It's a classic tale of good and evil. A tyrant with delusions of grandeur plots to wipe out an entire population. An elder statesman refuses to bow down to him and in fact holds some power over him. The persecuted population pulls together as one. And an unlikely hero emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, a hero whose cunning and bravery come to inspire millions the world over.
You would be forgiven if you thought for a moment there that just now I was referring to Vladimir Putin, Uncle Joe Biden, the Ukrainian people and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian and actor turned Ukrainian president. But no, my tale is the story of Purim, the joyous Jewish festival celebrated this past week, and I was referring to the evil Haman, chief minister of Persia who threatened to kill all Jews in the kingdom; Mordecai, the leader of the Jewish people in the Persian capital city; the Jews who fasted and prayed for three days to get God to intercede, and of course Uncle Mordecai’s niece, Esther, the Jewish woman who as queen thwarted Haman’s evil plan and saved her people from genocide.
The Purim story has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster: good guys, bad guys, lots of intrigue, and, according to some biblical scholarship, plenty of nudity. And, unfortunately, plenty of violence. The Purim story we heard earlier in Time for All Ages was the G-rated version.
However, far from being just another ripping good yarn, the story of Purim as told in the Book of Esther has another feature that makes it fairly unique in the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old or First Testament. It never mentions God.1 Not only that, but none of the main characters is a prophet or miracle worker, and there are no supernatural events in the story of Purim as there are in other biblical stories. The absence of prophets, who often speak for God in the Bible, and the absence of miracles, which are attributed to God, may explain why God seems missing.
And yet the story of Purim, a holiday celebrated by Jews all over the world this week, has endured down through the ages since its origins in the 5th century BCE. I am sure there are many reasons for this, including those I as a non-Jewish person don’t and can’t know. But as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about God, it seems to me that there is a lesson in the story of Purim for all of us, and it is one we need to hear right about now. Because it is a message of hope—a message that, even when things seem hope-less, even when we feel abandoned, there is something always working in the background that wants us to be an Esther, something that has our backs. Call it God backstage—something so close but so hidden, something behind the curtain stage-whispering cues to us, something passing forward things in our path we might not understand in the moment but play a role in our own Hollywood blockbuster having a happy ending—or if not happy, at least an ending we can understand, which is sometimes more meaningful.
In his brief reflection titled, “Why Purim Is So Important,” Rabbi Alon Levkovitz of Temple Beth Am in Jupiter, Florida, wrote about this very notion. He writes:
The story of Purim conveys a powerful theological statement that experiencing God’s miracles does not lie exclusively in the realm of the prophets, priests and supernatural miracles. The Book of Esther portrays a hidden manifestation of God, inspiring us to have faith that God is ever present in the world, even when that doesn’t seem so obvious…. Just like on a cloudy day when we don’t see the sun but know it’s there, the story of Purim teaches us that God is involved, even when we don’t see His direct involvement.2
Viewing this through a Unitarian Universalist lens, this thought that God is ever present in the world even when it doesn’t seem obvious offers hope. I’m reminded of another Jewish scribe, whose name has been lost to history, who wrote a kind of prayer on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, where a number of Jews hid themselves for four months during World War II.3 The words are familiar the world over, having been often quoted and even set to music. Maybe you have heard them :
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining;
I believe in love even when feeling it not;
I believe in God even when he is silent.
During one of the darkest moments in history, here was a prayer invoking the hidden face of God but also what might be called the hidden nature of hope. The inscription was discovered after the war and the secret hiding space where it was written was described in a June 1945 article by a reporter for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, or the New Zurich News:
When I visited the shelter [wrote the reporter], I had the opportunity to see the emergency housing, fully equipped with a kitchen, bedroom, living room, radio, a small library, and oil lamps — evidence of a stunning experience. Meals could only be prepared at night so as not to attract the Gestapo’s attention, who would have noticed the smoke during the day. Food had to be supplied by friends who willingly gave up a portion of their rations to help those unfortunate people living for weeks in utter darkness.4
Just as the story of Purim sounds very contemporary as we hear every day of the atrocities being perpetrated upon the Ukrainian people, so too does this description from 1945 feel right up to the minute, especially after a week in which civilians sheltering in a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol were bombed as they hid well below the theater, likely living in darkness but thinking they would be spared since the theater had been emblazoned with huge signs displaying the word “Children” in Russian. Here in the year 2022, God help us, people in Europe are hiding again in the catacombs from certain death.
We now know that in this new world-ish war, even children cannot escape the evil machinations of a deranged, delusional and sadistic dictator. And we ask, where is the hope for the Ukrainian people? Hidden inside this question is another question that lurks in our minds if we are honest with ourselves: Where is the hope for all of us and for our world? Why can’t this evil be stopped cold? What is next?
In that long-ago inscription on a cellar wall in Cologne is a clue to an answer, also hidden. Thanks to research performed just last year by one of my fellow graduates of the Starr King School for the Ministry, Everett Howe, a translation of that Swiss newspaper article from 1945 offers a more accurate transliteration of the inscription from the original German. See if you can hear how it reads differently.
‘I believe in the sun, though it be dark;
I believe in God, though He be silent;
I believe in neighborly love, though it be unable to reveal itself.’5
It is the last line that holds a clue for us. Then, as now, there were risks to openly and aggressively coming to the rescue. It’s why our leaders have ruled out a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Back in the Second World War, neighborly love was unable to reveal itself even though it was oh, so present, as evidenced by the hidden living quarters set up in that cellar and the food secretly passed to those hiding there.
