Purim always reminds me of Solomon, “the wisest man in the world,” says I Kings, and Solomon always reminds me of Ecclesiastes — since he is the reputed author. Tradition tells us that Solomon wrote two books of our Tanach: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. Not to be profane, but both of these books are as weird as they are beautiful. As inappropriate in our Holy Bible as pickled pigs feet on the Kiddush table.
How Ecclesiastes made the biblical Hall of Fame is beyond human understanding. It is sour like a lemon, cynical like a Greek philosopher with a stomachache and as heretical as the banned Spinoza. But it’s in our sacred text.
But why does Purim remind me of Ecclesiastes? Because Solomon (remember “the wisdom of God was in him”) in Chapter 1 of his shocking book says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” He must have been totally distracted by one of his restless wives the night he wrote Chapter 1. Because Shlomo, who “surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the East,” was dead wrong when he stated over and over his “nothing new” theory. The Jews of Persia discovered this several centuries later, when the currents of history brought Judaism and Haman into collision. Haman was something new under the sun. He wanted to eliminate the Jews. He was the father of the Final Solution. And don’t tell me about Pharaoh. The great pyramid builder does not qualify as a genocidist. He had no desire to kill Jews –he wanted to enslave them. Dead Jews can’t build pyramids.
Even the Amalekites, cursed repeatedly in our Bible, jackals who snapped at our flanks on our Sinai trek — maybe their hostility was half rational. Maybe they were worried about their land and crops as 600,000 slaves streamed by. Maybe even they were not terminators. Neither were the Philistines, Jebusites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks or Romans. They were the normal, greedy, barbaric nation states of their era — bent on conquest and loot. Where’s the profit in genocide? They burned our cities, stole our crops and women, plundered the temple and randomly killed us when they were in a bloodthirsty mood. Exodus tells us that, occasionally, our Israelite forefathers were equally reckless.
In “The Godfather,” Part I, a murderous enemy says to the Corleone family, “Hey Michael, nothing personal, it’s just business.” It was the way of the world.
Bible times were full of marching armies, shattered walls, and flaming towns. Hacked olive groves and uprooted grapevines. Just like Solomon said, “nothing new under the sun.” Until Haman! He wanted to “annihilate all the Jews. Both young and old. Women and children,” says Esther’s book.
The author of Ecclesiastes must have looked down in horror — to see his wisdom contradicted. There was something unimaginably, shockingly new under the sun. The lust to murder an entire nation. Not only to loot their women, goods, and gold — not only to usurp their homeland — not only to utilize their bodies in slavery. But murder.
This is not “just business.” This is personal.
Haman’s hatred is a force that continues to oil the minds of murderous men: first the pogroms of the 19th century, then Hitler, Stalin, and now this Islamic terror. Not slave-masters like Pharaoh or conquerors like Nebuchadnezzar, but killers who are interested in the thin strip of territory along the Western Mediterranean only as a mass grave for Jews. Keep the land, they say; we’ll bury you in it.
This is not a charitable or consoling thought. One would like to think of our current enemies not as inheritors of Haman’s blood lust but as rational political combatants whose quarrel with us is about the ownership of Eretz Yisrael.
Remember the wisdom of Solomon. His “nothing is new” theory may not have recognized Haman as new as a steel, double-edged sword. But he may be right with Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida and associated roughnecks. Their face looks like the face of Haman.