This time is different.
Saturday morning, Israel launched Operation Lion’s Roar. The United States launched Operation Epic Fury. Together, they struck Iran’s military infrastructure, eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and took out the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This was not a warning shot, not a limited strike, not another round of tit-for-tat. This was an all-out offensive designed to bring down the Mullah’s regime once and for all. And it began on the Shabbat before Purim.
Israel has fought Iran before. In April 2024, Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel. Israel intercepted nearly all of them and called it a night. In June 2025, Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites. Limited, surgical, careful. So what changed? Why is this time different?
Most people know the broad strokes of the Purim story. Haman, the chief minister of the Persian Empire, convinces King Ahasuerus to sign a decree authorizing the genocide of every Jewish man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Mordecai and his niece Esther outmaneuver Haman. Haman is hanged on the very gallows he built for Mordecai. The Jews are permitted to defend themselves, and they do so successfully, killing 75,000 of their enemies across the Persian Empire.
It is a spectacular salvation. A complete reversal of fortune. Any reasonable person, at that point, would thank God, go home, and celebrate with a good glass of wine.
But not Esther.
At the climax of the story, the king turns to Esther with a question that is really an accusation:
Ahasuerus is not marveling with admiration. He is a volatile Persian king sitting in his palace while hundreds of his subjects are being killed in the streets outside his palace. He is deeply uncomfortable. The carnage in his own capital city is staring him in the face. The subtext of his words is unmistakable: is this not enough? Are we not done here?
Yet Esther, knowing full well that she is pushing a volatile king to his limit, then makes a request so audacious it could have ended with her head on a spike. She asks the king for one more day of battle. This is not a request to save the Jews of Persia. By this point, after a full day of fighting, the antisemites were largely defeated, and Jews across the Persian empire were no longer in danger. Esther is asking for something different. She wants another day to launch an offensive strike in the heart of the Persian capital – to hunt down and destroy the enemies of the Jews.
The king, astonished by Esther’s audacity, grants her request. The next day, the Jews of Shushan once again picked up their swords and hunted the remaining antisemites of the city.
This additional day of battle is why Purim is celebrated on two different days. The Jews in the unwalled cities of the empire finished fighting on the 13th of Adar and celebrated on the 14th. The Jews of Shushan, the walled capital, fought an extra day and therefore celebrated a day later, on the 15th. The Sages ruled that all ancient walled cities follow Shushan‘s lead and observe Purim on the 15th of Adar. This second day is called Shushan Purim, and today, the Jews of Jerusalem are celebrating it.
But is a scheduling quirk from 2,500 years ago really worth preserving forever? Why should Jews in Jerusalem celebrate Purim on a different day than Jews in Tel Aviv, or New York, or anywhere else in the world? Wouldn’t one unified day of celebration make far more sense? The Sages could have easily standardized Purim to a single date. They chose not to.
The Israeli journalist Itamar Segal argues that the Sages were making a critically important point. The two days of Purim represent two entirely different stages in the battle against evil.
The first day of Purim is about the miracle of survival. It is the day that Haman’s genocidal decree was reversed, the day the Jewish people went from victims to victors, the day God’s hidden hand became visible in history. It is a day of genuine salvation, and it is the Purim that most of the Jewish world celebrates.
But the second day, Shushan Purim, is something else entirely. Esther understood that surviving is not the same as winning. When you play defense, even brilliantly, you send the enemy home alive. He licks his wounds, rebuilds his strength, and waits for his next opportunity. And one day, when you are weaker or distracted or unprepared, he strikes again. Playing defense leaves the initiative permanently with the enemy. He chooses when to strike. He chooses the battlefield. He chooses the timing. Survival buys you time, but it does not buy you safety.
Esther’s revolution was this: Stop defending. Take the fight to the enemy in his home, on your terms, until the evil is not merely contained but uprooted and obliterated. As David taught us:
It is not enough to defeat antisemites like the Iranian Mullahs. They must be pursued and completely destroyed.
This is why this war with Iran is different. Israel is not playing the defensive game any longer. The April 2024 attack and the June 2025 campaign were both first-day-of-Purim operations, defensive and reactive. But this war, Operation Lion’s Roar, is the second day of Purim. Israel took out the Supreme Leader on day one. Israel struck Iran’s missile infrastructure before most of those missiles could be fired. Israel and America went into the heart of the Persian capital and did what Esther asked the king to do 2,500 years ago.
Today is Shushan Purim. We are not celebrating survival. We are celebrating the moment Esther refused to leave the enemy breathing. That is exactly what Israel and the United States are doing right now.
The Mullahs built their gallows for us. We intend to make sure they hang from them.
