Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
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Eight months ago, when Israel first struck Iran in Operation Rising Lion, I shared the following reflection:
“Living through history can be terrifying.
It means sitting in a bomb shelter for hours on end listening to the impact of ICBMs whistling through the air from nearly 1,000 miles away, sent by a regime that has no problem murdering its own people and even less problem murdering you.
It means turning on your phone after a Jewish holiday and seeing that all your worst nightmares have come to life, that the massive terrorist attack you heard about in synagogue that morning didn’t kill 10 people, or 30, or 100. That instead, more than a thousand Israelis are dead, that hundreds more have been dragged into captivity, and everything you knew about yourself and your Judaism and your Zionism has been shaken to the core.”
Look, I still believe that.
People I love are still running in and out of bomb shelters. People I don’t know are being displaced or maimed or killed all over the Middle East.
And when I’m not glued to X, or the news, or WhatsApps with people in Israel or friends with loved ones in Iran, I’m still talking and thinking about this war, praying for the best outcome possible, uncertain of what that even is, unable to concentrate on anything but the historic moment unfolding before us now.
But underneath the exhaustion, the adrenaline, the stress-eating of hamentaschen (though, side note, I am not into that Jewish triangular pastry. I am outing myself, but it is wildly overrated. Jewish people, I vote that we replace hamantashen with babka as our national dish for the Purim holiday.) Anyway, underneath all that, and all my opinions about pastries, runs an undercurrent of awe.
And it’s that awe I want to focus on today.
Not up-to-the-minute reporting, which will be outdated before this episode airs. Not historical analysis of the conflict between Israel, the US, and the Islamic Republic, which is immensely important.
Not even the personal experiences of the innocent civilians all over the region, who are watching the skies explode above them and wondering what their lives will look like in a week, a month, a year.
There is a time for all of that. For the commentary from the experts, the historical context, even personal reflections from the front lines.
But I’m recording and releasing this on the Jewish holiday of Purim. And on Purim, I want to focus on awe. On hidden miracles. On resilience and resonance and the echoes of history.
Maybe you’ve heard that every Jewish holiday can be summed up as they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat. Well, Purim is that cliche on steroids. The holiday commemorates the averted genocide of every Jew in the Persian empire.
The story, which is related in Megillat Esther, the scroll of Esther, goes something like this:
King Achashverosh – believed by some historians to be the emperor Xerxes I – is more interested in partying and drinking than ruling the 127 provinces under his command.
He outsources the important decisions to his Grand Vizier, a guy named Haman, who I am convinced was the inspiration for Jafar in Aladdin: a scary, power-hungry megalomaniac who insists on having everyone bow to him as he rides through the streets. Real normal stuff.
But when a Jew named Mordechai refuses to bow, Haman gets so ticked off that he asks Achashverosh for permission to slaughter every single Jew in the empire. And because Achashverosh is more interested in beauty pageants and lavish parties than, I don’t know, making sure no one gets murdered on his watch, he’s like, sure, cool, whatever.
They choose a date for the slaughter. They send out memos to every province in the empire, even the really far-flung ones, letting them know that once the month of Adar rolled around, it’s open season on the Jews and their property. (Nerd corner alert: Adar is a Persian name. The Jewish people were deeply integrated into Persian society, adopting the local language and even the calendar.)
Understandably, the Jewish community of Persia goes into mourning.
But they don’t know that Mordechai has a secret weapon inside the palace: his relative Esther, who is either his cousin, his niece, his foster daughter, or maybe his wife at some point. I don’t know, man, it was 2500 years ago, people had some uncomfortable family arrangements and I am never exactly clear on this one. Anyway, at this point in the story, Esther is married to Achashverosh, which makes her Empress of the Achamaneid Empire.
No one knows she’s Jewish. And when she learns about this genocidal decree, and about what she needs to do to stop it, she’s terrified. You don’t just walk up to a guy who controls half the world and ask for favors – even if he is your husband. But in my favorite verse in the entire Hebrew Bible, Chapter 4 verse 14, Mordechai reminds her:
וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃
Who knows? Perhaps you were placed in this position for just this moment.
So Esther gins up her courage and exposes the evil plot, telling her husband that his creepy Grand Vizier wants to slaughter her and her people. The king hangs Haman, reverses the genocide decree, installs Mordechai as his new Grand Vizier, and they all live happily ever after. It’s your classic feel-good story.
Yes, I just told it simply and yes, there are lots of ways to read the story. But it’s impossible to ignore its historical echoes as we enter the third day of Operation Roaring Lion.
