When God Doesn’t Sign His Work

When God Doesn’t Sign His Work                By: Shira Schechter

On Shabbat morning the sirens went off. We grabbed the kids and went to the safe room, as we have done so many times since October 7th. But the sirens kept coming, one after another, and we knew something big was happening. For weeks, President Trump had been threatening to strike Iran, so we had a theory about what was going on. But it was Shabbat, and we couldn’t check our phones and confirm anything. We sat and waited and prayed and wondered.

Hours later, when Shabbat ended, we found out. Israel and the United States had indeed struck Iran. Khamenei was dead. The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, the man who had funded every terror proxy from Hezbollah to Hamas, was gone — three days before Purim.

Today is Purim, the holiday on which Jews read the Megillah — the Book of Esther — and celebrate the salvation of the Jewish people from their Persian enemies. This year, that story felt a little closer than usual.

Everyone by now has mentioned the obvious: Persia, Purim, the timing. And yes, the parallel is real and it is staggering. But there is something deeper happening in the Book of Esther, something that goes beyond the thematic coincidence of destroying a Persian enemy on the eve of celebrating the fall of a Persian enemy. It is something the Sages noticed long ago, and it speaks directly to this moment.

The Book of Esther is the only book in the Hebrew Bible in which God’s name does not appear. Not once. No “the Lord,” no “God,” nothing.

For a book that is explicitly about the miraculous salvation of the Jewish people, this is quite surprising. The sea doesn’t split. No fire falls from heaven. No prophet stands up and announces divine deliverance. Instead, what happens? A king has trouble sleeping. He asks a servant to read him the palace chronicle. The chronicle happens to be opened to the page where Mordechai once uncovered an assassination plot. And one thing leads to another, and Haman ends up on the gallows he built for someone else.

That is the miracle of Purim. A string of coincidences that don’t look like anything at all — until you step back and see the shape of it.

The Book of Esther is a theology of divine concealment. God is the author who doesn’t sign His work.

Now come back to this week.

I am not a prophet. I cannot tell you with certainty what God is doing in the killing of Khamenei three days before Purim. But I can tell you what the Book of Esther tells us about how God works in history — and it is not with splitting seas and pillars of fire. It is with intelligence operations and geopolitical miscalculations and a supreme leader who, for all his power, could not outrun his fate. It is with F-35s and the kind of timing that military planners will spend years trying to explain.

The Megillah is teaching us to read history at a different level. Not just “what happened” but “what kind of happening is this.”

When God’s name disappears from the text, He doesn’t disappear from the story. He goes underground. And the question the Megillah asks each of us — running in and out of safe rooms, watching headlines scroll, trying to make sense of it — is whether we have the eyes to see Him there.

But the Megillah asks a second question too: not only how do we understand what happened, but how do we live while it is still happening.

“The Yehudim enjoyed light and gladness, happiness and honor” (Esther 8:16)

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l called the joy of Purim “therapeutic joy” — a fundamentally different category from the happiness we feel when things go well. Adar doesn’t demand that we feel good because circumstances are good. It demands that we celebrate against the circumstances, as a deliberate act. “You defeat fear by joy,” he wrote. “You conquer terror by collective celebration.”

The Persian decree, Sacks noted, is the first warrant for genocide in recorded history. We know what it is to hear those words issued against us. And our response — our permanent, legislated, Talmudically-mandated response — is to make a party.

The old adage is true – “they attacked us, we won, let’s eat!”

The enemies of the Jewish people have always aimed at something beyond our physical destruction. They want us to live in fear, to walk bent, to feel the permanent precariousness of our existence as a curse. Purim is the Jewish refusal. The noise, the costumes, the festive meal, the wine — these are not distractions from the danger. They are the answer to it.

“A people that can know the full darkness of history and yet rejoice,” Rabbi Sacks wrote, “is a people whose spirit no power on Earth can ever break.”

This Purim we are not celebrating a story from the distant past. We are living it. The Persian threat is real. The miraculous timing is real. The God who doesn’t sign His work is real. And the joy we celebrate tonight is not naivete or escapism — it is the most defiant thing a Jew can do!