A New Persian Miracle in the Purim Style

As I write these words, my wife and children and I and four other sets of neighbors have emerged from our fortified room in our home in Jerusalem.  We have just experienced the latest in a wave of IGRC missile attacks targeting mostly civilian targets.  Today, Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva suffered a hit. Yet miraculously, given these latest two relatively large waves of one-ton ballistic missiles that Iran has directed at us, no one appears to have been seriously injured, the missiles caused only property damage.  The floor that was hit was the old surgical ward that the director of the hospital had ordered to be evacuated the night before the attack.  We are infinitely grateful to our Maker for according us this level of protection in the Land of Israel, after nearly two millennia of exile.  As a friend of mine pointed out, if not for that Divine protection, the various systems that Israel has fortuitously been able to develop against the missile and “suicide drone” threat would not be worth 5 New Israeli Shekels.

Therefore, while we are still fully embroiled in the current war instigated by Iran and its proxies, it is nonetheless appropriate and fitting that we should pause to give thanks for the latest miracles and wonders that we have witnessed first hand in this war.  For those who know the Purim story in the Book of Esther, the kind of miracles and wonders we are seeing will be familiar.

Serendipity:  The Hand of the Divine Power 

In the original Purim story, through a series of serendipitous events — Mordechai saves the Persian Emperor’s life from would-be assassins of the palace guard, Esther becomes the Persian Empress as a result of Vashti’s ill temper, Haman falls upon the divan on which Esther is seated, etc. — the Jewish people is saved from the machinations of the evil Amalekite vizier Haman, whose had been given permission to murder all the Jews of the empire, from infants to women, to the elderly.  Mordechai and Esther deftly navigate the niceties of Persian court etiquette and “under-cover operations” at the highest level of  Persian government (Esther never reveals her true identity until the moment of truth) as well as successfully guide the beleaguered Jewish people through a process of return to their spiritual source (Teshuva), including fasting and prayer   Each event of the Book of Esther, seen singly, seems to be unremarkable.  But taken together, the serendipity is awe-inspiring.  Nowhere in the story is the name of the Divine Guardian of Israel mentioned.  Yet in the very serendipity of the events themselves coming together in a breathtaking whole, years in the making, we see the hidden hand of that Divine Guardian of Israel.

It is not lost on students of the ancient Book of Esther and the accompanying Midrashic sources that the present-day miracles and wonders of the last six days and the last nearly two years of war also involved the Jewish people and the Persians as protagonists, nor is the remarkable fact that the both peoples, the present-day Jews of Israel and the Iranians of today, still speak their respective ancient tongues, Hebrew and Farsi, which would have been used largely in the same form millennia ago.  Today, as 2500 years ago, the events we are witnessing have been clothed in the garb of serendipity and clever undercover ops (operations).

Yet today just as it was two-and-half millennia ago, the serendipity itself reveals the hidden love of the Creator of the World for the people of Israel, that eternal people who since Moses at Mount Sinai have in the main remained loyal to the Creator of the World and His Torah (the aberrations are mostly forgotten historical footnotes today, such as the Sadducees or the Hellenists or the Bundists who deliberately rejected the Torah of Israel and who have left not a living trace, although there are still those seeking to separate the people of Israel from the Torah of Israel and seeking to sow division between Torah-true Jews and the Jewish people, and they, too, like their predecessors will fail in that plot).

We are still not privy to most of the details of the undercover ops against the Iranians, and probably we will need to wait until that history is declassified.  But as with any undercover op, it is axiomatic that many times agents and secret plans are exposed, and many times they go awry.  There are a million things that can go wrong even in simple plans, let alone ops that went on for years as the present ones have.  The odds are vanishingly low that no one would have discovered the drone-carrying trucks planted all over Iran or the explosives placed in the Hezbollah pagers or that the Hamas terrorists who had planned to expand eastward to the eastern border of Israel on October 7th should have stopped near the Gaza border, or that no double-agent betrayed all of these ops and more.  The list is very long and more of it is surely classified than will be revealed for a long time.  As anyone who has executed any complex plan will tell you, it is pure serendipity that that plan goes well, and it is more likely than not that plans do not come to fruition, especially when those plans rely on many people not discovering and many others keeping secret crucial information.  Let’s be clear:  Despite the laudable hard work and creativity of the military and intelligence agencies, despite the necessary weapons procured from the United States of America under the morally clear leadership of President Donald Trump, nonetheless, without the Divine hidden hand, that crucial serendipity crucial for victory would be absent.  Let’s not forget as well that the Iranians had their ops and their long-term plans, and they were much more numerous and bloodthirsty and implacable than the Jews who have mercy on civilian populations, consistently issuing evacuation orders before attacks even at the cost of surprise.

The result of this serendipity has been spectacular;  Instead of the much-heralded end of the Jewish people in Israel, (as the evil mastermind of October 7th and accompanying attacks, the Ayatollah Ali Khameini, repeatedly promised), we are witnessing the salvation of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and the ongoing downfall of the Mullah-regime itself (though at the time of this writing, the Ayatollah is still hiding like a cornered rat in his underground hole in Tehran just as Nasrallah was in Beirut).  In the original Purim miracle, the ten sons of the evil Haman met their end, and in the current miracle, the twelve disciples of the Ayatollah have met theirs (see link from Wall Street Journal here).

Those who have contemplated these events are moved to thank the Almighty who out of love for His people Israel has granted in our times and in our days these modern miracles in the Purim style.  Thus, for example, the journalist Boaz Golan of Channel 14 here in Israel was moved to remark on the miracles and, placing a Kippah on his head, received Psalm 100 (video embedded in this article).  These are all hidden miracles embedded in the apparently natural course of events.  Yet one of the meanings of the word Yehudi (Jew) in Hebrew is to thank and to acknowledge the Almighty for all the kindness He does to His eternal people and indeed to all the peoples of good will in the world.  Like Boaz Golan, it behooves us all to recite Psalm 100 and take upon ourselves as the Jews did at the time of the Purim miracles to renew and fulfill our Covenant with the Almighty, and in this way to merit an enhanced closeness to that Divine love: