PURIM:

Human Efforts Can Deliver Us from Threatened Destruction

by Rabbi Lawrence Troster - March 2005

Purim is a festival that commemorates an occasion when Jews were threatened with destruction, but were saved and this salvation was perceived as a miracle brought about by God. As the Al Ha-Nissim prayer says in the Purim liturgy, “You [God] in great mercy, thwarted his [Haman’s] designs, frustrated his plot and visited upon him the evil he planned to bring on others.” In the book of Esther, God is never mentioned and the victory over Haman is brought about by the human efforts of Mordechai and Esther. However, Biblical scholars and Jewish tradition agree that God is nonetheless behind the scenes helping to bring about the salvation of the Jewish people.

Purim was not the last time that Jewish communities celebrated their deliverance from threatened destruction. In fact, the Purim story became a model for many other Jewish communities. After escaping a threatened destruction, they often celebrated a special Purim event on the anniversary of that escape. These special Purims emphasized the spiritual theme of the hand of God being revealed in the event. Sometimes families created special Purims to mark a time when an ancestor escaped a danger that could have threatened the existence of the whole family.

I have often hoped that Jews whose families fled Europe before or during World War II could hold a family Purim to celebrate their escape from the Holocaust.

Many of us were saddened last week when the U.S. Senate voted to permit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). A sacred space of God’s creation may be desecrated in the name of economic and political self-interest. During this challenging time, we must gather our strength with God’s help to continue to fight. The oil drilling plans still face legal challenges. I personally believe that they will be stopped. And when that happens, we should declare a special environmental Purim so that all will remember how God helped us bring about this deliverance.