That He Was A Jew

A Purim Post-Mortem By Yardenne Greenspan

Yardenne Greenspan

Editor’s note: The story of Purim, which we just celebrated, holds striking relevance today. Yardenne Greenspan urges us to learn from it.

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Purim has always frightened me.

The story is dark, no doubt. It has all the elements of a harrowing thriller, the kind that stays with you, painting your days and sending the occasional shiver through your bones. A pompous, ignorant king who wields outsized power and is easily distracted by all that glitters. A power-mongering, malevolent advisor, with an ego so fragile that he seeks to destroy anyone who refuses to worship at its altar. A patriarchal prophet acting, by turns, as a pimp, Cassandra and messiah. And two impeccably self-possessed queens, each a different manifestation of feminism: the one who refuses to play subservient; and the other who risks showing up as her authentic self while quietly working the system from within. Without her, I wouldn’t be here today.

But my fear of the holiday also has a visceral history.

On Purim eve of 1996, when I was in eighth grade, a suicide bomber blew himself up just outside the bustling Dizengoff Center shopping mall in the heart of Tel Aviv, where my friends and I would often hang out. The next day, the youth band in which I played the trumpet performed cheerful music for a near-empty Dizengoff Street while around us, the city was stunned into a deathly silence. Just a few blocks away, kids our age had been murdered and the ground was still covered with blood, broken glass, car parts and shards of metal.

In 1997, a terrorist blew himself up outside of a café within walking distance of the previous year’s attack, killing three young women. One of them had been pregnant, another was there with her infant, who was dressed up as a clown when her mother was blown to bits before her eyes.

And then there was Purim of 2025. The Jewish holidays have felt different since October 7^th, 2023, to say the least. I’ve always made a point of celebrating Purim with my children, but this was the first year I put together costumes well in advance, ended my work day early, and planned for a late bedtime. In other words, it was the first year that I took Purim as seriously as I do Rosh Hashanah and Passover.

As I walked into shul in my Bruce Springsteen getup with my son the pirate and my daughter the superhero, I considered the inherent darkness of the festivities themselves. The variety of disguises, the injunction to drunkenness, the v’nahafoch hu of it all. There’s a sense, both tantalizing and terrifying, that anything can happen on Purim. People we’ve known for years can feel foreign and mysterious. The world as we’ve explained it to ourselves can turn upside down. Stories we’ve regarded as ancient lore can take on a sudden and shocking relevance.

Which is exactly what happened that night at a local congregation’s Purim spiel, “Shushan Rhapsody,” featuring the music of Queen. I expected it to be entertaining. I thought that, to my children, it would make Purim feel as joyous and fun as Halloween. I welcomed the chance to be in a warm community (where I’m not a member but have always felt welcome) and enjoy parody songs performed by clergy in costumes.

Instead, the difference between the story of Purim and every other horror thriller jabbed me in the throat, the whacky and humorous delivery making it no less potent. Unlike a typical thriller, which frightens and excites despite the high unlikelihood of something similar happening to you, the story of Purim terrifies because, if you’re Jewish, you know that it has happened and it will happen to you again.

The performance began with the familiar story from the Megillah: an all-powerful king wants to flaunt his trophy wife before his frenemies. Queen Vashti finds the idea an affront to her dignity. She refuses his command to dance and is summarily executed, leaving the king in search of a more compliant wife. A clever Jewish citizen named Mordecai speculates that installing his niece in the royal palace might not only ensure their own family’s survival, but the safety of all Jews.

At this point in the performance I was watching, the rabbi veered ever so slightly from his hysterical, self-satisfied, and decidedly British interpretation of King Ahasuerus. With a wink to the adults in the room, he began to prattle on about what a great king he was, how everyone knows it, how he has the best words and numbers, and his kingdom is yuge. Then the riff ended, and he was back on script.

My friends and I doubled over in a burst of cathartic laughter, releasing some of the tension that had been building in us over the past eighteen months as we’ve watched both Israel and the United States devolve into chaotic turmoil. But more than a moment of levity, it was a wake-up call. With more and more congregations all over the country flaunting political affiliations, the rabbi seemed to be sending an essential message: that while we might benefit from viewing politics through the lens of Judaism, we mustn’t view our Judaism through the lens of politics.

