Early 3rd century CE Roman painting of Esther and Mordechai, Dura-Europos synagogue, Syria.
I have stood on stages in the Middle East and in Europe and sung the same notes in Arabic and Hebrew, watched the same tears fall in the audience. So when Purim arrives this year wrapped in the smoke of geopolitical tension between Israel and Iran, I don’t reach first for a policy brief. I reach for a story. Because stories, like songs, carry what analysis cannot: the memory of what it felt like to be human together.
The Megillat Esther is, at its core, a thriller set in the Persian court of Ahasuerus, somewhere between 483 and 473 BCE. A young Jewish woman becomes queen, conceals her identity, and then, at mortal risk, reveals it to save her people from a planned massacre orchestrated by a vain and vindictive vizier named Haman. Her cousin Mordecai anchors her. Her community fasts for three days before she acts. And then, extraordinarily, the decree is reversed. Haman falls. The people survive. The word “Purim” itself, from the Hebrew for “lots,” refers to the dice Haman cast to choose the date of annihilation. He cast lots. Esther acted. Fate bent.
Every year we re-read this story. We dress in costumes, we make noise when Haman’s name is spoken, we bake pastries shaped like his ears (Oznei Haman), we give gifts to friends (mishloach manot) and charity to the poor (matanot la’evyonim). From the outside, it looks like a carnival. From the inside, it is a rehearsal, of solidarity, of courage, of the belief that things can turn around.
As a woman who studied the MENA region for years, I am aware of every dimension of the Iranian nuclear file, of the proxy networks, of the rhetoric calling for Israel’s destruction. I hold none of that lightly. But I also hold something else, something my academic training actually reinforced rather than erased: context is everything, and history is longer than the news cycle.
Before Iran was the Islamic Republic, before the mullahs, before 1979, there was Cyrus the Great. And Cyrus, Koresh in Hebrew, issued the decree that ended the Babylonian exile and allowed Jews to return to their land and rebuild the Temple. This is not mythology. It is attested archaeologically, in cuneiform, on a cylinder in the British Museum. The Hebrew Bible calls Cyrus “the anointed one.” A Persian king. The most pro-Jewish act of state power in the ancient world came from Persia.
I find it moving, and politically urgent, that inside Iran today, voices are growing louder calling for a normalization with Israel based on this ancient legacy. They speak of “Cyrus Agreements,” a conscious echo of the Abraham Accords. The regime tries to silence them. But they exist. That matters. It means the story is not finished.
Here is something that stopped me when I looked at this year’s calendar: Purim falls while Christians are in the third week of Lent, and while Muslims have been deep in Ramadan for two weeks. Three traditions. Three fasts. Simultaneously. The form of these rituals is strikingly similar: hunger accepted voluntarily, a slowing down, a turning inward, an opening toward the other. Esther’s three-day fast before approaching the king speaks the same ritual grammar as a Muslim breaking the fast at Iftar with dates and water, as a Christian abstaining from meat on Fridays.
This is not naive syncretism. I am not saying the three religions are the same, they are profoundly different, and I respect those differences deeply. I am saying they share a vocabulary of restraint and a profound hope for liberation, and that vocabulary is available right now, at this very moment of tension, to those who choose to use it.
The Iranian people deserve to be free. The Israeli people deserve to live in peace among their neighbors. The Middle East deserves to find peace and become a place of unity. Jews, Christians and Muslims deserve to coexist in the land of their common ancestor, Abraham.
Israel carries within it, in its kitchens, its music, its family trees, an entire Judeo-Persian world. Iranian-Israeli communities maintain, below the threshold of official hostility, a web of affection, memory, and cultural recognition. I have met these families. I have heard their Persian-inflected Hebrew. I tasted the ghormeh sabzi at a Shabbat table in Ramat Gan.
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran, at the state level, there is danger and enmity. At the human level, there is something far older and more stubborn: the memory of having lived alongside each other, of having influenced each other, of having, at certain moments in history, protected each other. Keeping both of these realities in view simultaneously, the threat AND the history, is not weakness. It is precision.
I want to be careful here, because I have seen too many beautiful interfaith declarations dissolve into nothing. So let me be specific. Religious and cultural leaders, rabbis, imams, priests, but also artists and musicians, have access to public discourse in ways that politicians often no longer do. They can insist, from within their own traditions, on the ethical vocabulary that all three scriptures share: the sanctity of life, the obligation to protect the vulnerable, the possibility of repentance and repair. This is not soft power as a euphemism for powerlessness. It is a genuine resource that remains criminally underused.
Cultural diplomacy, the kind that highlights Cyrus, that celebrates Esther, that maps the shared musical scales of Persian and Andalusian and Jewish liturgical music, can maintain human connective tissue during diplomatic ice ages. It has done so before. It can again. None of this means ignoring nuclear centrifuges. None of this means pretending that inflammatory rhetoric is harmless. I am a realist by training. But I am also a singer, which means I know that the same throat that screams hatred can, under different conditions, produce harmony. Conditions change. People change. History turns.
Purim is precisely about the belief that things can reverse. That the decree of annihilation is not the final word. That a young woman with no formal power can change the course of history if she fasts, prepares, and acts with both courage and intelligence. I don’t think we are Esther. But I think we are called to something by her posture: neither passive nor reckless, refusing despair without indulging in illusion, acting within our actual sphere while keeping the larger horizon in view.
In the spirit of Esther and in the memory of Cyrus, and in the spirit of every fast that has ever been offered, in every language, toward the same sky, may this Purim remind us that the story is not over. That the lots have not yet been finally cast. And that the people who share this ancient, complicated, magnificent region of the world have, despite everything, always also shared something worth preserving.
Hag Purim Sameah. Ramadan Kareem. Bon Carême.