There is something unusual about the book of Esther that most people, even those who have heard the story many times, never quite register. God’s name does not appear in it. Not once. In a canon where the divine presence is announced on nearly every page, the book at the center of one of Judaism’s most joyful holidays is conspicuously, deliberately silent on the subject.

This is not an oversight. It is the argument.

The story is set in the Persian empire, where a Jewish community lives in exile, scattered and far from home. A powerful official named Haman convinces the king to issue a decree of total annihilation against every Jewish man, woman, and child in the known world. The decree is sealed with the royal ring and distributed across the empire. From every angle, it looks like the end.

What follows is a sequence of events so precisely arranged that it strains any casual reading of the word coincidence. A Jewish woman had become queen years before the crisis arrived, placed there by a chain of events that seemed, at the time, to have nothing to do with the survival of her people. Her cousin overheard an assassination plot, reported it, and was never rewarded for it. On the night the story pivots, the king cannot sleep and asks for the royal records to be read aloud, and the one story that surfaces is that unrewarded act of loyalty. When the reversal finally comes, Haman ends up executed on the very gallows he built for someone else.

None of these moments announces itself as miraculous. Each one, taken alone, looks like ordinary life. And that is precisely what makes the story so enduring. It is not a story about a God who intervenes from the outside. It is a story about a world in which every ordinary moment is already part of something larger, already moving toward a destination that only becomes visible in hindsight.

This is a genuinely radical idea, and it does not require religious belief to feel its force. The claim is simply this: that history has a direction, that the surface of events and the truth beneath them are not the same thing, and that the darkest moments are not evidence of abandonment but of a concealment that is always, ultimately, temporary.

The Jewish response to the story is equally striking. Before Esther acts, she does not strategize or negotiate. She issues one instruction: gather together. A divided, fragmented people, she understood, cannot carry a message that belongs to everyone. Unity was not the reward for surviving the crisis. It was the precondition for it.

The practices of the holiday encode this understanding permanently. The community gathers to hear the story read aloud, training itself to trace the hidden design inside events that look random. Food is sent to friends, strengthening the bonds of community. Gifts are given to the poor, ensuring that no one is left outside the circle of celebration. And the day ends with a meal shared together, an act of collective gratitude for a story that, against every apparent odd, came out the way it did.

Two and a half thousand years after the events it describes, the book of Esther is still being read aloud in communities all over the world, in languages its original authors could not have imagined, by people whose great-grandparents had never met. That is its own kind of argument. The darkness, it turns out, was real. But it was never in charge.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)