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It’s Purim time – Again…

You know – the secular, dare I say Christian, calendar is linear. It starts from Zero and goes forward (or backwards for that matter) from there. One year, two years, all the way up to two thousand and twenty years!

Day follows day and year follows year from there to here….

The Jewish calendar is cyclical. Circular. The whole purpose of the calendar is to mark the Jewish Holy Days, beginning with Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon, of each Jewish lunar month.

The idea is that we live in a spiral; a helix, with the exact same day being repeated each year but – on a different level.

The Jewish New Year is Nissan, the month of Passover!

Huh? But… But… You always thought that the New Year was Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of Tishrei.

Rosh Hashanah marks the Day of Creation of the World, the New Year for This World. But Nissan and Passover begin the Jewish calendar year that commemorates our deliverance from slavery. It is the birth of the Nation of Israel!

And, as it is in the beginning, so it is in the end – Purim is both the advent; the herald of the New Year and Passover and, it marks the last holiday of the old year!

Did you know that the week of Passover tells us the dates of all of the Holidays of the coming year – except for Purim!

ATBASH!

The letters ATBASH are an acronym for the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet AT = aleph/tav BASH = bes/shin, and ATBASH is a way of predicting when Jewish holidays will fall, based on Passover.

It works like this:

The first day of Passover (alef) and Tisha B’av (tav) always fall on the same day of the week.

The second day of Passover (bes) is always on the same day of the week as the following Shavuot (shin)

The third day of Passover (gimmel) comes out on the same day of the week as Rosh Hashana (resh)

The fourth day of Passover (daled) always falls on the same day of the week as Simchas Torah. Daled corresponds to kuf, which is the first letter of the word Kriah “reading.” Simchas Torah.

The fifth day of Passover (hay) corresponds to the day of the week that Yom Kippur falls. Yom Kippur is a Tzom, which is the letter tzaddi.

But! The sixth day of Passover (vav) and Purim (pay) are always on the same day of the week… of the previous Purim before Passover!

(Which, of course, means that the ATBASH of Purim would be the same as Passover except that it would be missing Purim!)

Which makes Purim the beginning and the end of our Redemption from the slavery of Egypt.

On the material level which is Purim, Egypt represents all those descendants of Amalek who wish to destroy the Jewish People – from Pharaoh to Haman to today’s ruthless tyrants who wish to destroy the People of Israel.

Who is Amalek, you ask?

Amalek is the people who tried to wipe out the Children of Israel as we left Egypt.

In every generation – “[Therefore,] it will be, when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the Lord, your God, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!”

– Devarim (Deuteronomy) 25:19

We read this special section of this portion of the Torah on the Shabbos before Purim – every year.

This is because we need to remember that Amalek stands for that which insists that the world is random; that everything in the universe is by chance; and for all those that deny the existence of a Just; Free; and Loving G-d.

Haman, who wanted to wipe out the Jews, was from Amalek…

And Purim is the day when Hashem reminds us that although His Hand may be yet Hidden, He continues to link the Jewish holiday of Purim to… Things that make you go “Hmmmmm?”

The day before Purim is the Fast of Esther, the day when Queen Esther prepared to go before King Achashverosh to try and reverse the King’s decree that all Jews in the Persian Empire be condemned to death…

On March 3, 2015, the eve of the Fast of Esther, the Prime Minister of the Jewish State of Israel, Benjamim Netanyahu went before the Congress of the United States and said: “Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred, the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology…”

But Wait! There’s More!

Anybody know what day it was when the Russians “voted” to steal Crimea from the Ukraine? You guessed it! Purim 2014.

Oh, and when did the Russians vote to declare Putin (Vlad the Poisoner) President for Life? March 10, 2020 – Purim!

But this is all very confusing. What does one thing have to do with another?

The Hebrew word that best describes Purim is “venahafoch hu,” meaning flipped over story. Everything is upside down. Everything is topsy turvy. Nothing is what it seems.

The Vilna Gaon, one of the Greatest Jewish Sages who ever lived, said, back in the 1700’s: “When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, the ‘Times of the Moshiach’ have started, that his steps are being heard.”

Hmmm…

Let’s take a detour into the Stock Market.

October 19th, 1987, was the largest Dow Jones Percentage drop in history – including the Crash of 1929 and everything up until the present.

This occurred shortly after the Succos holiday in October of that year, and, after the end of the previous Shemitah Year, which is where the Torah commands that every 7th year all the land owned by Jews in the Land of Israel must lie fallow.

On September 17th, 2001, Erev Rosh Hoshana, the Dow Jones went down 684.8 points which, at that time, was the largest single point drop in its history.

This occurred at the end of the previous Shemitah Year.

On September 29, 2008, Erev Rosh Hoshana, the Dow Jones went down 777.7 points which, at that time, was the largest single point drop in its history.

This occurred at the end of the previous Shemitah Year.

Hey! What happened to Purim?

Well, the bottom of the stock market of the Great Recession, when the Dow Jones reached 6,547, happened on March 9th, 2009, the Fast of Esther.

It was the lowest Dow Jones close since 1997.

The following day, March 10th, Purim, the market rose 379 points, never to go that low again…

Hmmm…

These are the days of miracles and wonders. This is G-d’s long-distance call…

The way events follow us in slo-mo. The way it looks to us all.

It might look like it’s all consternation, as we drink to the sky.

But these are the days of miracles and wonders.