Because once again, just like Haman, the ayatollahs in charge of Iran called for a genocide. They spent 47 years establishing proxies that would attack Jews all over the world, building an arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, and frantically trying to acquire a nuclear weapon – all while calling for the so-called “Little Satan” to be “wiped from the pages of time.”
And, just in time, a Jewish woman assesses the considerable risk to her own life… and steps up to the plate anyway. Because it’s her time. Because this was what she was put on earth to do.
If there is an Esther in this scenario, it is the state of Israel, whose leaders assessed that this is the moment.
But I want to stay on that theme. I want to investigate it.
Because time – the right time, the appointed time – plays a significant role in the story of Purim. The genocide doesn’t happen right away. It’s meticulously planned and widely announced. Haman wanted to give the empire time to prepare, wants to give the Jews time to FREAK OUT. And Esther, who took the throne shortly before he conceived of this plan, swooped in at just the right time to save her people.
But is this the right time for all out war with the Islamic Republic? Why now?
Why right before Purim? Why eight months after the 12 day war, which was supposed to have taken out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure? Why is this the time?
It’s so easy to draw parallels to other events.
Leave Purim aside for a second. The historical record is hazy on whether this story happened as written. (The Hebrew Bible is more about teaching Truth with a capital T than facts. Something can be true without ever having happened…but that’s a rabbit hole for another time.) So let’s talk about parallels to slightly more recent events.
Like World War II, or even the Iraq War in 2003.
Both of those wars featured an almost comically evil bad guy with an iconic mustache hell-bent on genocide. (Remember, Sadam Hussein did actually try to exterminate the Kurdish people, and threatened to burn Tel Aviv to the ground.)
Both of those wars came with a horrible price.
Back in the 1930s, the Europeans tried desperately to appease Hitler. They didn’t want war. They just wanted the crazy guy to annex German-speaking territories and leave the rest of Europe alone. Appeasement didn’t work out so hot with Hitler, just as it didn’t with the Ayatollah, who never softened on his stance towards, uh, anything.
After Hitler invaded Poland, though, the rest of Europe had no choice. They had to go to war. But I understand why American isolationists looked at that mess across the Atlantic and said, that’s their problem. Not ours.
They were also wrong, obviously, but, you know, without 20/20 hindsight, I understand the hesitation. In the end, once the US had no choice, America got involved, too. And though the United States did not pay as heavy a price as the European countries, we Americans nonetheless lost more that four hundred thousand soldiers in just four years. Four hundred thousand. My grandfather, Saba Irving, fought on D Day, on the shores of Normandy, France. He proudly served his people and his country. And I know that his story, which ends in triumph, could have ended so differently. I know that. I honor that.
So I understand the anti-war voices coming from both the left and the right in the United States. I understand why many are concerned that Trump went to war without first outlining a plan or seeking approval from Congress. I understand that Operation Epic Fury is not a defensive action addressing an imminent threat to the U.S. So I get why someone might look at the US’s involvement in this war and say, Wait, Iran isn’t doing anything to the US directly. Why are we fighting Israel’s war? Why are American soldiers dying for a conflict thousands of miles away?
I said I understand it, not that I agree. At this moment, I want to be direct about how I am seeing this. War is painful, always. But in this moment, I lean towards optimism – while recognizing that A, my feelings might change as it continues and B, I’m not a geopolitical expert with deep inside knowledge.
Still, despite my optimism, I understand why at the time of this recording, some four days into the war, nearly 60% of Americans oppose this war, as they are wary about getting involved in another war in the Middle East. Historically, that hasn’t gone so well for us.
But here is the difference between this war, and the war in Iraq, or even World War II.
Time.
If you look at history on the shortest possible timescale, the next few months, the here and now, then wariness about this war makes sense.
But I want to view this with the tool of the kaleidoscope and view this through the long arc of Jewish history.
The Jewish people have been around a long time. And we don’t take a short view of history. Our view of history is very, very long.
Our story stretches back thousands of years. And though it has held its fair share of tragedies, we have a fascinating throughline in our history. I’ll explain.
In college I took a class taught by the great professor JJ Schacter, about “Jewish responses to Communal Catastrophe.” And there were a lot of responses, because, sadly, there were a lot of communal catastrophes.
And as we delved into each one, I always marveled at the fact that logically, rationally, Judaism and the Jewish people should have curled up and disappeared a long time ago. Just be done with this whole Judaism project. It’s exhausting. Too much. One communal catastrophe, okay, maybe you survive. But millennia of them?
Our existence isn’t rational.
After the Babylonians razed the First Temple, displacing the Jewish people from their home and destroying the heart of their religious practice, the should have been the end of the Jewish people. Well, Jewish leaders learned to live in Diaspora. They began educating their children differently. Began adjusting their worship. Began a process of adapting what would later transform Judaism completely.
