As Purim approaches, one of the questions which has troubled me in the past is, why is that when we celebrate this festival, all walled cities have been elevated to the same status as the city of Shushan – where the original story took place? In all walled cities Purim is clebrated a day after everywhere else, this is called Shushan Purim.
It never made much sense to me. Why make up such a rule? And why choose walls as a defining quality? Why not say, for example that Shushan had a lot of chickens, so all other chicken clad cities should also celebrate with it?
Whenever I have thought about this question I have come up with no satisfactory answer, until this year when sitting on a bus in Jerusalem next to Rabbi Eliezer Woolf – who himself moved to Israel from Scotland – I received an enlightening answer.
“You see,” he explained, in a his soft Glaswegian accent, “As we know, at the time of the Purim story, Shushan is where Haman’s strong support base was and so it took two days of fighting for the Jews to overcome their enemies, whereas across the rest of the empire it was achieved in one day. So everywhere in the world would celebrate on one day and Shushan on the next.”
“This left a big problem.” He continued, “It would mean that another city would be elevated so to speak above Jerusalem, which is unthinkable to the Jewish mind.”
“The Jews of Shushan were nervous of outright saying Jerusalem should also be elevated along with Shushan since they were citizens of the Persian Empire and didn’t want to seem like they were stirring up any kind of anti-Persian patriotism. So what did they do? They came up with a rule about walled cities which would mean Jerusalem would be elevated as well without anything needing to know why.”
I felt on hearing this that ever since we have lived in the Diaspora the Jewish People have had to strike the balance of how to live in a new country and yet retain the flame of affection for a distant homeland.
Although the majority of Jews in the Persian empire didn’t return to Israel even when they had the chance, Purim nevertheless teaches that we should never forget the centrality of Israel and Jerusalem in Jewish life, wherever we are. In the words of Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi in 15th Century Spain “My body is in the West, but my heart is in the East.”
This dream has been at the forefronts of Jewish vision for 2,000 years. If we ever feel it waning, perhaps we’ve been away too long.
A Thought for Shabbat 
