In “Waiting for the Purim Miracle,” Albert Veksler writes like a man watching ancient scripture climb off the page and into the night sky—where missiles are intercepted overhead and the holiday of Purim suddenly feels less like a costume party and more like a live-news ticker. He opens with a memory from the Knesset reception for the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast (JPB), when former Member of Knesset Yehuda Glick joked, “Albert, please don’t forget to invite me to the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast in Tehran!” The laugh line, Veksler suggests, carries something heavier: a yearning for a Middle East no longer “overshadowed” by Iran’s revolutionary regime.
Veksler places that longing into a recent political moment, recalling a January gathering at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Glick announced that the US president had halted negotiations with Iran and proclaimed, “The help is on the way.” From there, the piece leans into the Purim framework: in the Book of Esther, a seemingly unstoppable campaign of extermination turns—not through armies, but through the nerve of one woman willing to risk everything.
He draws blunt parallels to Ali Khamenei’s long-running “Death to Israel, Death to America” rhetoric, then pivots to a dramatic assertion of reversal in the present tense: Khamenei and more than 40 senior figures are “no longer around” to threaten annihilation. The theological point is clear: the God of Esther has not changed, and history can still flip at the last moment.
Yet Veksler doesn’t romanticize the modern scene. Iranian student protesters, many of them women, are not palace insiders; they are citizens pushing back against fear, demanding dignity and accountability. Their struggle, he notes, is uncertain—but courage, the story insists, shows up where you least expect it. The piece lands on a call to prayer and a question with sharp edges: will enough voices—inside and outside Iran—rise in time for a reversal?
Read the full essay for Veksler’s vivid Purim lens on power, peril, and the stubborn hope that the story isn’t finished—because he is betting that the next chapter can still surprise.
