Listening for Ourselves: Megillah in a Time of War |
I sent a note to friends in Israel this week. I shared something I’d written about Purim — about living with uncertainty, the emotional whiplash of following news from a distance, the anxiety of not knowing how the story turns. I wanted them to know they weren’t alone.
Their responses taught me something I hadn’t expected.
The first came from a friend who has lived in Israel for decades. She was generous with my words, but honest: “They do not capture the reigning sentiment here. We are buoyant. Relieved that this is finally happening. As much as we hate the shlepping back and forth to the shelters, we feel it’s for a good cause. We are all in.” She mentioned, almost in passing, the tragedy in Beit Shemesh. Grief and resolve in the same breath.
The second came from a friend who works with high school students from the Diaspora on a semester abroad program and was with his students in Kibbutz Ketura when I wrote. He thanked me for reaching out, and then — with the instinct of a true teacher — reached for a verse I wouldn’t have chosen. Not Esther’s “if I perish, I perish.” Not Mordechai’s “for such a time as this.” He went to chapter 9:
“The Jews gathered together in their cities… to strike at those who sought their harm — and no one stood against them.”
“Our greatest strength,” he wrote, “isn’t just in our individual merits, but in the way we gather together. United we truly can stand.”
I have been sitting with both responses ever since.
The Book of Esther is set in ancient Persia — where Jews lived as a vulnerable minority at the mercy of imperial whim. To read this story while headlines track conflict involving modern Iran — inheritor of that Persian geography and, in many Jewish hearts, something of that ancient shadow — is not a coincidence any of us can simply pass over. Jewish memory is long, and the resonance is real.
What I had missed, writing from Toronto, is that the Megillah does not describe a single Jewish emotional reality. It describes several — simultaneously.
The Jews of Shushan, far from the palace, receive Haman’s decree and fall into mourning. The Megillah slows here. The trop shifts; the melody grows heavy. “There was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting, weeping, and wailing.” Jewish tradition understood that the text must be heard as much as read. The sound teaches us how to feel. That is one kind of Purim this year — the Purim of diaspora Jews watching from a distance, anxious, carrying the weight of a story we cannot control.
But Esther, inside the palace, is living something different. She hesitates — and then decides. Her words are not the language of waiting. They are the language of someone who has concluded that the story requires her full presence, whatever the cost. My first friend’s “we are all in” carries that same register — not triumphalism but resolve. A people who have concluded that what is happening, difficult as it is, is necessary. Sheltering with intention, not cowering in fear.
And then there is the teacher’s verse. Nikhalu. They gathered. Not a great individual hero. Not a single act of courage. The Jews gathering in their cities, standing together, and finding that no one could stand against them — because they were not standing alone.
That is what both friends were telling me, in different registers. The first spoke of shared purpose. The second spoke of the act of reaching out itself — the message, the response, someone on the other side of the world paying attention — as a form of gathering. “It gives us over here a great deal of chizuk,” he wrote, “to know we aren’t alone.”
I had thought I was offering comfort. I did not realize I was enacting the Megillah.
One more thing the text insists on: power changes the moral landscape. The Jews of Shushan were powerless. The Jewish people today are not. Israel exists. That is cause for profound gratitude — and for ongoing moral seriousness about how power is used. The Megillah’s triumph is real; so is the weight that comes with it.
When we gather to hear the Megillah tonight and tomorrow, we will not all be in the same emotional place. Some will be anxious. Some relieved. Some grieving. The Megillah does not ask us to harmonize these into a single feeling. It asks us to gather — nikhalu — and hear the story together. To know that the person beside us may be carrying something different, and that this is not a problem to solve but a community to hold.
My friend the teacher ended his note with a question: “Maybe to see you when this is all over?”
That is the Megillah’s deepest promise. Not that the danger is never real. But that the gathering itself is the answer — and that on the other side of hard times, there is reunion.
Chag Purim sameach. May we all find each other there.