PURIM

Tomorrow is Purim, a holiday about which I am deeply ambivalent. Celebrating Purim is fun: there are special foods and parties, you get to make loud noises in Temple, many congregations, including ours, have special Purim carnivals for the kids. But Purim comemorates G-d's saving the Jewish people from genocide in ancient Persia. I have yet to come to a satisfactory understanding of why G-d would intervene to stop one genecide but not another.

Today, however, is the Fast of Esther about which I am not at all ambivalent. Esther was the Persian king's secretly Jewish wife, chosen in a national beauty pageant after the king had his first wife killed. The day before she went to beg the king to spare the Jews, Esther fasted and prayed. That seems, today, an altogether fitting precedent. Regardless of whether you pray, take time today to think about our troops, their families and about the strength of the United States. Think about the people of Iraq: the conscripts huddled in their trenches and barracks, the civilians in the cities, the Ba'athist Party members who have sold themselves to the state for some measure of security for themselves and their family and about the evil doers who have brought their country to this state. The United States is about to do a great and terrible thing. I support it wholeheartedly. But the price will not be small, however few are killed, and moral seriousness demands that we look directly at it.

During the seder, the ritual Passover meal that was also the Last Supper, there is a moment in which we remember and mourn the Egyptians killed by G-d in freeing the Jews. No one could wish it undone, but we can never pretend that human suffering is of no moment. Posted by David Cohen at March 17, 2003 9:25 AM