War, Self-Iconing, and the Eclipse of Discernment in the Days of Lent and Ramadan

We are living through days of fasting.

Christians have entered Great Lent, the slow ascent toward Pascha, toward the trembling proclamation that life persists where death appeared sovereign. Muslims have entered Ramadan, the month in which hunger and thirst reorder the human body, reminding it that existence is sustained not by possession but by mercy. Jews, just these days, will complete Purim, the feast born in ancient Persia, where annihilation was decreed and unexpectedly reversed through courage, concealment, and timing.

Three traditions, distinct yet intertwined, converge in a single historical moment overshadowed by war.

The war in Ukraine has entered its fifth year. What once shocked the world has become normalized, absorbed into the background of global consciousness. The war in the Middle East expands and contracts, now revealing more openly the deeper confrontation between Israel and Iran – Persia, one of the great civilizational matrices of human history. At the same time, Israel has established unprecedented contacts with Arab Gulf states, former adversaries now bound by shared vulnerability and converging strategic necessity.

These developments are not merely political realignments. They are manifestations of deeper moral and civilizational tensions that have shaped humanity for millennia.

Persian religious consciousness, articulated in the teachings attributed to Zarathustra, identified two fundamental orientations: asha, truth, alignment with reality, and druzh, falsehood, distortion, the corrosion of trust. In modern Persian, dorugh still carries this ancient weight: not simply a lie, but a fracture in the fabric of the real.

This distinction was never purely theoretical. It demanded that human beings confront themselves. To align with truth was not to possess it, but to submit to its discipline.

The Biblical tradition echoes this same demand. The commandments of the Torah do not merely regulate conduct; they educate perception. They teach the arduous work of distinguishing between what sustains life and what destroys it, between justice and violence, between necessary defense and destructive excess. Yet even this vast framework converges, as Jesus of Nazareth affirmed, into a single commandment: love of God and neighbor (Mark 12:31; comp. Deuteronomy 6: 4-5, Leviticus 19:18).

And yet this immediately destabilizes human certainty.

“What do you call me good?” Jesus asked the rich young man. “No one is good but God alone” (Matthew 19:17).

This statement does not deny goodness. It removes it from human possession.

Human beings may seek adjustment with good, but they cannot claim sovereignty over it.

The Book of Esther, set within the Persian imperial court, radicalizes this uncertainty. It is the only biblical text in which the name of God does not appear. History unfolds through political maneuver, human fear, calculated courage, and chance. The date of annihilation itself is determined by casting lots – pur/פור. From this act emerges the name Purim.

Lots. Chance. Apparent arbitrariness.

The game of backgammon, born in the same civilizational region between Mesopotamia and Persia, reflects this same existential awareness: human beings move, but dice fall.

Yet the Esther narrative does not resolve moral ambiguity. It preserves it. The threatened community defends itself. Violence answers violence. Survival emerges, but without metaphysical clarity.

Who judges the boundary between defense and vengeance?

This uncertainty did not end with antiquity. No Esther appeared at Auschwitz and many rabbis questioned the non-appearance of a “savioress”. No reversal interrupted the machinery of extermination. The lots fell into darkness.

And yet Jewish tradition preserved within Purim a paradoxical command. One should drink until one can no longer distinguish between “Cursed be Haman” and “Blessed be Mordechai” (Megillah 7b). This is not a celebration of confusion, but its acknowledgment. It confesses that human discernment is fragile, vulnerable to exhaustion, fear, and manipulation.

We are living in such a world now, just now. And the Megilah/מגילת אסתר is definitely not a myth.

Iran, Persia, represents not merely a contemporary adversary, but a civilizational space that has wrestled deeply with the tension between truth and falsehood. Its internal diversity, its historical memory, its intellectual traditions cannot be reduced to the ideological rigidity of present political structures. At the same time, Israel navigates existential threats that cannot be dismissed or minimized. The emergence of alliances between Israel and Arab Gulf states signals not reconciliation in the emotional sense, but a shared recognition of danger and necessity.

