According to local tradition, a shrine in the Iranian city of Hamadan marks the burial place of Mordecai and Esther—the heroes of the Purim holiday, which is celebrated tomorrow and Thursday. The Israel National Library has recently publicized a series of letter that document the purchase of the tomb by Jewish communal leaders in 1971. Hanan Greenwood writes:

There is no mention of [the] burial site in Jewish texts, making the issue of their tomb a matter of dispute. According to several traditions dating back to the Middle Ages, the two Jewish figures are buried in Hamadan. According to one of the traditions, following the death of King Ahasuerus, supporters of Haman, who attempted to have all the Jews in the kingdom killed, sought to exact revenge from Esther and Mordecai, prompting the two to flee to Hamadan.

Initial evidence of the mausoleum’s ties to Esther and Mordecai was provided by the medieval Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century; [he] estimated Hamadan to have around 50,000 Jewish residents and described the tomb as being situated in front of the synagogue.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.