Purim Under Persian Fire: A Moment of V’nahafoch Hu

Every year on Purim I listen for the same word near the end of the Megillah.

It comes tumbling out almost casually — v’nahafoch hu — “and it was reversed.” The decree to annihilate the Jews of Persia collapses into its opposite. The hunted become defenders. The doomed host a feast.

It is a strange kind of victory story. No sea splits. No empire falls. The king remains who he was. The Jews remain a minority. But history tilts.

This year, walking through the streets of Israel in costume and sunlight, that word felt less literary.

This Purim was almost offensively beautiful — warm enough to hint at spring, bright enough to make you forget that we are at war. Children ran between cars dressed as superheroes, soldiers and rebbes. Boisterous singing spilled from synagogues and living rooms, melodies of redemption floating through open windows. For a moment, it felt normal.

And then the sirens sounded.

Since Saturday morning we have had roughly two dozen alarms here in Rehovot, just southeast of Tel Aviv. Each alert still jolts, but no longer surprises. We are veterans now. We move quickly to shelters stocked with water, canned tuna and crackers “just in case,” in that peculiar choreography Israelis have mastered: brisk but not panicked, alert but not dramatic.

In those minutes in the safe room you do not know whether the next sound will be the familiar thud of interception or something far worse. You listen. You wait, measuring the silence until the concussion of an Iron Dome’s interception.

It is hard not to think about Persia when Persia is once again firing at Jews — on Purim.

The original Purim story describes a genocidal decree engineered within the Persian Empire. Two and a half millennia later, Jews in a sovereign Jewish state hurry into shelters from missiles launched by a regime that openly calls for their destruction. The names have changed. The method has evolved. The intent has not.

History does not repeat itself neatly. But sometimes it echoes with unsettling precision.

For the long memory of the Jewish people, this Purim will not feel incidental. It will be remembered as one of those moments when an ancient story stepped out of parchment and into present tense: a Persian regime declaring Jewish destruction, Jews living openly in their land, sirens interrupting celebration — and celebration continuing anyway. Not superstition. Not mythology. A pattern that has followed us across centuries: threat declared, survival secured — this time through the hands of those who stand guard and those who make decisions history will later debate — history’s reprise of a melody long played in the minor key of antisemitism.

Purim has always been about inversion — the sudden reversal of assumed power. Jews marked for elimination are granted the right to defend themselves. A concealed queen becomes decisive. Fear becomes feasting. Vulnerability becomes agency.

The Jewish calendar finds other inversions in this same season. For example, in March 1953, as preparations were reportedly underway in the Soviet Union for the deportation — and likely worse — of its Jews following the fabricated “Doctors’ Plot,” Joseph Stalin died from a stroke after days of decline. Days during which many Jews are said to have prayed for his death. It was another historical moment that halted what many historians believe was the cusp of another mass persecution. A regime poised to turn on its Jews collapsed inward at the last possible moment.

Not biblical redemption. But reversal. Divine? Who can say.

That word hovered over my Purim meal. In an act of culinary irony reflecting the tension of recent days, our friends hosted a “Persian” feast — saffron rice, jeweled stews, juicy meats, fragrant herbs — lovingly prepared by mostly Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors would have preferred kugel. The food was excellent. Laughter came easily over sweet mixed drinks. The irony was unmistakable.

Outside, Israeli warplanes crossed the sky. Each pass stirred a quiet prayer for the pilots and their missions. The geopolitical explanations for the broader war shift depending on which spokesperson for Donald Trump one listens to — strategic, moral, political, reactive, preemptive. Clarity is rarely granted in real time.

But one thing is clear: Jews today are no longer petitioners in someone else’s court.

Ancient Persia sealed its decrees over Jewish life and death without Jewish consent. In modern Israel, Jews deliberate, decide, and defend themselves. We argue with one another, as Jews always have, but we do so in our own language, under our own authority, responsible for our own consequences.

Sovereignty does not guarantee safety. But it restores agency.

That transformation — from subject to sovereign — may be the quietest and most profound inversion in Jewish history.

And yet Purim unfolded as it always does. Children intoxicated on sugar. Adults on wine and memory. The public reading of an ancient threat neutralized by courage, timing, and Jewish resolve.

There is something uniquely Jewish about celebrating survival before the story has fully resolved. We do not wait for the final chapter. We mark the turning point.

We do not know how this war will end. We do not know how historians will parse the alliances or the strategy. We only know that once again, Jews are alive, now living in their own land while a Persian regime again declares its hostility.

On Purim afternoon I came home through sunlit streets, past costumed teenagers and families pushing strollers, and thought about how thin the line is between catastrophe and continuity. In Shushan it took one sleepless night for the king. In Moscow it took one stroke. In modern Israel it may take an interception system, a cabinet decision, or the courage to act when others hesitate.

V’nahafoch hu.

Not a slogan. Not naïveté.

A reminder that Jewish history has never been a straight line downward, no matter how confidently our enemies predict it. It bends. It turns. Sometimes at the last possible second.

This Purim we moved between shelter and sunlight, between siren and song, between uncertainty and celebration. We read an ancient story of reversal while living a modern one.

And once again, the Jews were not erased from history.

They were still here to mark it — with costumes, with courage, and with a surprisingly good Persian feast.