This Queen-singing, tap dancing rabbi seemed to be warning us that while the current idiot king can be swayed into protecting the Jews for now -- as our interests just so happen to align with his -- we mustn’t expect that to last. For the moment, this king can be reasoned with. For the moment, he may promote certain policies that benefit us. For the moment, whether or not we voted for him, we are caught in a kind of political snare where he capriciously markets himself as a friend to the Jews.

This leaves us in a bind. To rationalize his brutal acts simply because he seems -- for now -- to be on our side would be monstrous. By the same token, objecting to a policy we agree with simply because it was implemented by him would be self-destructive and hypocritical. Moreover, it would represent the lethal choice to prioritize our politics over our Jewishness. It would mean that our deepest and defining identity is not “Jew” but “Democrat” or “Progressive”. It implies that we would sell our own tribe down the river to maintain loyalty to a party.

But it is precisely because Mordecai sees himself as a Jew above and before all else that he won’t bow to Haman: “For he had explained […] that he was a Jew.” That’s it. That’s really the whole — forgive me — megillah. Jews bow to no one but our G-d. This doesn’t mean we can’t hold other values and loyalties. We can and do work toward social justice. We can be and are upstanding citizens, as Mordecai proves to be later in the story, when he warns Ahasuerus about a plot against the latter’s life. In doing so, he demonstrates that his refusal to bow does not translate into a lack of loyalty -- that while being Jewish might set us apart, it does not preclude us from serving a crucial role in our home countries. Jews are very often inspiring patriots or groundbreaking revolutionaries, but we worship at the altar of no mortal man, and we cannot be bought by power. This is how we have preserved our peoplehood through millennia of exile, annihilation, and assimilation.

Of course, it’s also what makes it easy to hate us. We are different, uncontainable, inexplicable -- aggravating in our tenacious otherness, enigmatic in our closed religion. A convenient foil for accusations of infidelity or secret agendas. People who are unmoved by a golden calf are inherently threatening to those in thrall to it.

Seeing us for what we truly are so enrages Haman that doing away with just Mordecai—insufferable Jew that he is—is not enough for him. The insult to everything he was taught to believe about money and power is such an affront that he decides to rid the entire kingdom of Jews.

Ahasuerus hears his advisor’s plea about “a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm,” along with Haman’s promise to enrich the palace treasury in return for this trifling little genocide. He sees no reason to object when Haman advises that “it is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them.” Ahasuerus either doesn’t know that his new wife is Jewish, or doesn’t think it’s relevant.

Haman rolls the dice, picks a date, and has notices posted all over the kingdom about the scheduled annihilation of the Jews. In every town where Jews learn of their impending doom, grief and panic ensue. Mordecai dons sackcloth and ashes and wails in lamentation on the street. Still a law-abiding citizen, he pauses before the palace gates, knowing that entering in such an unkempt state is forbidden.

Esther sends clean clothes for Mordecai but he won’t put them on. Why should he present as civilized when civilization has abandoned him? Mordecai informs her, via written message, of Haman’s plot against their people. But within the safety of the palace compound, Esther seems initially untroubled by this news. When Mordecai urges her to appeal to the king, she explains that legal barriers prevent her from approaching him unsummoned, let alone asking him for anything.

This, too, feels alarmingly relevant to the current moment.

Esther is either too afraid or in too much denial to acknowledge the danger, a mindset all too common in many Jews I’ve witnessed over the past eighteen months. There are the Jews who react with full-throated fury when any other vulnerable minority is threatened, but who fall silent when the threat is to our own. The Jews who make believe the October 7^th massacre never happened or that hostages aren’t still held in chains as they proudly march along those calling for an intifada outside of children’s hospitals. The Jews who identify as anti-Zionist in order to preserve their progressive credentials. The Jews who minimize or dismiss clear antisemitism when it comes from their own side of the political aisle. The Jews who claim that advocating for the hostages is Islamophobic or genocidal. The Jews who pretend they cannot see the swastikas, the Hamas flags, or the encampments. The Jews who insist on characterizing violent, eliminationist groups as “peaceful protestors”. Finally, there are the Jews who simply stand by and remain quiet -- saying and doing nothing at all.

