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By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about Purim in May. But this week, I can’t resist.

“Vayishlach s’farim el kol m’dinot ha-melekh”—“And he sent forth letters throughout the kingdom.” (Esther 1:22) From beginning to end, letters figure prominently as a motif in the Book of Esther. From King Ahasuerus’s ridiculous proclamation in chapter 1 ordering husbands to be masters of their households; to the venomous, insidious edict that Haman drafts and promulgates in the King’s name providing instructions “l’hashmid, laharog u’l’abed”—“to destroy, massacre, and exterminate” all of the Jews; to the letter that Mordechai and Esther send out in Chapter 8—again, in the king’s name—permitting the Jews to defend themselves: everyone important—or so it seems—either sends or receives a letter in the Book of Esther. And these letters are important. They define the contours of the story.

This week, yet another letter was sent forth from “the palace” in Persia. Just a few days ago, the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter to President Bush. (See NY Times, Wednesday, May 10, 2006, Page One). Ostensibly sent to one man, it was in fact an open letter, and much like the letters King Ahasuerus sent, this too has been sent, via the miracle of the internet, “el m’dinah u’midinah kichtavah, v’el am va-am kilshono,”—“to each and every land in its own language and script.” I first downloaded the letter from the website of the French paper, Le Monde. That was an odd sensation: reading an English translation of a French translation of a letter originally written in Farsi. I finally got hold of an English version on the Washington Post website, translated directly from the Farsi.

This is a fascinating letter. It’s also important, and I urge everyone to read it, for it reveals the nature of the thinking in the halls of power in a nation which is becoming increasingly significant, not just to us as Americans but to us as Jews. In case people have been out of the loop on this, Iran has repeatedly threatened Israel with destruction and is now well on its way to becoming a nuclear power.

The letter rambles quite a lot, in tone and in content. It contains pointed criticism, yet also disingenuous protestations of innocence; in some places it’s tightly argued, yet it also contains Orwellian misstatements of fact.

For example, the letter condemns the contradictions in U.S. policy, and what it sees as our government’s hypocrisy. How, Mr. Ahmadinejad asks our President, can you on the one hand declare war on terror, and, on the other hand, invade a nation under false pretenses, claiming that there are WMDs there, when in fact you know that there are not? That’s a good question. Speaking personally to the president, he asks, “How can you, on the one hand, espouse loyalty to Jesus Christ and the Christian faith, and profess commitment to human rights and yet, on the other hand, hold prisoners in Guantanamo Bay who have not been tried, have no legal representation and whom their families cannot see?” A priori, there’s nothing surprising about these sorts of questions—they’re the sort that are asked on editorial pages across America. The only bizarre thing about them is their source.

For when one hears these questions expressed by Mr. Ahmadinejad, it is easy to dismiss them. It is the pot calling the kettle black. How can anyone who knows the terror infrastructure maintained by Iran—its support of Hezbollah in Lebanon is just one example—take any of this seriously? And yet, although this is not the focus of my remarks this morning, I do think we need to take such criticism seriously—regardless of its source.

We Jews will undoubtedly focus on what the Iranian president says about Israel. Not surprisingly, he condemns Israel. He calls into question the historicity of the holocaust. He calls into question the historical basis for the establishment of Israel. He blames Israel for the consequences of its war of independence: the killing of thousands; the creation of, as he puts it, millions of refugees; the destruction of thousands of acres of farmland. Israel’s existence, he says, has been an on-going tragedy. It doesn’t seem as though he’s read Walter Laquer’s History of Zionism, or Howard Sacher’s History of Israel. In fact, it doesn’t seem as though he’s read any dispassionate history text at all.

Responding obliquely and indignantly to the accusation that Iran is taking steps to develop nuclear weapons, he asks, “Why is it that technological or scientific achievement is translated into a threat to the Zionist regime? Is not scientific research and development one of the basic rights of nations?”

That’s what this letter is like: it wrenches back and forth from one issue to the next. I would like to focus on one overarching theme of the letter as a whole: the role that its author believes that religion should play in the world in which we live.

In essence, the letter is a call to conscience. Speaking as one religious person to another, the Iranian president is asking Mr. Bush—indeed, our entire nation—to do teshuvah. To repent. To admit that the course that Western culture in general, and America in particular, has taken is flawed—no, worse, it’s sinful. It’s evil. Leaving aside the a-historical thinking, the distortions, the self-pity: at its core, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s argument is this: Turning away—as secular life does—from a traditionalist, pre-modern notion of an omnipotent, omniscient God, liberal democracy is evil. It must be abandoned if America is to be redeemed.

Before we too quickly dismiss Mr. Ahmadinejad as a deluded—though dangerous and dangerously powerful—despot, we must address the key philosophical challenge his letter poses: Are we really religious? If so, why don’t we buy his argument? Why don’t we agree that modern secularism is the enemy of religion?

