“I have mixed feelings about every Jewish text, as we all should,” says Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, whose work often places Torah in its historical context and wrestles with its complexity. “What transcends time about the story is that we don’t have cut and dry good guys and bad guys.” She points out that the destruction of Gaza is not the first reminder of the darkness that lies in Esther.

[…]

“There’s so much liberatory potential [in the Purim story], and there’s a lot of really nasty, nasty images in there that deserve to be wrestled with,” Margolis says. Part of why we tell the story, she points out, is that this is the story we tell: it has been with us for millennia. It is part of how Jews have historically processed our experiences, our fears and dreams, and our obligation to ourselves and others. “I don’t know that I could say I know what the Purim story is about…I’m so deep in the story, what isn’t it about?” she says.

[…]

And yet, the brutality remains. This is why in 2024, when the genocide in Gaza was only six months old, Margolis’ Purim Spiel directly reckoned with the crimes of Chapter Nine, incorporating references to the present moment. In the Spiel, anti-Zionists from Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) wearing “Ceasefire Now” shirts declare we can’t abide the holiday with what’s happening in Gaza. “We have a responsibility to get present with the truth and turn the tables, both on the narrative in the Megillah and the way it is playing out in real time now, in Palestine,” they shout.

But Margolis’s Purim Spiel doesn’t end with Purim’s erasure. It continues by doing what Jewish tradition does best: it reinvents itself. “The tools to transform our tradition are encoded within the tradition, an inheritance designed to heal itself [and] align us with liberation,” says one character later in the Spiel before calling the Megillah, the scroll that contains our story, to be brought before the crowd.

Jews exist calendrically, but since Judaism is the process of interpretation and even imprinting, the stories that mark that calendar never remain the same. In the end, “we tell the stories we tell, until the stories start telling us,” says Margolis. This is why the question of what the Book of Esther is really “about” is so opaque, at once revolutionary and reactionary depending on the commentary.

“I’m glad that I didn’t grow up hearing [the violent ending] of the story because I’m glad I didn’t grow up thinking being Jewish means killing other people,” says Ami Weintraub, an author and rabbinical student whose 2024 book To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living grapples with the legacy of Jewish trauma. “I don’t think that’s a choice that is skirting the responsibility. It’s a choice of what we are going to revere in our community…and in this moment, it hits different…and there’s more wisdom for us now.”

Rabbis have intentionally shifted our focus over time to emphasize the values they want to impart, to create traditions that highlight pieces of our inheritance that embellish our best selves[.] This is why we celebrate Hanukkah with a hanukiah and the story about the oil that lasted longer than it should, rather than the story of militant fundamentalists executing their enemies and re-establishing the covenant of G-d’s law. But both stories are there, just as there are multiple threads found in Esther.

Having finished reading the Book of Esther only yesterday, I was startled by the ending where the armed Jews massacred literally thousands of their enemies. I can see why many Jews would prefer not to dwell on that chapter, not only because it feels like an afterthought but also because it would strike many of us today as ’way over the line. Hanging Haman, sure. Hanging ten of his sons, getting a little excessive now. But massacring thousands of enemies…? Was that really necessary?

One of the aspects that I admire about Judaism is how self-confrontational it is: no Judaists assume that their faith as they practice it was the same as it was millennia ago. The principle of sola scriptura is foreign to them, so they easily come to terms with the violence in the Tanakh without deconverting either.