Purim and the War Against Iran

On the 14th of Adar, 356 BCE, the Jewish holiday of Purim was observed for the first time, commemorating the survival of the Jewish people under Persian imperial rule and the defeat of a decree calling for their annihilation. As Jews around the world prepare once again to mark Purim, the ancient story carries an uncomfortable familiarity, alongside a measure of hope.

The Book of Esther tells the story of King Ahasuerus and his rise of his chief minister Haman, who uses royal favor to issue a decree of extermination against the Jewish people. Haman’s hatred was rooted in a blood feud between his people, the Amalekites, and the Jews stretching back centuries.

The decree is reversed not through military genius or diplomatic triumph, but through something harder to explain: a string of seemingly random events, each one unremarkable on its own, that together add up to something that can only be called a miracle.

Look at the chain. Esther becomes queen, not because she sought power, but because the previous queen was deposed for refusing the king’s command. Mordecai happens to overhear a plot to assassinate the king and reports it, a small act that gets recorded and then forgotten. Haman, consumed by rage at Mordecai’s refusal to bow, builds a gallows and goes to the king at night to request Mordecai’s execution. But the king can’t sleep that same night, and orders his servants to read to him from the royal chronicles. They open, at random, to the exact passage about Mordecai saving the king’s life, the favor that was never repaid. By morning, when Haman arrives to ask for Mordecai’s death, the king is already asking how to honor him. Haman ends up leading Mordecai through the streets in royal celebration. The gallows he built for Mordecai becomes the instrument of his own execution.

No single event looks like salvation. Every step along the way could have gone the other way. Taken together, they form something unmistakable.

That is the hidden hand the Megillah is pointing to. God’s name never appears in the Book of Esther. But the architecture of the story makes the presence undeniable. What looks like coincidence, read in sequence, is anything but. Venahafoch hu — “it was turned upside down.” The condemned became the victors. Everything that was meant to destroy the Jews became the mechanism of their rescue.

The Ancient Story Playing Out Now

Shushan, the very city at the heart of the Purim story, sits in what is today Iran.  We are in the midst of witnessing a moment of “venahafoch hu”, of things being turned over right now.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, fueling proxy wars, arming terror groups, and spreading violence across the Middle East and beyond. For nearly four decades, its Supreme Leader positioned himself as the ideological heir to the annihilationist hatred the Jewish tradition names “Amalek.” He openly and repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jewish people. And like Haman, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not survive to see those ambitions realized.

Khamenei, the leader of this murderous regime, died on Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath immediately before Purim, when Jews around the world fulfill the Torah commandment to remember what Amalek did to the Jewish people. The timing is not something a novelist would dare invent. His end carries the unmistakable resonance of venahafoch hu.

Khamenei spent decades declaring war on the Jewish people, on America, on Western civilization itself. He was taken down by the very forces he sought to destroy.

The Danger Is Not Over

The Iranian regime’s collapse, if it continues, would be one of the most significant geopolitical shifts in a generation. But we are not there yet. The situation is fluid and dangerous. Retaliation is already underway. The regime’s proxies still have weapons, funding, and intent. A weakened but cornered Iran may strike harder before it falls.

The Iranian regime has spent decades building nuclear infrastructure aimed at one purpose: a weapon capable of killing millions of Jews.

The Iranian regime has spent decades building nuclear infrastructure aimed at one purpose: a weapon capable of killing millions of Jews. It has funded every major terror organization targeting Israel and American interests in the region. It has murdered its own citizens for demanding basic rights. Half-measures and negotiations have bought time but time is running out. The window to act before Iran crosses a nuclear threshold is narrow. Israel and the United States share both the capability and the moral obligation to close it.

The Call to Every Jew

The closeness of all this to Purim demands our attention.

The story of Esther is, at its core, a story about what happens when people refuse to look away. Mordecai could have kept his head down. Esther could have stayed silent. Instead they acted, and their actions became the vessel through which something larger moved.

Modern-day Esthers and Mordecais are out there, the dissidents inside Iran risking their lives, the intelligence officers who moved in silence, the leaders who held lines others wanted to abandon, the journalists who refused to normalize evil. Human responsibility was not hidden in Esther’s time, and it is not hidden now.

That is the call for Jews today, religious or not: come together and pray.

Before Esther went to the king, she asked Mordecai to gather every Jew in the city to fast and pray together for three days. That communal gathering, that act of unity and serious prayer, was the foundation on which everything else rested.

Let each of us do our part. For those who pray, pray. For those who hold power, advocate. Whatever gift or ability you possess, use it. And let us come together, like the Jews of Shushan, showing up united as one people.

Throughout Jewish we have faced Hamans and Khameneis. Each believed he was writing the final chapter for the Jewish people. How remarkable that each turned out to be only a footnote.

We are watching something unfold in real time. How it ends is not yet clear but the resonance with this season is too precise to ignore.

I look forward to Purim this year, to our joint efforts, and to the day Iran is finally free.