Purim, The Prime Minister And The President

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Queen Esther violated protocol and appealed to the king to intervene against a threat to annihilate the Jewish people. This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated protocol and appealed to the United States Congress to intervene against a threat to annihilate the Jewish people. In both cases, the enemy threatening the people of Israel was Persia (today, Iran).

In the days of Esther, the deliverance of the Jewish people led to the institution of the holiday known as Purim. Today, just one day after Netanyahu’s speech, it is Purim again.

Truth sometimes is stranger than fiction, especially at this time of the year.

In Esther’s day, she had to approach the king without being called for, a violation of protocol that could have cost her her life. Netanyahu came to America to address Congress despite President Obama’s strong objections, potentially risking his nation’s relationship with our country, not to mention potentially endangering his own re-election campaign.

Odd things often happen in conjunction with Purim, including:

In 1991, the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein ended after just 100 hours of battle, coinciding with the beginning of Purim. During the war, despite Hussein raining down 39 SCUD missiles on Israel, casualties were so minimal that even non-religious Jews called it miraculous.

In 1953, during Purim, Josef Stalin died suddenly, putting an end to his infamous Doctors’ Plot aimed at slaughtering Jewish doctors. Ultra-orthodox Jews of the Lubavitch, Chasidic sect, believe that it was just as their grand rabbi (the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1992) was reciting an inspired (and mystically relevant) discourse that Stalin was smitten.

Although it was not on Purim in 1946 when Julius Streicher, the notorious Nazi propagandist, was being led to the gallows for his war crimes, he cried out in mockery, “Purim-fest, 1946!” meaning, the Festival of Purim, 1946. His point was that just as Haman, the instigator of the plot against the Jews in Esther’s day, was hung on the very gallows he prepared for his Jewish enemies, so Streicher was hung for his crimes against the Jews.

Tragically, Purim was also a time when the Nazis would carry out public Jewish executions to ridicule the biblical story of Jewish deliverance.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Haman, raised to high command by the king of Persia, devised his plot to exterminate the Jews. Today, Ayatollah Khamanei, the supreme leader of Iran, has offered a 9-point plan to “eliminate” the Zionist regime, explaining that, “During its 66 years of life so far, the fake Zionist regime has tried to realize its goals by means of infanticide, homicide, violence and iron fist while boasts [sic] about it blatantly.”

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