So when the Romans came around and destroyed Jewish life in Judea a second time, the Sages were ready.
From the churban, the destruction, came rabbinic Judaism.
From the ashes of the Temple came the schools of Yavneh in the land of Israel, and the academies of Sura and Pompedita in what is now Iraq.
From the ruins came the Mishnah, the Talmud, the liturgy we have today, the scholarship of generations of giants.
Fast forward a few hundred years. When the pogroms of the Khmelnytskyi Uprising devastated the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, claiming tens of thousands of lives, the Jews of Ukraine responded by establishing a radical new movement: hasidut. Hasidus. Hasidism. A joyous, mystical, kabbalah-inflected worldview that eventually transformed Jewish life all over the world.
When the masses killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in pogroms, state sanctioned violence against Jewish communities, the Jewish people said enough is enough; we, the Jewish people, need sovereignty and developed the ideas of Zionism.
When the Nazis exterminated one third of the world’s Jews, when the Arab and Muslim states exiled nearly one million people, the survivors and refugees built a safe haven. A messy, flawed, complicated, imperfect, sometimes-dysfunctional miracle of a Jewish state. A safe haven, at last.
And yet again, we are watching the reshaping of history. The Jewish response to communal catastrophe. This time at the national level.
A few months ago, I recorded a podcast with Michael Koplow, Chief Policy Officer at the Israel policy forum. He said that October 7th was the most significant event in Israeli history! Here, I’ll play it:
October 7th, which I think at this point is fair to say is the most significant event in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe eclipsed by 1948, but I think you can make an argument either way.
Noam: So Michael, October 7th is the biggest day in Israeli Palestinian history since 1948, maybe including 1948, you’re including 1967 in that statement. Can you just say a little bit more about that?
Michael: I am. Obviously, 1967 is a huge deal, transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all sorts of ways. I think that five years from now, 10 years from now, when we’re looking back at October 7th, it will have transformed the conflict and transformed the ground in even more significant ways. And at the moment, we’re at an inflection point. I actually don’t know in which direction this transformation is going to go.
I think there are multiple plausible pathways. One of those pathways we’re seeing unfold now diplomatically, which is a push for a Palestinian state, I think a more serious and widespread push than we have seen in decades. And there’s another pathway, which is that Israel might finally transform its military occupation into a permanent annexation.
So I do think that October 7th is going to end up being more impactful.
I was surprised by that at first, and then I thought about it a little more. And I realized: I think he’s right. Look at how the Jewish people, in their Jewish state, responded to this moment.
The Jewish state of October 6th no longer exists.
The Jewish people of October 6th no longer exist.
The world of October 6th no longer exists.
They’ve all been reshaped.
Alchemized into something new.
Sinwar opened a FanDuel account, bet the house that Israel would fold. Israel didn’t just cover; they rewrote the lines mid-game, reshaping world history.
One by one, the Ayatollahs’ proxies have been picked off.
Hamas, defanged. Hezbollah, decapitated. Assad’s Syria: well, it’s chaos, yes, but Assad the butcher is gone.
And now, the final boss, the “avuncular” man the Washington Post bafflingly described, the number one exporter of global terror in the world, the regime that slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, that strangled the indigenous and ancient culture of Persia, that hollowed out Lebanon and Syria, that blew up a Jewish community center in Argentina and a barracks full of American and French soldiers in Beirut, that took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, that funded and supported terrorism around the world – that regime is dying before our eyes.
And Israel is reshaping the Middle East. All because of October 7th.
Koplow was right.
I’m not saying these horrific tragedies – the destruction of the Temples, the uprisings and pogroms, the Holocaust, October 7th – I’m not saying they were somehow “worth it.” I’m not saying that at all.
But this is the hand we Jewish people were dealt. This is the timeline we were given.
And it is what we do with that timeline that matters. Do we remain victims? Do we curl up and die, an ancient people lost in the archives of history? Do we grab our pacis and blankies?
Or do we get up and rebuild? Do we reshape the world, reshape ourselves, and not just survive, but thrive?
And I can’t stop thinking about a bit of commentary on the story of Esther that Shmuel Silber, a rabbi in Baltimore, and teacher of mine, introduced me to. It comes from a 19th century rabbi named Shlomo Hakohen Rabinowicz.
When Mordechai first hears of Haman’s genocidal decree, he goes into mourning. Sackcloth, ashes, sitting outside the gates of the palace in lamentation, the whole nine yards.
And I get it. If I heard that the Grand Vizier had it out for me personally, and was planning to murder my people because I wasn’t enough of a sycophant to him, I’d be mourning too.
