Re-Reading Persia: Thoughts on an Ancient Text in a Modern Moment

If you consider yourself a staunch secular rationalist, you may be disinclined to see what is unfolding as a religious war. You may assume such categories belong to a less enlightened age, that humanity has, or should have, moved beyond them. That view is understandable. We prefer to believe reason governs history, that conflicts are driven by policy, territory, security, or power rather than ancient hatreds clothed in theological language.

And yet I wonder whether that confidence goes too far. All wars, and even our most ordinary conflicts, contain a degree of irrationality. Even when framed as principled disagreement and articulated in modern vocabulary, something older stirs beneath the surface. We see it not only on battlefields but in marriages, families, workplaces, in the sudden hardening of a conversation. The instinct to dominate rather than understand, to humiliate rather than persuade, to erase rather than enlighten, feels less like progress than inheritance. Reason may account for a conflict once it is underway, but it is often not what ignites it.

Yesterday evening, on Purim night, I joined Jews the world over in listening to a story set in ancient Persia some 2,500 years ago. A genocidal decree under royal seal. A date fixed for the annihilation of an entire people. A state-sanctioned plan to murder Jews across 127 provinces.

As I listened, I could not ignore what was unfolding in the news.

The land was the same: Persia. The rhetoric of annihilation felt hauntingly familiar, as did the fixation on Jewish destruction. Then came a sudden reversal: a death at the summit of authority, a secretive gathering of high-level officials, and tightly guarded information about the location. Events had unfolded precisely as Jews around the world were reading Parashat Zachor, the commandment to remember Amalek, an ancient enemy who attacked the Israelites and later became a symbol in Jewish memory of those who seek Jewish annihilation. And then, entering the holiday of Purim.

The timing is difficult to dismiss. No one could plausibly have arranged history around the Jewish calendar. The secrecy alone makes that clear. Yet the convergence stands. Ancient text and modern headline occupying the same hour.

The Megillah is not merely a tale of threatened survival. It is a study in courage under tyranny. At its heart, it is about faith in God, even when, and perhaps especially when events appear governed only by random forces. God’s name is famously absent from the text. There are no overt miracles, no seas split, no voices from heaven. What we see instead are political maneuvers, sleepless nights, and coincidences that accumulate. Yet beneath the surface runs a quiet suggestion: that what looks accidental may not be. That what appears chaotic may, in fact, conceal a deeper design.

Queen Esther, the story’s heroine, is no caricature. She is a young Jewish woman navigating absolute power, sexual vulnerability, political calculation, and existential threat. Esther begins cautious, concealed. When she speaks truth to power she risks her life without guarantee of success. “If I perish, I perish.”

In an age that loudly proclaims its devotion to women’s rights, Esther remains the ultimate radical. Her courage is deliberate. Her faith is unfailing. She understands timing, influence, and cost. But Esther does not stand alone. There is Mordechai, the perfect exemplar of Jewish courage and leadership.

He refuses to bow to the evil Haman, not out of ego or rebellion for its own sake, but because bowing would signal submission to something corrupt. He understands the cost. His refusal ignites fury and sets the murderous decree in motion. Yet he does not bend.

My middle name is Mordechai. On Purim night, hearing his name repeated, hearing again of his refusal to kneel before power, I felt more than admiration. I felt kinship. Not because I imagine myself heroic, but because the text insists that there are moments when not bowing carries consequences, and yet bowing would cost something deeper.

Meanwhile, millions of Iranian civilians now celebrate quietly or openly, risking imprisonment or worse, trying to loosen the grip of rulers who are not metaphorical tyrants but actual killers, jailers, and torturers. It is not surprising that many of the same voices who denounced Jews and Zionists with moral certainty remain muted here, or offer support for regimes that crush dissent, silence women, and export violence.

Where is the outrage for Iranian women? For students? For dissidents? For those executed to preserve control? Those fluent in the language of human rights seem restrained when the violators are not politically convenient targets.

There are those who worry, rightly, about escalation, bloodshed, unintended consequences. I too, share that worry, that fear. The future is unknown. The walk forward is never simple and history does not reverse its course.

But where is the equal moral concern about passivity in the face of a regime that has funded and orchestrated so much death across the region? Where is the reckoning with what inaction enables?

I am a rational person. I do not casually invoke miracles. But as I listened to an ancient scroll describing the survival of a small, dispersed people under existential threat, and then turned to the news and saw history echo in real time, I didn’t have to struggle to feel awe.

There are roughly fifteen million Jews in a world of eight billion. Exiled, expelled, persecuted, slaughtered, scattered, and still here. One may reject the language of miracle. One may prefer sociology, geopolitics, demography— even chance. That is fair.

But can the pattern be dismissed so easily? Can the convergence of memory and event, text and headline, be reduced entirely to coincidence? Can the survival of such a small people across millennia be seen as nothing more than statistical anomaly?

The future remains unwritten. What going forward means, and where faith enters into it, are questions none of us can answer with certainty. And still, I find it increasingly difficult to believe that history is merely random motion without a divine Mover.

On Purim, re-reading Persia, we stand at the intersection of the past and this very moment. May we merit not merely a temporary cessation of war, but true peace — the ultimate end of all conflict.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.