The Blogs: The Hidden Face of Purim: A Mirror for Iran’s Defiant Souls

In the scroll of Esther, unfurled each year amid the revelry of Purim, there lies a whisper, a secret cloaked beneath the masks and the wine. It is not merely a tale of a Jewish queen, a thwarted genocide, or a tyrant’s fall. No, the Megillah, in its silences, speaks of something more profound: the courage to unmask power, the audacity to speak when the world demands silence, and the enigma of a liberation that arrives not with thunder but in the quiet steps of the unseen. Today, as the Iranian people rise against the suffocating grip of their theocratic overlords, this hidden message of Purim emerges as a beacon—not just for the Jews, but for all who dare to dream of freedom’s unruly dawn.

Let us begin with the text itself. The Book of Esther stands alone among the Hebrew scriptures: G-d’s name is absent, a void that pulses with paradox. The Sages, those restless interpreters of the sacred, saw in this absence not a retreat but a revelation. The Talmud (Hullin 139b) ties Esther to Deuteronomy’s “hiding of His face”—hastir panai—yet some mystics whisper a deeper truth: when G-d seems absent, it is because He is everywhere, woven into the fabric of human choice, trembling in the hands that act when the heavens hold their breath. Mordecai’s plea to Esther—“If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise from another place” (Esther 4:14)—is no mere nudge; it is a summons to join the divine chorus, to become the vessel of a presence too vast to be named.

And here we find the Iranian parallel, stark and searing. For decades, the mullahs have ruled with an iron liturgy, cloaking their brutality in the garb of divine will. Yet the Iranian people—those poets of resistance, those heirs to Cyrus and Persepolis—have begun to peel back the mask. From the streets of Tehran to the villages of Kurdistan, they cry out, not unlike Esther before Ahasuerus, risking all to expose the lie at the heart of power. The regime’s Haman, its ideologues and enforcers, peddle a narrative of submission as virtue, of chains as sanctity. But the protesters, like Mordecai at the king’s gate, refuse to bow. In their defiance, they embody Purim’s hidden truth: when G-d’s name fades, His spirit surges through those who dare to act, a presence diffused in every shout, every unyielding step.

What is freedom, then, if not this? Not the sterile liberty of contracts and ballot boxes—though these matter—but the raw, visceral act of standing erect before those who would have you kneel. The Iranian woman who burns her hijab, the student who faces the Revolutionary Guard’s truncheon, the mother who mourns her child yet returns to the fray—they incarnate a freedom that transcends survival. It is the freedom of Esther, who walked into the inner court unbidden, knowing death might greet her (Esther 4:11). It is the freedom to say, as she did, “If I perish, I perish” (4:16)—a declaration that shatters the cowardice of complicity, resonating with a divine ubiquity that needs no trumpet to be felt.

Yet Purim bids us go further, into the shadows we seldom dare to probe. The festival’s joy—its costumes, its satire—mocks the pomp of power, revealing its fragility. Haman’s gallows, built for Mordecai, become his own scaffold; the king’s ring, a symbol of dominion, slips from one hand to another. So too in Iran: the regime’s pageantry of control—its parades, its edicts—crumbles before the laughter of a people who refuse to play the scripted part. This is the genius of Purim’s hiddenness: it teaches that power is not invincible but theatrical, a masquerade sustained only by fear. When the mask is torn away, when truth is spoken to power, the stage collapses—and there, in the wreckage, G-d’s everywhere-ness glimmers, unconfined by dogma.

And what of us, onlookers in the West, sipping our lattes and scrolling our feeds? We who congratulate ourselves on our freedoms while averting our gaze from Tehran’s bloodied squares? Purim indicts us too. It demands we ask: what does it mean to be free if we do not amplify the voices of those who fight for it? The Iranian struggle is not theirs alone; it is the frontier of a universal battle, where the stakes are nothing less than the soul of humanity. To remain silent, to hedge our bets with diplomatic niceties, is to betray the very lesson Esther’s story burns into us: that salvation comes when we risk something of ourselves, stepping into the omnipresent will that waits in our deeds.

So let Purim this year be more than a ritual, more than a memory. Let it be an urgent summons to the Iranian people—those Esthers and Mordecais of our time—who weave their own deliverance from the threads of courage and despair. Their triumph will not come from above, nor from afar, but from within, as it did in Shushan. And when it does, when the gallows of the ayatollahs stand empty and the masks of oppression fall, we will see in their victory the face of freedom itself: not a gift bestowed, but a fire kindled, a truth unhidden at last, borne by a presence that was always, everywhere, there.