JERUSALEM—Tonight, Jews around the world will read the Megillah.
In New York, London, Buenos Aires and Sydney, children in costumes will shake their graggers, families will gather around tables, and the story of Haman’s downfall will be read aloud in synagogues overflowing with noise and joy. Purim, in all its chaos and color, belongs to the world tonight.
Jerusalem waits.
As an ancient walled city, Jerusalem observes Purim on a different day—Shushan Purim, one day later. Tonight, the city is quiet by obligation. Tomorrow, it celebrates. And in between, it sits in shelters, monitoring sirens, watching the sky and thinking about Amalek.
Not as an abstraction. As a current event.
The theological conversation taking place in the bomb shelters of Jerusalem right now is not theoretical. It is immediate, almost unavoidable.
Amalek, in Jewish thought, is not simply an ancient enemy. The rabbis describe Amalek as something colder and more specific than ordinary evil—a spiritual force defined by its total indifference to the Divine.
Where other nations might sin out of passion, greed or desperation, Amalek is different. Amalek is the rejection of meaning itself. It is cruelty without motive, destruction without gain, an evil that exists not to take something but simply to extinguish light. The Talmud teaches that Amalek “cooled” the Jewish people—dampening the awe and moral clarity that had surrounded them. That coldness, that contemptuous apathy toward G‑d, toward goodness, toward truth—that is the essence of Amalek.
Sitting in a shelter in Jerusalem over the past few days, it is not hard to find people who will tell you, quietly and without drama, that they see that coldness in the current Iranian regime.
“It’s not about land. It’s not about resources,” said one man, a lawyer in his 40s, waiting out a siren with his teenage son. “What they want is to extinguish something. That’s Amalek. Pure ego. Pure rejection of anything above themselves.”
In a way this can feel annoying. Here we are, once again, the people at the center of the story.
“We didn’t ask for this,” said a woman in her 30s, arms folded, leaning against the shelter wall with the expression of someone who has missed too much sleep for too long. “Nobody wants this. We want to live our lives. But here we are.”
Here we are. The phrase comes up again and again, in different voices, with different weight.
And yet alongside the exhaustion, beneath the annoyance, beneath the interrupted Shabbat and canceled school days and rearranged holiday plans, there is something that doesn’t waver. Something almost matter-of-fact in how people say it.
“We get it; it just has to be like this,” said a young mother, her toddler asleep on her shoulder, despite everything. “This evil of Iran just needs to be wiped away. There is no negotiating table. I mean they tried, but Iran didn’t even show up. You can’t wait for evil like this to change. You confront it and remove it. That’s what the Torah says about Amalek. Iran is the same.”
It is not resignation but clarity.
Faith, in Jerusalem’s shelters this week, is not dramatic. It is quiet and functional, like a tool people reach for and find exactly where they left it.
“I’m not scared,” said an elderly man who has lived in Israel through more conflicts than he cares to count. He said it simply, without bravado. “Scared of what? We know how this ends.”
Isn’t that what happened on Purim? Is that not the story we read year after year?: “For the Jews there was light, joy, gladness and honor.”
The spiritual undercurrent of the timing is not lost on anyone. Purim, the holiday that celebrates the survival of the Jewish people against an enemy who sought total annihilation, arrives today (tomorrow here in Jerusalem). The Megillah will be read. The story of Haman, descendant of Amalek, will be told. And outside, the story will still be unfolding.
“It’s almost too perfect, it’s right on the nose,” said one man with a tired laugh. “Purim tomorrow, sirens tonight. The holiday was written for exactly this.”
Tomorrow, Jerusalem will do its best.
Holiday feasts and Megillah readings will be smaller than usual, in apartments, in courtyards, possibly in shelters if necessary. Mishloach manot will certainly still be delivered, children will still wear costumes, the Megillah will still be read. The joy will be real, even if it shares the table with exhaustion.
“It won’t be normal,” admitted one father, who has four children at home. “But it’ll be Purim. That’s the whole point. They never managed to stop it. Not then, not now.”
The story of Purim, at its core, is about a people who looked like they were finished. Who had every reason to despair. Who committed to their faith anyway, because they understood that the darkness was not the end of the story.
Jerusalem, waiting for its Purim, living inside that story in real time, understands this in a way that is difficult to articulate from the outside.
There is no panic here. There is no crisis of faith. There is weariness, annoyance, inconvenience and interrupted holidays. There is a sober recognition that confronting pure evil is exhausting, inglorious work. There is a wish, universal and unspoken, that it was different.
And there is absolute, bedrock certainty that it will be OK.
“We’re not worried,” said one woman, preparing mishloach manot at her kitchen table between alerts, assembling small packages of hamantaschen and chocolates with practiced efficiency. “Worried is for people who don’t know how the story ends.”
She folded the ribbon on another package.
“We know how the story ends.”
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