Out of the Fog of War... Alignment?

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As man of you know, today is the Fast of Esther, which comes right before Purim.

Back in the time of the first exile of the Jews from Israel, in Persia, King Xerxes (Ahashverosh, in Hebrew) had an evil advisor (Haman, may his name be erased from history), who wanted the Jews destroyed once and for all.

The heroine of the story, the Jewish woman named Esther, essentially sacrificed herself and her lineage to go into an audience with Ahashverosh after undertaking a fast of 3 days (along with the rest of the Jews) to persuade him to eliminate Haman and his 10 sons, all products of the evil Amalek, a nation that has always sought our elimination first, targeting our women and children and elderly from the back of our people’s procession through the Sinai desert.

In short, the fast is a huge deal historically.

But as we can all plainly see in our very day, the fast has never had a more personal and heavy weight for all Jews.

Our nation is beset not just by terrorists who have raped our women, beheaded our babies, kidnapped our elderly and otherwise committed crimes against our Jewish humanity.

We are also facing a concerted effort by our enemies - and by our enemies from within the pale of our supposed allies - to delegitimize us, to exclude us from public institutions and discourse, to silence our voices, to physically and emotionally and financially and otherwise harass us, to pressure us.

In short, to royally F* with us.

It’s far from our first collective rodeo.

We are taught that Amalek will rise to destroy us in every single generation.

And also that we must arise to kill Amalek first.

The IDF is certainly doing an amazing job at it right now, despite the lackluster political leadership that slept on the all the intelligence and got us into this mess, to begin with.

And despite the pressure from our “allies.”

The last couple weeks have seen the unfortunate rise of the Kapo, Jews who seek to refute their Jewishness or otherwise pressure the Jewish state to capitulate, put up and shut up, just follow the script (to our own destruction, G-d forbid).

We are still on edge here, wondering what’s next as the Rafah invasion looms, arms boycotts are starting, Biden is pressing, so-called allies are turning their backs on us.

We are still burying our dead, as we saw this week, with the funeral of Daniel Perez, Z”L, who was found to be dead with complete certainty according to Jewish law, based on intelligence.

We saw and prayed with his dear father Doron only 3 weeks ago for his son’s return…

Aside from the absolute hell of Gaza, there is the 10x better armed and better trained evil up north, Hizballah (may their name be erased for good).

We got some Houthis blowing some serious smoke on world trade.

So on and so forth.

We REALLY need that Purim miracle this year, like we haven’t needed in at least 80-ish years, since the Holocaust.

We pray and we work hard behind the scenes to eliminate every shred and hint of Amalek we can, starting with ourselves.

And it’s with this in mind that I had a strange insight last night, as I lay down to sleep.

You see, this morning, it was my turn to drive my eldest and her classmates to a special gifted-and-talented program for selected kids here in Haifa.

I’d done it a couple times before, without much incident.

But as it happens, the GPS in our car and on our phones simply doesn’t work these days, given the IDF jamming it to prevent Hizballah from targeting us with hyper-precision.

So the old spatial reasoning and memory re-emerge.

For whatever reason, perhaps because Haifa is insanely hilly and has tons of winding roads up and down the mountain - or maybe just because of age and lack of practice, I’ve had a bit of trouble in our almost 3 years here in visualizing some of the usual pathways from place to place in town.

Yeah, there are some crazy winding roads here.

And tunnels and indistinct Soviet-lite architecture.

I joke that it’s like San Francisco, if you don’t look too closely (LOL).

So I lay in bed falling asleep and I kid you not, a road suddenly draws itself with perfect clarity in my mind, with the exact spatial progress drawn on a map.

Down the hill from our hood, through the tunnel, out by the bay, taking one major highway, turning off, turning left, through town and to the exact school.

I was kind of shocked, myself.

Just like someone was drawing the path for me on a map right in front of me.

Why now, suddenly?

To be frank, I’ve been feeling quite listless lately.

Things are moving very slowly.

Some things just aren’t working out.

There’s stress.

There’s a lot of waiting.

Schedule’s changed since I left the local job.

I’ve just been feeling stuck.

Yesterday, it rained in the morning.

Just got out of the house, worked from the campus library.

Really felt productive, ate well throughout the day, got things done.

Wasn’t interrupted by any random calls.

Progress unlocked, in other words.

Maybe it was the extra sleep the night before.

I don’t know.

But for whatever reason, there I lay in bed, in the dark, with a mask, and the map just drew itself, where it hadn’t drawn itself in nearly 3 years (!!).

Is it a sign of something new, something coming down the pipeline?

Hopefully only good things. I don’t know and can’t say, obviously.

So I pray. I’m also fasting today, as are hundreds of thousands of others here in Israel and abroad.

We all pray for our enemies to be eliminated (especially the Amalekites in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran), for our hostages from Gaza (and Russia, Yemen and elsewhere) to come home alive and well as soon as Divinely possible (at any moment).

We pray for peace for our children and for ourselves.

The sun is shining. The view in the library looks north.

The energy is good.

I don’t know that we have all the answers or deserve what we pray for.

But I do know one thing. G-d has sent me a map through the wilderness, as he has done so many other times in my life.

We will find our way home. We will prevail.

May G-d grant you peace and strength to deal with the many challenges in our world today.

May we know no more pain.