Purim in an Age of Empire
Purim begins with a spectacle of male power. The Megillah opens with King Ahashverosh hosting a feast that lasts for months. The text lingers over goblets and fabrics; it shows a ruler performing dominance for an audience of other men. He then commands that Vashti be brought before the drunken court “to show her beauty.” Vashti refuses.
The king’s advisors panic that if Vashti’s defiance becomes known, “there will be contempt and wrath in every household.” Their fear is not about the marriage between Vashti and the King; it is about hierarchy itself. If one woman can say no, what happens to male authority everywhere?
The Book of Esther begins with the punishment of a woman.
It is tempting to read this as ancient melodrama, safely confined to Persia long ago. But the Megillah is not only telling us about a king. It is telling us about a culture in which masculinity and power are fused, in which dominance must be constantly performed, and in which women’s bodies become the stage on which male insecurity is resolved.
Pankaj Mishra, writing about what he calls a global “crisis of masculinity,” describes how “luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream. Mishra argues that this is not strength but panic. It is “the doomed quest for a stable and ordered world that entails nothing less than war on the irrepressible plurality of human existence.” When power feels unstable, it compensates by becoming louder, harder, more contemptuous of vulnerability.
Purim exposes what happens when masculinity becomes a political project.
This is why we cannot tell the story of Jeffrey Epstein as if he were an isolated monster, an extraordinary aberration in an otherwise normal system. That framing is emotionally satisfying because it reassures us. It suggests that the danger is rare and contained in Jewish communities or Israeli society. It reveals a world in which powerful men (and women) of every country and religion traded emails, introductions, favors, and people to gain proximity to wealth and prestige. This is the same worldview that animated the panic in Ahashverosh’s court. Women are distractions from male greatness. Women’s autonomy is destabilizing. If women are weak, then men are entitled. If women are distractions, then excluding them is a virtue.
The problem is not only sexual abuse. It is a culture of global patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism guided and upheld by those with extraordinary power. It's about whose money we take, who we hire, and who we put on boards and leadership positions. It's the social circles across the right and left that can joke about harassment while quietly coordinating to silence survivors and discredit them.
The #MeToo movement threatened that culture by insisting that no one is too rich or too powerful to escape accountability. Of course, the backlash was swift and there was little change for survivors. But it is important to recognize that these powerful abusers appeared scared, not primarily by criminal charges but by social consequences. The panic about “cancel culture” was, in part, a panic about losing immunity. That panic is clear in the Megillah. Haman’s rage is not only that Mordechai refuses to bow. It is that someone has stepped outside the script. Someone has declined to participate in the ritual affirmation of his power.
The Epstein story also reveals something else that Purim forces us to confront: elite networks are built on affinity and access. The reporting about Jewish institutions and leaders who courted Epstein’s donations even after his conviction is painful because it is specific. It describes how philanthropic systems can create “an elite, separate group that had access to networks, that had access to power, and could therefore do things that others couldn’t do."
It is possible, and necessary, to hold both truths at once:
Some of Epstein’s network included prominent Jews and Jewish institutions that courted money even after his conviction. That is real, and it demands communal self-examination in the Jewish world.
The vast majority of the world's wealthiest and most influential people are not Jewish. Antisemitic conspiracy theories that weaponize that reality to frame collective blame to Jews and Israel are also real, and they are a threat to Jews and a distraction from actual accountability.
Power does not begin at the scale of a private island.
It begins in rooms where everyone knows something is wrong and chooses silence.
It begins where donors are allowed free rein because everyone is afraid to jeopardize the next campaign or capital project.
It begins when a religious leader or board is quietly warned about someone’s behavior and responds, “Let’s handle this internally because we don't want to let this get out."
It begins when an organizer is known to cross boundaries and disrespect others, but people say, “She's too important to the movement,” or “We can’t give ammunition to our opponents”
It begins when people confuse ideological alignment with moral integrity, assuming that someone on the correct side of an issue cannot also abuse power.
Vashti’s refusal exposes the fragility of a system that depends on compliance. Esther’s later decision to speak out exposes the risk required to challenge that system from within. Neither path is easy. Survival strategies are not the same as liberation. Esther navigated coercive structures that were never designed for her dignity. Most victims and survivors do not get to be Vashti. Many have to be Esther, calculating risk, choosing timing, trying to stay alive long enough to change anything and unsure of the future.
Maybe it is not a coincidence that this story is set in Persia, today's modern Iran. It’s important to acknowledge without hesitation the deep harm and inexcusable repression many Iranians have faced under a violent theocratic regime that punishes dissent and constrains women’s freedom. We can say clearly that authoritarianism clothed in religion is dangerous: this is true of every religion. And we can also say that liberation is never delivered by foreign bombs, that military domination does not produce dignity, and that no government wages war from a place of pure innocence. At the end of the Megillah, the Jews fight back and kill their enemies in the thousands. But history tells us what the Megillah does not: that violence did not secure permanent safety for the Jews, it did not end antisemitism, and it did not usher in liberation. Purim does not teach us to divide the world into righteous empires and evil ones. It teaches us to distrust concentrated, unaccountable power wherever it appears. All power must be checked. All nation-states are built upon the oppression of those must vulnerable.
Our responsibility is not to cheer for one throne over another, but to be like Esther: to risk speaking when silence is safer, to challenge power from within our own communities, and to refuse the fantasy that domination will ever save us. Purim offers us a model that honors tochecka (loving rebuke), and solidarity. It insists that decrees can be reversed. The phrase v’nahafoch hu, “it was turned upside down,” is not magic. It is the result of people refusing to bow, refusing to disappear, refusing to accept that power is untouchable.
If we are serious about learning from Purim in this moment, then the lesson is not only that villains exist. It is that our cultures enable them. We are all complicit in systems of harm, and we are each responsible in our families and communities to interrupt those systems. We must build communities in which autonomy and dignity do not require exile, in which those with the most power do not purchase immunity, and in which leadership is accountable.
