This war, like all wars, has its generals, missiles, satellite imagery, and breathless correspondents in flak jackets peacocking their reality TV bravery explaining what we cannot yet know. For this war, it also has Tamima.

Tamima is eight years old, and today she stood in my living room with the moral clarity of the prophet Jeremiah declaring, through tears of apocalyptic proportion, “I’m not going to have my Purim party!” This, she believes, is the true catastrophe. You can try to speak to her about regional escalation and the delicate dance between deterrence and provocation. She’s mature and will listen gravely. She may even nod with more resolve than an eight-year-old should. And when all is spelled out clearly, she will repeat, “But there’s no Purim party.” History in the making, it seems, is less interested in missiles than in cupcakes.

Purim, as it happens, is the only Jewish holiday whose villain reads like a cartoonish bored tyrant with too much eyeliner and too little therapy. Haman, we are told, was offended Mordechai would not bow to him. An entire empire trembled because one man refused to stoop. It is the sort of geopolitical escalation one might expect if kindergarten were run by the Persian court. Haman plots annihilation. The Jews fast. Esther risks her life. And in the end, the villain swings from the gallows he himself built. This is divine irony. It is also what my daughter calls “fair.”

And so Tamima, faced with the news that school has been canceled because missiles have been flying over the Middle East with the horizon acquiring a certain apocalyptic decorative flourish, she sees only one thing. There will be no costume parade. No candy bags. No mediocre clown hired by the school whose act consists primarily of yelling. In her little spiritual cosmology, Haman has returned and he has canceled the party.

Since October 7th, we have been living inside a megillah not yet finished. There was the sudden, horrifying, shock like the decree sent to all 127 provinces. Confusion. Grief. Rage. Then mobilization. Long nights. Families in safe rooms. Fathers in uniform. Mothers explaining words children should never have to learn.

In the Book of Esther, there is a moment before the reversal. A silence before the plot turns. Mordechai sitting in sackcloth at the gate. The empire proceeding as if nothing has changed. It is the most uncomfortable portion of the scroll because it feels like despair pretending to be normalcy. We are living out that moment too. In this newest chapter, Israeli jets streak toward Tehran. Iranian missiles arc toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Homes are struck. Families crouch in safe rooms. Debris falls. People are injured by fragments they never asked for and others with fates far worse. But, Tamima weeps because she cannot be Queen Esther in a pink dress with plastic jewels. There is something devastatingly comic about this hierarchy of suffering.

Mark Twain once observed that the reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Jewish history, by contrast, has endured many reports of its death, none of which turned out to be accurate. Haman, Antiochus, Titus, Torquemada, Cossacks, pogromists, Nazis, and now terrorists and ayatollahs. The list is long and, frankly, uncreative. We are the only civilization that has survived this many finales. Yet Tamima stands in our living room and informs me that without her Purim party, the Jewish future stands on a knife. Perhaps she is not entirely wrong.

Haman sought to annihilate the Jewish people because one Jew would not bow. Today’s antagonists cloak themselves in theology and geopolitics, but the psychological pattern is recognizable. Resentment inflated into destiny; humiliation alchemized into exterminationist fantasy. The weapons are upgraded. The resentment is not. In Persia then, lots were cast, Purim, to determine the date of destruction. In Persia now, missile trajectories are calculated by engineers, not astrologers. But the animating hatred is eerily consistent. And just as in the megillah, the plot twists upon itself. Haman prepares the gallows; he hangs upon them. The modern tyrant builds missiles and dies by them learning too late his compounds are not as invisible as he hoped. Esther concealed her identity until the moment demanded revelation. Today, intelligence services conceal until satellites reveal. The parallels are not perfect. History does not photocopy itself, but it does rhyme. It rhymes with a bitter sense of humor.

What makes Purim peculiar is that the Divine Name never appears in the text. No splitting seas. No pillars of fire. Just a series of “coincidences” so elegantly timed that only a philosopher or an eight-year-old would call them by their proper name. Providence. This providence within Purim, works through politics. It works through court intrigue, misfiled documents, and a king who cannot sleep. In our time, perhaps providence works through air defense systems and coalition politics and the stubborn refusal of a people to vanish. It is not cinematic. It is bureaucratic in its own way. And with these hour apart missile warnings it is also exhausting.

Tamima’s tears are not just about balloons and hamantaschen. They are about interruption. Children expect rhythm. School. Celebration. Costumes. Candy. The annual reenactment of survival. War interrupts rhythm and Purim is the holiday of rhythm restored; of order overturned twice, first for destruction, then for redemption. To an adult, the cancellation of a party is an inconvenience. To a child, it is a cosmic betrayal. Haman tried to cancel the Jews entirely. This year, Iran has merely canceled the party. Perspective is everything, but try explaining perspective to a child in a glitter crown.

In the megillah, the Jews are granted permission to defend themselves. They prevail. Then they celebrate. They exchange gifts. They feed the poor. They feast. They do not pretend nothing happened. They mark survival with abundance. Perhaps this year Tamima’s Purim party will be postponed. Perhaps it will happen in a safe room with juice boxes and a slightly nervous clown. But it will happen because if there is one lesson Purim teaches, it is this: the story that begins with mourning ends with laughter.

Jewish history, for all its tragedies, retains a perverse talent for punchlines. Haman planned annihilation. He supplied the hanging apparatus himself. Empires declare final solutions. The Jews declare dessert. Tamima, once she has dried her tears, will dress as Queen Esther anyway. She will distribute hamantaschen with the confidence of someone who has not yet read international headlines. In doing so she will participate in something far older than this war, far sturdier than any regime, and far more persistent than any missile.

As history has shown, to the irritation of our enemies and the bewilderment of statisticians, it does not end where they predict. Tamima may miss her party date. But Haman still hangs.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)