An attack like Mr. Ahmadinejad’s on modern Western values and principles, grounded in religion, is, believe it or not, welcome. For only when we are forced to defend our principles and beliefs can we truly come to understand how precious they are to us. As Jews who live in the modern world, yet who are attached to traditional Jewish practice, we must address this challenge. How is it, indeed, that we can be devoted to Torah, to the wisdom of our tradition, and yet also embrace modern Western values?

The answer has to do with how we understand Torah. We are, on the one hand, inheritors of a precious legacy. The Torah, the entire Jewish tradition, is the basis for our identity as Jews. Sure, you can be a Jew without Torah, but it’s hard to believe that you’ll have anything to pass on to your children or grandchildren if you don’t take hold of it. Torah teaches us how to mark the seasons of the year, the days of the week, the ages of our lives. It teaches us what to eat and what not to eat. It gives us a structure, a framework for everything under the sun.

And yet, to imagine that the words of the Torah can be understood without recourse to the interpreters of every generation is to be false to the Jewish tradition. For Judaism, from its inception, has recognized that our understanding of Torah and its demands evolves in every generation. A Jew in the late Biblical period might have thought that he had to remain in his home, sitting in the dark, all through Shabbat; yet by the time of the Talmudic sages, the law was understood to permit leaving one’s home, and to permit—even to require—light in the home on Friday evenings, so long as it was kindled before the onset of Shabbat. Biblical Jews believed that the dead are incapable of praising God (see Psalm 115:17); yet rabbis living in the Talmudic period believed in a World to Come. Talmudic sages might have believed in astrology, yet Maimonides could go ahead and condemn astrologers as charlatans. Judaism has always been an evolving faith, an evolving religious civilization. And this has been true even during the most catastrophic challenge to traditional religious faith: namely, modernity.

We Jews have not ignored modernity. Spinoza may have been an outsider to the Amsterdam Jewish community, but his understandings concerning the origin of the Bible are now commonplace among Jewish religious thinkers. And the radical, revolutionary notion, embodied in the French and American Declarations of Independence, that all men are created equal (since expanded even more in our understanding to include women as well), that all human beings deserve to be treated with equal respect whatever their origin or creed or religious belief—this extraordinary universalism has been absorbed into what we today call Judaism—or, at least Conservative Judaism, about which I can speak with greater authority. And so, although to those of us who take religion very seriously and who see it, at its best, as a source of truth and a wonderful guide to a meaningful life, there is something deceptively appealing about a call, in the name of religion, to return to religion; there is something repellent—even abhorrent—about the Iranian president’s appeal.

For what Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to do is to turn back the clock: to return us to a pre-modern religious sensibility, to that of the Middle Ages, when religion stood for religious coercion, when free-thinking was punishable by death.

The fact is, we in this room today have more in common with liberal Christian theologians or liberal Islamic scholars—who do exist, incidentally—than with fundamentalist Christians or Moslems—or even fundamentalist Jews. The great philosophical divide, it seems to me, is between those who accept the truths that enlightenment has brought us and have assimilated those truths into their consciousness and their consciences, and those who reject modernity, who would have us return to the coercive, inhuman and inhumane religious authoritarianism of the past.

I love Torah, but I’m not willing to live in a theocracy. I love the Jewish tradition and believe it to be sacred—but when I read texts excluding the leper or condemning a child for the sins of his parents; when I read texts ordering my ancestors to wipe out the Amalekites, or to stone Sabbath violators, or to slaughter idolators, I remember that Judaism recognizes that moral understandings have evolved since then, and that it would be wrong to interpret 2,500 year old texts today according to 2,500 year old moral principles. Wrong. Not just nonsensical, but wrong. And that it’s not irreligious to say that, but deeply religious. Deeply principled. Deeply Jewish.

So my quarrel with Mr. Ahmadinejad rests not just on the Enlightenment notion that I have a right to be left alone, to think whatever I want to think, to write whatever I want to write, and to do whatever I want to do, so long as it doesn’t harm another person—but also on the now-Jewish notion that it is immoral to impose my religious beliefs on another. It might have been pious to do that in the 16th century, but it isn’t pious today.

The lesson of Purim is that things aren’t always what they seem. Sometimes, the messages that religious people send you are truly pious, but sometimes they’re not. I believe strongly that to be responsive to the world in which we live today, contemporary religions must grapple with and come to appreciate and embrace the religious values inherent in Enlightenment ideas. Conservative Judaism has done this, to its credit. To do otherwise, to close our eyes to the moral and religious insights the Enlightenment has given us, to willfully retain a pre-modern religious consciousness, is hardly religious today.

At the end of the Book of Esther, there’s one more letter—in addition to those I mentioned above—commanding us to observe the holiday of Purim throughout the generations. No matter how much the world changes, no matter how much we change—even in the Messianic Era, we can and should observe Purim! Religion is not incompatible with modernity. Judaism may—no, it will—be practiced very differently far in the future. That Judaism will not be the Judaism of today, any more than our Judaism is the Judaism of Mordechai and Esther. Instead, we can and should hope that the Judaism of the future will be a Judaism informed and enriched by moral and religious insights yet to be discovered by our descendants.

Amen.