June 13: Purim and Jewish Power

On this date in Biblical history (23rd of Sivan, 357 BCE), the Jews of Persia were issued a decree by Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai, with King Ahashueras’s approval, giving them permission to rise up against the forces that Hamen had mustered to destroy them. According to the Book of Esther, seventy-five thousand souls were killed by the Jews. “We don’t talk about that,” observes Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic, in his forthright new book, The Crisis of Zionism, “because we begin our stories with victimhood and end them with survival.” The key question facing Jews today, however, is how we contend not with victimhood but with power, says Beinart. “The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and in historical terms so rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves.” Yet “perpetual victimhood is not a narrative that can . . . sustain Judaism in America, a country that makes it easy for Jews to stop being Jews,” nor can it “sustain democracy in Israel, a country that for two-thirds of its existence has held the West Bank, a territory where its democratic ideals do not apply.”

“The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people. . . . And all the rulers of the provinces, and the lieutenants, and the deputies, and officers of the king, helped the Jews; because the fear of Mordecai fell upon them. . . . Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.” —Book of Esther, 9:2-9:5