The Biblical Return to Zion, Part I: The Revelation of Mordecai

The Babylonian exile was a vaccine, not just a tragedy. In a short and measured experiment, the Jews learned that national death, indeed God’s own perceived demise, is not permanent. That exile can be reversed. Without that knowledge etched in the national psyche, there was no way to hold on for 2,000 years after the Second Temple was destroyed.

The secret to Jewish survival can thus be found in the book of Esther, set midway through the return to Zion, as the titular heroine approaches her king with an air of resignation, saying “If I’m lost, I’m lost.” She never imagined that the same words would be whispered by Maccabean rebels, put to poetry in a dark Hungarian forest by a female paratrooper, or echoed by IDF pilots heading thousands of miles to her native Iran. It was Esther who taught the Jews no longer to expect redemption to come in the form of miracles. That the days when “The Lord will fight for you, and you hush” (Exodus 14:14) are forever gone.

But this message is hidden in an acute political thriller, masquerading as a children’s fable. All too often, modern readers take the book as a kind of satire—Commedia dell’arte in a Persian key. But the Megillah, which has sustained Jewish survival for two millennia, deserves to be taken far more seriously, and, above all, far more historically.