I empathize with the desire to shrink back into one’s shell and wait for the storm to pass. I understand the urge to indulge in denial. I can even see why some Jews believe that denouncing Zionism as the root of all evil will make them safer. But I also think endangering other Jews as a method of self-defense is contemptible, not to mention wildly naïve. Any close reading of history reveals that the Jews of every place and age who renounced their Jewish identity or its historical connection to the Land of Israel were made safe only temporarily by this self-abnegation. Sooner or later, when their services as tokens and fig leafs were no longer needed, they too were discarded like trash, executed or worked to death in a labor camp. Mordecai’s eyes are wide open to this reality as he warns Esther: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace.” It would behoove us all to heed the same wisdom today. No one is coming. It’s up to us.

Facing this is painful. But if we are bound to live through such tumultuous times, enduring heartbreak and betrayal in our personal and professional lives, then let this moment awaken us to the reality we’ve refused to see for so long. Let us embrace the gift of clarity, the lack of moral confusion. Let us foster and reinforce our integrity, harness our defiance, and let’s fucking go. Let us meet this moment and serve our people with whatever tools we each have at our disposal. As Mordecai concludes in his letter to Esther, comforting her as she comes to terms with the need to risk her life: “And who knows? Perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis.”

While I’m no Esther, these days I believe I was born for this moment. For so long, I was preoccupied with the question of the meaning of my life, harboring a fear of missing my moment as I dreamily debated my next move. I desperately wish October 7^th had never happened. I wish so many hadn’t turned against us in our time of need. I wish so many hadn’t already been plotting our demise or dismissing our worth for millennia prior. But at least this much is true: since I began trusting my own moral compass and allowing myself to pursue Jewish advocacy with my whole heart, I have worried about many things: the efficacy of my efforts, the dangers of social media, the neglect of my other ambitions, the risks to my own mental health, the safety of my husband and children. But one thing I have not worried about is whether I’m leading a meaningful life. This moment is the meaning.

Esther rises to the occasion, summoning her courage and using her allure to charm the king into hearing her plea. Ahasuerus is shocked to find that Haman’s plan endangers his own wife, and just as readily as he agreed to end the Jews, he now reverses the decree. The Jews are saved, Mordecai is installed in the royal palace, and Haman bites the dust, hanged from the tree he’d intended for his mortal enemy—all thanks to Mordecai’s clear-eyed counsel and Esther’s immense bravery.

We’re no longer in Shushan today, but we might be in Europe circa 1933. And if we don’t want to get to 1939 again, we must commit to active, adamant, and unapologetic resistance. That means we can’t sit around the palace doing nothing, we can’t allow our tribe to be divided by politics, and we can’t place our blind trust in any leader, whether he appears to be on our side at the moment or not.

On the other hand, if we remember who we are, if we celebrate our existence while refusing the illusion that antisemitism is gone or that Haman is truly dead, if we’re mindful of how precious and precarious we are in numbers, antiquity, and statehood, I believe we can’t be vanquished.

As Haman boasts to his cohort of the many royal honors bestowed upon him, and rants about Mordecai’s refusal to submit, his wife Zeresh issues a stark warning: “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish stock, you will not overcome him; you will fall before him to your ruin.”

Zeresh understands the inherent and intangible power that lives in the heart of every Jew. Let’s make sure we understand it too. Let’s not let it go to waste. Let’s remember that we are those Jews.

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Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her work has been featured in Tablet, Jewish Book Council, Literary Hub, Haaretz, Words Without Borders, and as a regular column in Ploughshares. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her translation of The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and her translations have repeatedly been included in World Literature Today's Notable Translations lists. Greenspan has taught creative writing and translation workshops at Columbia University and at a VA hospital. She has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York City.

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Five tiny joys:

1. Winning a game of Mahjong

2. Bench pressing a personal record

3. Coke Zero

4. Watching TV with my husband after a stressful day

5. Long, rambling voice messages from friends

Five tiny Jewish joys:

1. Singing Hanukkah songs with my kids and doing the same dance moves I did as a child

2. Shabbat dinners with friends and family

3. The moment the candle is extinguished in the wine mid-song at the end of Havdalah

4. Cry-laughing while watching Eretz Nehederet

5. My 3.5-year-old singing HaTikvah

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