanded the annual reading of the Megillah — so memory becomes shared, embodied, and public. They instituted mishloach manot, gifts sent to one another, so Jews practice connection and generosity across the community. They established matanot la’evyonim, gifts to the poor, so solidarity extends to the most vulnerable. And they mandated the seudah, the celebratory feast, so that relief becomes shared joy.

Notice what none of these mitzvot require: Haman.

None of them depend on the presence of an enemy. They are expressions of what we are to one another, habits that strengthen Jewish peoplehood whether or not Haman is knocking at the door.

They build a Jewish life full enough, joyful enough, obligated enough, that when Haman appears, he interrupts something already vibrant. He does not create it.

Mordechai and Esther turned a moment of danger and awakening into something durable, leaving us not just a story of survival but mitzvot that carry Jewish life into ordinary time.

There are people who believe we need Haman. I will never forget a moment at a conference eight years ago when one of them said so out loud.

A prominent scholar of American Jewish life said something that too many people think but are too polite to express: that only rising antisemitism will push back the tide of Jewish assimilation and apathy in America.

I remember being angry. And I remember offering a quiet prayer: please, God, do not send us that test.

Alas, the scholar’s prediction came to pass. We have seen a resurgence of antisemitism unlike anything in recent American memory — and we have seen a generation of Jews awakened as rarely before.

And now comes the harder reckoning.

Because what Purim teaches us is that antisemitism can wake us up — but it cannot keep us Jewish.

The question before us now is whether we will do what Mordechai and Esther did. Whether we will take this October 8th awakening and build something lasting from it.

Not a Judaism defined by those who hate us. A Judaism defined by what and who we love.

Purim does not teach us to defeat our enemies. It teaches us to outlive them — by building a Jewish life too full, too joyful, too alive to be extinguished.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)