Canter Bridge

Some find the violent pedigree of the Purim celebration distasteful. In a day that has seen too many religious massacres, it hardly seems right to gather with family and friends on the anniversary of an ancient one, when according to the book of Esther the Jews of the Persian diaspora brought vengeance down on those who had planned to destroy them.

To this reader, such moral sensitivity seems too finely tuned.

The Esther story encapsulates divine rescue of a largely powerless Jewish minority in a way that resonates with Bible readers across history. Though YHWH is not named in the book, his hand is probably to be discerned in the remarkable protection of the Jews and the sudden turnings with which the story makes its literary hay.

Mordechai’s Jews did not seek the evil day. The story suggests they lived peaceably across the empire in which its erstwhile ruler Nebuchadnezzar had scatter them. Neither Mordechai nor Esther arrived at their positions of influence through self-serving machination. Rather, it seems, things happened to them.

When the tables are turned on those who hate them, they seek the opportunity to organize against their harassers. This is no Viennese waltz. It is the far too common threat of extermination that lurks outside the fretful walls of Jewish homes in Susa and other cities and villages across the Persian landscape.

A distracted king’s word is law. The last word he hears seems the right one too him, an alignment with proverbial description that may just cast him as a royal fool of sorts. Under such conditions—known not only to Jews but to threatened majorities of diverse lineage—a people necessarily seizes any opportunity to remove their declared assassins.

This is not raw, visceral vengeance. It is life outside a rule of law that is familiar to readers like this one but unspeakably remote to most of human history.

On a single-digit number of days in antiquity, there is collateral damage as the Jewish diaspora in Persia briefly takes in hand the tactics with which their enemies had intended to erase them from the empire’s future. Then it is over, presumably, and this people in due course takes its place as just another legacy of deportation and conquest, its Josephs and Mordechais available upon request to avail petty tyrants of some measure of wisdom.

The feast of Pur is its legacy in food, family, song, and memory. Within the limits of the less than absolutely satisfying purity that history can produce, it is all good. Let us feast.