But Esther doesn’t approve of Mordechai’s choice to sulk, as fair as it might be. The megillah tells us that she sends him actual clothes so that he stops walking around looking like one of those apocalyptic street preachers wearing a cardboard sign and shouting that the end is near.
Or, in the words of the Megillah:
(ותבואינה) [וַ֠תָּב֠וֹאנָה] נַעֲר֨וֹת אֶסְתֵּ֤ר וְסָרִיסֶ֙יהָ֙ וַיַּגִּ֣ידוּ לָ֔הּ וַתִּתְחַלְחַ֥ל הַמַּלְכָּ֖ה מְאֹ֑ד וַתִּשְׁלַ֨ח בְּגָדִ֜ים לְהַלְבִּ֣ישׁ אֶֽת־מׇרְדֳּכַ֗י וּלְהָסִ֥יר שַׂקּ֛וֹ מֵעָלָ֖יו וְלֹ֥א קִבֵּֽל׃
When Esther’s maidens and eunuchs informed her that her uncle slash cousin slash foster father slash ex-husband appeared to be having a mental breakdown, the queen was greatly agitated. She sent clothing for Mordecai to wear, so that he might take off his sackcloth.
She tells Mordechai: this is a moment of devastation.
And in a moment of devastation, you don’t respond with despondence.
You don’t meet catastrophe by giving up.
You meet it with action.
You meet it by getting up and doing something.
So she asks Mordechai to get up and help her. To stop sitting around being sad. To get up and do.
To unite all the Jews of the city to bargain with God on her behalf. As the megillah says:
לֵךְ֩ כְּנ֨וֹס אֶת־כׇּל־הַיְּהוּדִ֜ים הַֽנִּמְצְאִ֣ים בְּשׁוּשָׁ֗ן וְצ֣וּמוּ עָ֠לַ֠י וְאַל־תֹּאכְל֨וּ וְאַל־תִּשְׁתּ֜וּ שְׁלֹ֤שֶׁת יָמִים֙ לַ֣יְלָה וָי֔וֹם גַּם־אֲנִ֥י וְנַעֲרֹתַ֖י אָצ֣וּם כֵּ֑ן וּבְכֵ֞ן אָב֤וֹא אֶל־הַמֶּ֙לֶךְ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹֽא־כַדָּ֔ת וְכַאֲשֶׁ֥ר אָבַ֖דְתִּי אָבָֽדְתִּי׃
“Go, assemble all the Jews who live in Shushan, and fast in my behalf; do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will observe the same fast. Then I shall go to the king, though it is contrary to the law; and if I am to perish, I shall perish!”
וַֽיַּעֲבֹ֖ר מׇרְדֳּכָ֑י וַיַּ֕עַשׂ כְּכֹ֛ל אֲשֶׁר־צִוְּתָ֥ה עָלָ֖יו אֶסְתֵּֽר׃ {ס}
So Mordecai went about [the city] and did just as Esther had commanded him.
For me, Esther is the clear hero of the story. But notice: the Jews of Shushan had a role to play, too.
Esther begs for unity. For solidarity. And the Jews of Shushan deliver.
The Hebrew Bible calls the Jewish people a “stiff-necked people,” and listen, the shoe fits. We can be fractious. We have a hard time agreeing on most things. The State of Israel seems to be in perpetual danger of falling apart from the inside. It holds on… barely.
So I’m not trying to pretend Jewish history has always been sunshine and roses, or that we have always united. That’s just not facts.
But the Jewish people have responded to catastrophe time and again not with despondency, depression or passivity, but action and innovation.
Back in ancient Persia, the Jewish people interceded on Esther’s behalf before she could intercede for them.
And once again, the great wheel of history is spinning. The map is changing. The cards are shuffling.
The Jewish people are living through history, like our ancestors did. We have been put here and now for such a time as this.
It’s terrifying. It’s exhausting. It’s awe-inspiring.
Esther instructed us: do not be sackcloth Jews. Do not wallow in your sorrow and self-pity, even if everything is the WORST. Get up and do. Be joyous. Be present. Be proud.
And I would extend this to all human beings. When catastrophe presents itself, do not be sackcloth people. Get up and do. Be joyous. Be present. Be proud.
And that is how I am viewing this war with the Islamic Republic.
As a new chapter in a very old story. An opportunity to get up, to do, to shake off the dust and arise and act. A historic moment that ends with a free and liberated Iranian people, with a stronger Jewish state, with a world that is less vulnerable to global terror.
May we see better days, and soon, amen.
Unpacking Israel History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who you think will appreciate it and leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify. It really does help other people find our podcasts. This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Adi Elbaz and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here. See you next week.