2 posts tagged with "History"

A Necessary Foreword​

I intended to write this post on Purim. But I did not. And now the esteemed Rabbi Kochubievsky posed me a question about how I would explain such two delicate topics as Haman's verdict to annihilate the entire Jewish people, and the Holocaust.

Perhaps Rabbi Kochubievsky himself posed the questions about Purim and the Holocaust as two separate difficult questions. But in my view this is precisely one question. Purim offers a way to explain the Holocaust, because if we analyze the situation in which Haman's decree came about, we can put forward a hypothesis that a certain pattern is discernible here, and extrapolate the conclusions to the subsequent and present-day situation.

As a continuation of my posts on Hanukkah and of my discussions with Rav Michael Jedwabny—see Hanukkah, The Son of the Star and the “Three Oaths”, The Storming of Heaven and the History of Hanukkah—discussions in which, it seems to me, there were interesting and profound thoughts on both sides—I noticed a historical circumstance to which I had not previously paid attention: