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Today we celebrate the act of a single woman. Faced with a racist, murderous regime, she wormed her way into favor and then, with nothing more than her brains and looks, she turned the tables. She orchestrated the public hanging of the architect of a planned genocide, took power together with her brother, and reigned over a multicultural country wisely and benignly for years.

We imagine her, in that fabled Persia of long ago, lowering her eyes to her dainty shoes, eyelashes pointed at the lustful king from under a sheer, finely embroidered shawl from which a few long dark hairs have artfully escaped.

What would she make of a woman in today’s Tehran, photographed wearing red lipstick and dark hair flowing unrestrained past her shoulders, lighting a cigarette from a flaming photo of the murderous, dictator – a dictator who could have her killed?

I would like to imagine she would point out that the act of a single woman can change the world.

The weapons have changed; the intent of bad clerics has not. And then, as now, women take the lead because it is women who have paid the price of repression.

To my American friends who oppose this war: I get it. And I would be lying if I said, by day four of missile attacks, that I am ready for the war to go on for “as long as it takes.”

And yet, as Jews, if there is anything we have learned from our history, it is that even if war should be the last option, sometimes we run out of alternatives. I’m talking about the math – the numbers of waging war against a leadership that murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens in a matter of days.

I’m talking about weapons-grade uranium in the hand of fanatics who, lacking the level head of a Queen Esther, might invent ways to justify a new genocide right around where I live. I’m talking about the buildup of missiles and their launchers, about years of support for even more fanatical, murderous, well-armed groups on our borders.

That does not mean I love this war. I still hate the chest-beating, weapon-swinging males who assure us they are doing this all for us. I hate the way our news reports, with every wide-eyed gasp, talk about the firepower of American weapons and how our air force works so well in tandem with yours. I hate the names – Roaring Lion, Epic Fury – they have attached to the operation. I hate the waste and cost of the war; I hate the fact that two-and-a-half years after Oct. 7, 2023, we are still not allowed to retake our own country from the clerics and would-be dictators who would repress the freedom of minorities, as well as our own.

I hate the willful “miscalculations” on every side that are dragging us to the center of a regional war; I hate the fact that the short operation is turning into a longer-term war; I hate the pictures of black smoke rising in the air, even in the center of Tehran.

And yet, and yet. With only some lipstick, a swish of freed hair and the courage to look a murderous, racist, repressive regime in the eye, some women are bringing us to understand that the bad actors need to go, whether by public hanging or precision arial attacks. They are holding your president to his rash promise, even as they hope it will be enough to so they can give a final push and topple the regime from its shaky pedestal, and then replace it with something that will bring them a real say in how they are governed. None of these is promised; no one can explain how to get from the religious council that is already meeting to select a new ruling group to a democracy with free and equal votes for all. No one can promise the end will be better than what came before.

But I beg you, before you completely condemn this war, to think of that woman, lips and hair exposed for all to see, cigarette in mouth, acting out of the pure desire to grab freedom for herself and her countrymates. Remind yourself, she may have the power to change the world.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)