War accelerates decisions. It simplifies narratives. It tempts human beings to declare themselves fully righteous. It needs cash.

And here another collapse becomes visible: the collapse of effective exclusion.

In earlier centuries, excommunication – herem/חרם in Jewish life, its ecclesiastical equivalents in Christianity – functioned because communities were cohesive. Exclusion meant isolation. It threatened survival. It could restore discipline and unity. Today, such exclusion has become structurally unenforceable. Attempts at doctrinal discipline do not restore unity but generate parallel communions. The fractures between Western and African Anglicans illustrate this transformation: authority no longer radiates from a single uncontested center. The global Church has become polycentric, dispersed.

In dictatorships, exclusion still functions. Ideological herem/exclusion is imposed through surveillance and coercion. But in societies marked by freedom, exclusion fragments rather than purifies. It produces competing orthodoxies, each self-affirmed, each convinced of its own moral clarity.

In such a world, exclusion no longer resolves crisis. It multiplies it.

This fragmentation is sustained by a deeper phenomenon: self-iconing.

Historically, icons were understood not as objects of narcissistic affirmation, but as windows toward transcendence. They directed attention beyond themselves. They humbled the observer. Today, however, individuals, institutions, and nations increasingly transform themselves into icons. They construct idealized images of themselves – morally pure, historically justified, destined for preservation.

These images demand recognition. They resist contradiction.

This process extends beyond theology into anthropology. Modern societies cultivate hyper-hedonism, not merely as pursuit of pleasure, but as stabilization of identity. Sensation, affirmation, and visibility become substitutes for transcendence. Individuals seek to anchor their existence in the reflection of themselves. Nations do the same. They narrate themselves as righteous, victimized, or chosen.

But such constructions cannot endure indefinitely. Reality resists projection.

Sooner or later, hyper-hedonistic self-iconing collides with the irreducible complexity of existence – with mortality, failure, resistance, and limitation. What was constructed as permanent reveals itself as fragile. What was proclaimed as absolute reveals its contingency.

This collision leads not only to crisis, but to revamping.

Civilizations are forced to rediscover humility. Individuals rediscover their limits. Societies rediscover the necessity of truth beyond affirmation.

And yet there is another paradox, quieter but no less decisive.

Hyper-hedonistic societies, precisely at the height of their self-affirmation, begin to experience exhaustion. What was once liberation becomes burden. The constant demand to affirm oneself, to project certainty, to sustain the image of moral, emotional, or civilizational completeness, produces not stability but fatigue. The self, transformed into its own icon, must be maintained endlessly. It cannot rest.

Pleasure ceases to console. Affirmation ceases to persuade.

A subtle weariness enters the body and the collective consciousness. The abundance of sensation no longer answers the deeper hunger. The multiplication of voices no longer produces meaning.

At this threshold, fasting reappears – not as imposition, but as rediscovery.

Limits cease to be perceived as oppression. They become protection. Silence ceases to be emptiness. It becomes space. Transcendence, long dismissed as illusion, begins to reemerge as necessity.

This return emerges through exhaustion itself. When the human being can no longer sustain the illusion of self-sufficiency, openness becomes possible again.

This is why the convergence of fasting seasons in a time of war carries meaning beyond ritual observance. Beneath the surface of conflict, the deeper work of reorientation has not ceased.

We are indeed drenched in a world of lots.

Missiles cross the sky. Alliances shift. Decisions unfold beyond human control.

And yet the ancient question persists: will human beings align themselves with truth, or with its distortion?

Great Lent and Ramadan do not remove violence from history. But they preserve the fragile possibility that beyond power, beyond projection, beyond the casting of lots, truth itself has not disappeared.

Even now. Especially now.

For even the rabbit that endlessly nibbles may perish from indigestion (Tibetan proverb).

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)