As families prepare costumes, assemble mishloach manot and dust off well-thumbed Megillot, Purim arrives this year with unusual force. It is a festival for dangerous times. Set entirely in exile amid a decree of annihilation, it speaks directly to moments when Jews find themselves attacked, exposed and uncertain.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observed that Purim’s jollity exists so that Jews can live with the risks of being Jewish, “without being terrified, traumatised or intimidated”. That insight feels painfully contemporary amid resurgent antisemitism that has moved from social media to campuses, from marches to acts of violence, including the terror attack on Heaton Park Synagogue.
The Book of Esther records what may fairly be described as the first explicit warrant of genocide against the Jewish people. It unfolds not in the Land of Israel but in the diaspora, where a minority’s fate depends on the whims of power. Purim’s central act of defiance – when Mordechai refuses to bow to Haman – is of enduring significance. He will not renounce who he is to purchase a quieter life. That refusal echoes today in quieter but no less significant acts: Jewish students who, despite unprecedented hostility, express proudly their identity and create across campuses spaces of learning and celebration rather than retreat; in communities that respond to intimidation by strengthening schools, synagogues and cultural life; the “October 8 Jews” who responded to massacre and hatred not with withdrawal but by leaning more deeply into their Jewish identity and, in many cases, rediscovering it.
The Megillah also contains one of the most resonant lines in Jewish thought: “And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?” It is a challenge to us all, a reminder that individual acts of courage, solidarity and kindness can carry consequences far beyond what we imagine.
And then there is the historical irony that cannot be ignored, that just around Purim the Jewish people once again face a threat from Persia. A radical regime that repeatedly declares its aim of destroying Israel continues to arm and finance those who seek to do so.
Yet this time it is not a stateless people awaiting a monarch’s whim. Israel is sovereign, militarily capable and embedded in alliances. Despite the surge in antisemitism, the Jewish state is not alone. America’s substantial military build-up in the region and the country’s own military power are reminders that Israel’s security is not treated as a parochial concern and Jewish vulnerability is no longer an immutable condition of history.
This Purim, history may yet turn again. A future in which perhaps a new Iranian leadership and the Jewish state rediscover older bonds is not inconceivable. Such a shift would not only enhance Israel’s security; it would also weaken those who draw confidence from Jewish vulnerability – by removing a regime that has fuelled anti-Jewish hatred far beyond its borders and by affirming that Jewish sovereignty is neither transient nor undefended.
That lesson of strength applies in Britain as much as in the Middle East. Antisemitism flourishes when Jews are perceived as cowed or marginal. The most effective rebuttal is therefore not only legal or physical protection, essential though both are, but confidence. To celebrate Jewish life, to invest in education and culture, to argue, to publish, to create – as we shall again at Jewish Book Week, which begins Saturday – is more than communal self-affirmation. A community that refuses intimidation, that invests in learning, culture and faith, not only strengthens itself; it unsettles those who seek its diminishment.
Purim does not promise an end to peril. It teaches instead how to confront it: that even in exile there is agency, and that even when threatened, the Jewish response is to live more deeply, more publicly and more joyously.
In that spirit, we enter the festival – not naïve to danger, but unbowed by it.
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