This week’s Torah reading contains a perplexing passage that has led to endless debate among commentators. The Israelites, wandering in the wilderness, complain to Moses and Aaron because there is no water. God tells Moses to command a rock to bring forth water. Denouncing the people as rebels, Moses strikes the rock twice, water gushes out, and the people quench their thirst. God then informs Moses and Aaron that “because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.” But for what, exactly, are Moses and Aaron being punished? Marc Angel ventures his own explanation:

The Midrash connects the death of Miriam, [which occurs in the verse immediately before this episode], with the lack of water. As long as she was alive, her merit was so great that a well miraculously accompanied the people. Once she died, that well ceased to give water and the people therefore became thirsty. . . . She was a key leader of Israel and was gifted with prophecy.

Yet, when she died, the Torah tersely reports that she was buried. There is no mention of the Israelites mourning her death. (By contrast, after the deaths of Aaron and Moses, the Torah indicates a national 30-day mourning period.) Not only did the people not seem to appreciate the lifelong service of Miriam, they are not reported as having offered any words of consolation to her brothers, Moses and Aaron. The people didn’t seem to care much about Miriam’s passing, and did not seem to associate her virtue with the existence of the water well that had accompanied them in the wilderness. The people were thirsty; they were not concerned about the death of Miriam or the grief of Moses and Aaron.

When the Israelites complained, then, Moses and Aaron were deeply disappointed and pained. Not only should the people have had more faith in God, Who had been providing for them throughout their years in the wilderness; the people should have shown appreciation to Miriam! How could they be so callous? . . .

When Moses and Aaron assembled the people to bring forth water from the rock, they were not in a calm state of mind. . . . Moses . . . lashed out at the people, calling them rebels. He smote the rock rather than speaking to it. Moses let his anger get the best of him. Aaron, as Moses’ accomplice in this episode, apparently shared Moses’ feelings and concurred with his words and actions. So this was the great “sin” of Moses and Aaron: letting their personal grief and frustration overtake their reason and sense of responsibility to the people.

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.