Closing Prayer for Moral Mondays CT/Fairfield County — 3/2/26

Today on the Jewish calendar is an observance known as Ta'anit Esther — a daylong fast that commemorates the one the biblical Queen Esther calls the Jews of Persia to observe before she confronts her husband, the king, unsummoned, which in her world could mean death.

In Jewish tradition, a fast is not primarily about hunger. It is about wakefulness — about refusing to move through a moment that demands our full attention as though it were ordinary.

And this is a moment that demands our full attention.

On Friday, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. Whatever one believes about the threat Iran may or may not pose, something else is also happening here — something we need to name. We have watched, over these past months, the same logic applied again and again: boats blown up in the Caribbean, a foreign head of state abducted, families separated and detained in our own communities, and now a country bombed and its senior leadership decapitated — each action arriving so fast on the heels of the last that we barely have time to ask who authorized it, what it will cost, or who will bear that cost. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we are not meant to ask. Perhaps we are meant to accept all this as simply the way things are now.

That, my friends, is what I want us to refuse today. Not just this war, but the logic underneath it: the slow, deliberate normalization of a world in which power answers to nothing and no one. In which the measure of what is permissible is only what can be gotten away with. In which the lives deemed expendable keep multiplying — immigrants in our courthouses, civilians in Tehran, children caught in the machinery of someone else's calculations. It is the same logic. It is always the same logic. And it depends, more than anything else, on our exhaustion. On our coming to believe there is nothing to be done.

The Fast of Esther immediately precedes the Jewish holiday known as Purim, which begins tonight at sundown. Purim is deeply connected to the biblical book of Esther, an ancient Jewish story about a young woman living as a minority inside a powerful empire, who hides her true identity in order to rise to a position of power and privilege, and then has to navigate the question of what, if anything, she can and should do with her power when her people is targeted for destruction. When catastrophe looms, her uncle Mordecai confronts her with a question she cannot escape: Who knows whether you have not come to your position for such a time as this?

Now, Esther's first instinct — like most of ours — is to find a reason why she can't be the one. It's too dangerous. She could lose everything. There must be someone else. Mordecai doesn't let her off the hook. And eventually she relents, and calls for a fast — this fast, Ta'anit Esther, the one we mark today — in which her whole community gathers to hold the weight of the moment together before she acts.

And then she acts. She goes to the king uninvited, saying simply: If I perish, I perish. And then she goes.

What has always moved me about that moment is that there is no miracle to propel her. No voice from the sky. No sign. And that, it turns out, is not incidental — it is the whole point. The Book of Esther is the only book in the entire Hebrew Bible in which the name of God does not appear. Not once. The ancient rabbis wrestled with that absence for centuries. Their answer was that the hiddenness is the point: that there are moments in history when the sacred speaks not through revelation but through human choice. When the only question is whether we will be the ones who act.

We are in the fast right now. In the not-yet. In the place where the outcome is not written.

But Purim does not let us stay in that place of uncertainty and anxiety. Because the holiday that follows this fast is not a memorial. It is a feast. Celebration, generosity, noise, and joy — not as an escape, but as a moral insistence that power does not get the last word on what the world can be. The tradition commands us to give gifts to friends and food to people in need, to eat and drink together, to make so much noise that cruelty cannot hear itself think.

Joy is not the reward for when justice is won. Joy is part of how we fight for it.

Generosity is not what we do after the work. Generosity is the work.

Let us pray.

Ribbono shel Olam — Sovereign of the Universe, as Jews have called out across millennia —

God of every name, and the power that makes for redemption —

We come to you today in the threshold between fast and feast, between grief and hope, between the world as it is and the world as it must become.

We pray for the people of Iran — for civilians who did not choose this war and who are paying for it with their lives. For those who have long dreamed of freedom and who deserve better than to have that dream conscripted into someone else's military ambition.

We pray for all who dwell in the Holy Land — for families in shelters, for those sitting with real and unbearable loss, for peoples who have known genuine threat and who deserve a path to safety that does not require the world to burn.

We pray for our immigrant neighbors — for those who walk into courthouses afraid, for families separated by the same logic of unchecked power that is now dropping bombs abroad.

We pray for our country — for leaders still capable of asking whether force is wise, whether law still means something, whether the lives of other people's children count.

And we pray for ourselves — that we not grow numb. That we not confuse the dizzying pace of catastrophe for its inevitability. That we remember, when we cannot feel it, that our gathering here is itself a form of resistance — that joy, and generosity, and presence are not soft alternatives to the hard work of justice. They are the hard work of justice.

Give us the courage of Esther — to fast together before we act, to act without guarantee of outcome, and to keep returning to this work because we have decided, together, that this is the moment we were made for.

If we perish, we perish. But first — give us fortitude enough to feast, grace enough to give, spirit enough to sing, and courage enough to continue showing up with and for one another in pursuit of a better world.

Amen.