It has been some time since I last put fingers to keyboard. Partly this was the result of extreme busyness at Neshama, a great blessing. But admittedly it has also been difficult for me to transcend my rage.
Tonight we start celebrating the festival of Purim, one of the most joyful festivals in our Jewish calendar year! One that has triggered my thoughts to paper, so to speak…
What’s my rage? Rage at Hamas, at the large swaths of Palestinian civilians who support them. And many more who don’t but still think burning and pillaging Jews was a great moment of victory.
Rage at the ignorant infantile forces driving the so-called progressives who think they are so righteously forward-thinking and all they’ve managed to do was pick up exactly where the Nazis left off. These ignorant fools have not the faintest idea that the Zionist dream was literally built by Jewish refugees. Half were survivors of the Shoah, the dreadfully real genocide of Jews, and the other half were from ethnically-cleansed Arab lands like my grandparents from Yemen. Clearly, brutal colonisers of the highest order.
To add salt to injury, none of their western countries did anything to stop the Nazi killing machine. What’s worse in a way, was that after the Shoah they all refused to lift the quotas to take in the quarter million survivors of the death camps. They had no problem resettling all the Nazis across the globe. All 750,000 of them. But for the 250,000 Jews, survivors of death camps run by the people they’ve just resettled, ‘sorry, no room’.
These poor souls ended up in Israel because that was literally the only alternative to the gas chambers. How come these people had no right to seek refuge in the only land that wanted them, which also happened to be their ancestral homeland?!
And just so we’re clear that their hate is for Jews no matter what, in all Western countries these same extreme leftist ideologues are the ones crying for open borders. So millions or billions wanting greater financial opportunities must be forced upon the populations of the West in the name of pseudo-liberal ideas, yet Jews, who literally survived the most horrendous systematic killing of a people by far in the history of the world, are white colonisers who ‘should go back to where they came from’.
As you can see, it doesn’t take much to set myself off, but that’s not where I want to go right now. Instead I want to zoom out and learn a lesson I’ve resisted learning my entire adult life.
Jewish history which I’ve been a student my entire life mostly comprises a history of persecution. First, at the hands of The Egyptians. Then the Amalekites. Onto the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the expulsions, the Ghettos, the Pogroms, culminating in the Shoah, the worst atrocity in history.
The Arab aspiration of Israel’s annihilation was one last-ditch effort to kill off the Jews since they were conveniently herded in one small piece of land, in the centre of the Levant, amidst a sea of Arabs.
By the time I became an adult though my sense was that it was all history, a thing of the past. Once Israel was victorious and signed a peace deal with their arch enemy Egypt amongst others, it felt like things were secure for Jews. After all, half of the world’s Jews live in Israel securely established with no credible existential threat to it. The other half of Jews live in Western nations with a quality of life never imagined by their ancestors.
Antisemitism was something we learned about, not felt. I distinctly remember as a 13 year old walking on Shabbat to Brighton Shule to read from the Torah in a Chabad uniform being screamed at ‘bloody Jew’ by some drunk in a car on Brighton road. I remember it not because of the trauma it inflicted, quite the opposite. I remember it because I remember thinking how lucky we are that this is all we need to put up with.
Then came October 7, a deep dive into the recesses of our people’s trauma. We rediscovered to our great horror the fact that Jewish life is simply an intolerable abhorrence to so many. The savagery of the day was not only celebrated in Gaza, but in Columbia university and the Sydney Opera House. And in half of London. And everywhere.
This shattered the complacency. I had truly believed Jew hatred was something of the past, practised today only by fringe primitives. What I came to realise, along with our entire community, is that we are back in history in a way that is entirely uncomfortable for us. Not only because we feel more vulnerable in our very existence but also because we can’t explain the hate. The hate that is needed to celebrate the brutal mass murder of kids and babies with bare hands.
Enter Purim, the happiest day in our calendar. I never understood why we celebrated Purim which was a save from a disastrous Holocaust in ancient Persia 2500 years ago. True it was a great save but surely the subsequent actual near annihilation of Jews by the Romans and then the Nazis, cancels it out?!
For the first time in my life Purim has real meaning. To really feel the fact that hatred for the Jews goes back at least 2500. Long before the terrible anti-semitism inspired by Christianity, there lived a man called Haman (“Boooooo”, we traditionally shout out when we recite his name during the reading of the Megillah*) who so despised the Jews that he wanted them all dead. Men, women, and children in the entire Kingdom of Persia, where the entire global Jewish population resided, were to be annihilated on the 13th of Adar. And he nearly pulled it off. That it took place in Persia particularly resonates since Iran today espouses that same ambition.
I don’t understand what drove monsters like Haman and Hitler, but I do know that that evil is alive and thriving. Those forces sadly exist today as ever before. Not only in Iran and much of the Muslim world but in the once revered institutions of the West. In the facial contortions of the Ivy League students as they ripped down signs of the kidnapped Bibas babies.
But Purim reminds us that we do prevail. And if the Jews in ancient Persia who had no power were able to destroy those who wanted their annihilation, surely the Jews of today who have Israel, will defeat their enemies.
Let us celebrate Purim this year like no other and let’s toast Lechaim – to Life. Remember, only we Jews toast life itself because our very continued existence is the ultimate victory against the forces of evil.
Happy Purim!!!
Am Yisrael Chai!!!
Shneur
*Megillah, in the Hebrew Bible, any of the five sacred books of the Ketuvim (the third division of the Old Testament), in scroll form, that are read in the synagogue in the course of certain festivals. The Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) is read on the sabbath of Passover week, the Book of Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations of Jeremiah on Tisha be-Av, Ecclesiastes on the sabbath of the week of Sukkoth, and the Book of Esther on Purim. The reading of Esther on Purim is prescribed in the Mishna; other readings were introduced in post-Talmudic days.