By 
From Children’s Costumes to an Ancient Warning That Echoes Today
Today, Purim is most visible as a joyful, almost carnival-like holiday, especially for children. Classrooms and synagogues fill with kids in costumes, groggers rattle loudly during the reading of the Megillah, and baskets of sweets and hamantaschen are exchanged among friends and neighbors. It is a celebration marked by laughter, playfulness, and the deliberate embrace of joy, a rare moment on the Jewish calendar when silliness itself is part of the religious experience.
Yet beneath the masks, the noise, and the sugar rush lies a far darker story, one that has echoed across centuries and feels unsettlingly current. In recent years, Israeli leaders have used Purim to remind the world that just as the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people failed in ancient Persia, it will fail again today. The plot did not succeed then, they say, and modern threats emerging from Iran will not succeed now.
That message resonates precisely because Purim is not, at its core, a children’s holiday at all. It is a story about genocide narrowly avoided and about how close to extinction the Jewish people have repeatedly come.
The story of Purim, recorded in the biblical Book of Esther, is set in the vast Persian Empire of the 5th century BCE. Jews living across the empire suddenly found themselves condemned by royal decree after Haman, the king’s chief minister, persuaded the monarch to authorize their destruction. The order was chilling in its scope: all Jews — men, women, and children—were to be killed on a single appointed day.
This was not mob violence or spontaneous hatred. It was ruler-backed genocide, sealed with the king’s signet ring and disseminated across 127 provinces in many languages. The Jews were not accused of rebellion or wrongdoing; it was their very existence that was intolerable.
What followed was a dramatic reversal of fortune. Esther, a Jewish woman who had risen to become queen, revealed her identity and exposed the plot. The decree by the king could not be revoked, but a counter-decree permitted Jews to defend themselves. Haman was executed, and the Jewish people withstood this threat to their existence.
Unlike many biblical narratives, the Purim story was not set in Israel, Egypt, or Babylon. It unfolded entirely in Persia, the predecessor of modern-day Iran. That geographic coincidence has an added layer of meaning today. For centuries, Persia was home to thriving Jewish communities. Jews lived there long before Esther’s time and remained long afterward. Even now, about 10,000 Jews live in Iran, maintaining synagogues, schools, and traditions, including the annual celebration of Purim itself.
But while ancient Persia ultimately became the setting for Jewish deliverance, modern Iran occupies a very different place in Jewish consciousness. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a central pillar of Iran’s worldview has been hostility toward Israel. Iranian leaders have repeatedly denied or distorted the Holocaust, supported armed groups dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and used rhetoric that questions the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. For many Jews, this language feels uncomfortably familiar. The vocabulary has changed, and the tools are more advanced, but the underlying premise, that Jews are a problem to be erased, echoes the logic of Haman’s decree.
When we Jews invoke Purim in this context, we are not simply retelling a biblical story. We are framing modern threats through an ancient lens, reminding ourselves that the Jewish people have faced annihilation before, including from rulers based in Persia, and survived. The message is blunt and deliberate: history has tested Jewish existence repeatedly, and yet ‘am Yisrael chai,’ the Jewish people lives.
Purim insists on memory. Jews are commanded to read the story aloud every year, to hear
Haman’s name and blot it out with noise, not because the danger is gone, but because it never
fully disappears. This insistence reflects a hard-earned lesson of Jewish history: hatred does not always arrive wearing obvious uniforms. Sometimes it comes clothed in law, ideology, or reason. Sometimes it arrives politely, stamped with official approval.
The holiday’s rituals underscore that truth. The noise of groggers is not childish disruption; it is symbolic erasure. Charity to the poor reinforces communal responsibility. Feasting affirms life in the face of those who sought its destruction.
Costumes, too, are not incidental. On Purim, Jews dress in disguise to reflect the hidden nature of the story itself. Esther conceals her identity. Evil hides behind authority. Survival depends on recognizing danger before it is too late.
In a modern world where antisemitism often appears masked, reframed as political critique, historical revisionism, or selective outrage — Purim’s lesson feels particularly sharp. Threats are not always announced openly. They must be identified, named, and confronted.
This is why Purim is both playful and serious, why it invites laughter even as it warns against
complacency. Joy becomes an act of resistance. Survival becomes a statement.
For children, Purim is a day of costumes and candy. For adults, it is a reminder that history is not as distant as it sometimes feels. The story Jews tell each year is not ancient folklore; it is a pattern they recognize all too well.
From the palaces of ancient Persia to the speeches and slogans of the modern Iranian theocracy, the names change, but the threat has often sounded the same: Death to the Jews! and Death to Israel! The attempt to annihilate the Jewish people failed in ancient Persia. Purim exists to help ensure that all such attempts will fail in the future.
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