Rabbi’s Monthly Message

A Message from Rabbi David Lerner (February-March 2026)

At first glance, Purim and Pesah feel like opposites. Purim is our most carnivalesque holiday: costumes, noise, merriment, a little (or a lot) of drinking, and the kind of joy that spills out of the synagogue and into the street.

Pesah, by contrast, arrives with checklists and scrub brushes – cleaning, kashering, cooking, planning, and then the seder itself: a night of commentary, creativity, and curiosity, as we narrate the birth-story of our people with songs, questions, and ever-new interpretations.

And yet – these two holidays are not merely “close” on the calendar. They are inexorably linked.

The Talmud makes that connection explicit when it discusses a Jewish leap year (when we add an extra Adar). Which Adar should host Purim? The answer: the one closer to Nisan, so that we can juxtapose redemption to redemption; Purim’s salvation alongside Pesah’s liberation.

That rabbinic instinct – to put one ge’ulah (redemption) next to another – isn’t just about scheduling. It’s about meaning.

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The Torah famously reframes time itself in Egypt: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months… the first month of your year.” In other words, the “Jewish year” (in a Torah sense) begins not with Rosh Hashanah’s introspection, but with Pesah’s liberation. The first chapter of our national story is: you can leave Egypt, you can leave Mitzrayim, literally: the narrow place.

If Nisan is the “first month,” then Purim – celebrated at the end of Adar – sits right at the edge of the year, like a closing bracket that leads us back into the beginning.

Pesah starts the cycle: covenantal birth, freedom, the road to Sinai. Purim, in that same Torah-shaped calendar, becomes the final holiday before we turn the page again.

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Both stories happen outside the Land of Israel. Pesah unfolds in the crucible of Egypt. Purim unfolds in the courts of Persia, under King Ahasuerus.

Both narratives speak to experiences that are painfully real.

In Egypt, the trauma of oppression, of slavery, and the dehumanization that turns human beings into “inventory.”

In Persia, vulnerability in exile – what it means to be a minority living at the whim of power, facing an explicitly genocidal threat.

Purim and Pesah are redemption stories – but they are redemptions of different textures.

Pesah is the story of God interrupting history.

The plagues, the splitting of the sea, the sheer impossibility of it all: this is redemption with the volume turned up. In the haggadah’s telling, the spotlight is so intensely on God that Moses is almost totally absent.

That literary and spiritual choice matters. Pesah teaches that slavery is not “normal,” not “fate,” not the final word. Redemption can come from beyond what politics, sociology, or empire would predict. Freedom begins when God says, in effect: Enough.

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Purim moves in the opposite key. The Book of Esther is famously “secular” in one startling way: it makes no reference to God.

Instead, we meet Esther and Mordecai – two people with limited power who take enormous risks and act with courage, strategy, and a willingness to step forward even when doing so comes at a high price. Purim is replete with reversals and “coincidences,” but the redemption comes through human decisions, human bravery, and human solidarity.

Nachmanides (Ramban) explains the difference between nissim g’lu’im, open miracles (Pesah) and nissim nistarim, hidden miracles (Purim).

Pesah is God’s “outstretched arm,” Purim is the story of what happens when human beings become God’s outstretched arm.

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Here’s the rabbinic kicker: Midrash Mishlei teaches that in the Future Time, all of our holidays will be nullified – but Purim will not be nullified, citing the verse “these days of Purim will not be rescinded from the Jews.”

Maimonides (the Rambam) echoes this tradition, teaching that in the messianic era the books of the Prophets and the Writings will no longer be needed – except for Megillat Esther. The story of Purim, he suggests, will endure.

Why would that be?

Perhaps because Purim represents the kind of redemption the world still needs after the Exodus: a redemption initiated by human beings – guided by Torah values, sharpened by generations of Jewish moral imagination, and carried out through courageous action.

Pesah tells us that God can redeem. Purim insists that we must also learn how to redeem.

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Happy Purim and Hag Kasher V’Sameah – have a wonderful Passover,

Rabbi David Lerner