If you consider yourself a secular rationalist, you may be inclined to see what’s happening as a “religious” war, perhaps to think that humanity has, or should have, moved beyond such primitive thinking by now. That’s understandable. And yet I wonder whether, in some sense, all wars, indeed all conflicts, whether relational, political, or global, contain a degree of primitivism, a kind of baked-in irrationality.

Tonight, at the Megillah reading for Purim, I sat listening to a story set in ancient Persia some 2,500 years ago, the same land where, just a few days ago, a brutal and authoritarian ruler met his end, and heard of the destruction of those who conspired to annihilate the Jews, only to be destroyed themselves. It struck me that what I was reading in an ancient text was precisely what I was hearing in the news.

I am, among other things, a rational person, and as such, I feel it would be wrong not to use the word miraculous to describe what is taking place, even in 2026