Neighborly love being unable to reveal itself is in fact how we got our flaming chalice, the burning symbol of Unitarian Universalism. The image of the flaming chalice was conceived as a secret mark for special correspondence from members of the Unitarian Service Committee in Europe in World War II who were helping European Jews escape the Nazis. It was novel enough that it wouldn’t be seen as allied with any particular cause and would escape scrutiny. And that symbol came to inspire thousands of Unitarian Universalists. And it came out of a need for neighborly love to not reveal itself.
And so, like a magician who uses misdirection to say look over here! while doing something over there, God, a singular entity so seemingly silent, is working through the many, causing the multitudes to practice neighborly love, to take risks, to be bold—whether it is NATO and the West uniting in ways that would have been unimaginable just months ago, American armed service veterans signing up to head to the front in Ukraine, the arts, sports and business worlds isolating the aggressor, or Russian people protesting in the streets at great peril … and the Ukrainian people and their president rising like Queen Esther to risk their own lives so that others might live. For Esther risked death when she approached her husband King Ahashverosh about Haman’s plot to kill the Jews—to approach the king without permission was punishable by death, even for his queen. She did it anyway. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jewish man whose father’s three brothers were murdered by the Nazis, has repeatedly stood before the world in his olive short-sleeve shirt, appearing before presidents and parliaments, our modern-day kings and ministers, and pleaded for his people. All while changing locations and dodging the bombs raining down on his capital city of Kiev.
And it sometimes feels as if Ukraine’s president and its people are not acting purely out of self-interest or survival, but for the cause of freedom in general—the ultimate in neighborly love. Of course, when it comes to Ukraine—which we used to refer to as The Ukraine, remember?—there are complications, a history we Americans know little of that dates back to 1919. But what is clear is that now, as then, a nation wants to be free, sovereign, and free from tyranny and persecution. And its fight for freedom has caught the world’s imagination. We can pause and ask why this has not happened with Syria, or Yemen, or why Afghanistan is now in the hands of the Taliban, leaving Afghans and especially Afghan women terribly vulnerable. What I find compelling, and hopeful, is that while much of the free world is focused on Ukraine, conscientious voices are also calling for us to consider whether a Euro-centric bias has caused us to look the other way while non-white majority countries are also subject to invasion, bombs, starvation and devastation. It is as if the magician is asking us to pay closer attention, that if we wish to know her secrets, the meaning of life, the meaning of love, we can’t just sit and watch, hoping to be entertained, waiting for the next trick.
The magician wants us to be fully and hopelessly engaged—hopelessly in that we would be willing to give up the comforts of our complacency to ponder that even things that seem to make no sense or disturb us have purpose and are pointing in the right direction. And so, even as the war in Ukraine rages on, suddenly we are aware that there are other Ukraines going on, other people hiding from bombing, other children being slaughtered elsewhere in the world.
Let’s just take one: the civil war in Yemen. According to the Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker, as of Friday, an estimated 20.7 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, nearly 111,000 people have been killed since 2015, and 4.2 million people have been displaced.6
It has been happening right under our noses for seven years … and this conflict, too, calls for neighborly love. Neighborly love and the same outrage and united response we have now only recently seen we are capable of.
It may all seem like just too much. And of course every conflict has its complicated history, as do Ukraine and Russia, as do the Saudi-led coalition and Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen. But might it be that, as with the story of Purim, there is something at work beyond what we can see or hear, something behind the curtain, God at work even when God is not obvious, something that is stoking our highest aims and most heightened consciousness—and conscientiousness? Maybe we have been brought to this moment for a reason.
Maybe it’s time to step back from the footlights, to de-center ourselves, and take a walk back behind the curtain. Where the real action is. All the headlines, the social media posts, the news analysis, the opinionators—Queen Esther wouldn’t have paid any attention to them. She acted on faith, knowing that her God was always nearby, right behind the curtain, even when he was silent. God was there when words were scrawled on a cellar wall in Cologne. God was there this week in that bomb shelter beneath the theater in Mariupol, even though we don’t know that from the headlines yet. God is here in this sanctuary, wondering if we get that he wants us to know what he knows. For a great magician understands that his most cherished secret, that only love can really do the impossible, is meant to be shared. The rest is just misdirection.
Where is there hope? Where is the love? How can evil be stopped cold? If we only ask questions, we’ll just question the answers. Rather, don’t question. Trust. Place your trust in humanity. That’s where God works best. Behind the scenes and through the multitudes, in countless ways and almost never obvious. In a way, when we have faith, we are backstage with God and we are in on her secrets. With such an ally you could even approach your king with a request, even if it meant risking death.
And so, in fact, we are the hope, and there are least two reasons to believe our love will prevail and our good will will triumph over evil.
First of all, there are a lot of us. And second, and more important … there are a lot of us. We have seen in just the past few weeks that for all the evil in the world, there is far more good. There is far more love.
Interesting that the word “Purim” means lots, as in the lots or chances the evil Haman cast like dice to determine the date on the calendar he would slaughter the Jews. When we cast our lot with each other, we summon an awesome power to overcome such evil intent. With this power we might be the heroes of our own story. But if we are lucky, somewhere in there we might also spend a few precious moments reclaiming our faith, making it visible, the sun just behind the clouds, standing backstage with God.
Amen. Blessed be.
Some English translations of the Bible, the NASB and ESV, show the word “Lord” appearing once in Song of Solomon 8:6.
https://www.templebetham.com/why-purim-so-important.
Everett Howe, The Humanist Seminarian. I believe in the sun, part V: the source. https://humanistseminarian.com/2021/04/04/i-believe-in-the-sun-part-v-the-source/.
Quoted from the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, June 26, 1945.
Quoted from the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, June 26, 1945. “The following inscription is written on the wall of one of these underground rooms, which in some ways resemble the Roman catacombs: ‘I believe in the sun, though it be dark; I believe in God, though He be silent; I believe in neighborly love, though it be unable to reveal itself.’