I understand the holiday in honor of a military victory. It was an open and risky clash, and Victory Day is a manly and honest holiday. But how to celebrate the day of the pogrom? How to celebrate the day of the murder of thousands of children?

Is there any other people on earth that celebrates with joy the day of known unpunished massacres? Are there any such analogues? Then let me consider the vindictiveness of those who celebrate Purim unique.

Imagine that some group of "Russian patriots" began to openly and loudly celebrate the day of the burning of the "Judaizer heretics" as a Russian national and church holiday. What will the press say? [252]

It is so strange to celebrate this unpunished pogrom of unarmed neighbors that from ancient times some Jews felt the need to justify their vengeance in the face of the Gentiles.

The first step in this direction was made by the Alexandrian translators of the Tanakh into Greek. They gave a purely historical tradition a religious character, adding the dream of Mordecai and the prayers of Mordecai and Esther (the numbering of these additions to the Greek text in the Russian Synodal edition is indicated not by numbers, but by letters).

Then Josephus begins to add something that was not in either the Hebrew or the Greek biblical text: they say, in the king's decree written by Mordecai, it was said: "If the Jews on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar had to repel persons who would think of offending them on that day..." (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 11, Ch. 6, 12).

And today there are attempts to give those events at least some glimmer of military valor. The newspaper Segodnya, which together with NTV was part of the information empire of MOST-Bank, i.e., Mr. Gusinsky, then chairman of the Russian Jewish Congress, offered a new, more respectable version of the events of Purim: "As a result, the Persian anti-Semites were disarmed and utterly defeated. In the walled Susa (the Persian capital), the battles went on for two days."[254] In the book of Esther itself, there is no mention of battles. Not a word is said about whether there were casualties among the Jews. But, as we can see, even to the taste of modern Jews, the fact that the basis of the holiday is the slaughter of the unarmed is so obscene that you have to invent fights.

But even Josephus did not think of this. His description of the pogrom in Susa is more honest (in the sense that it is closer to the biblical source)

Another way to glorify the Purim pogrom is to place it on a par with the events of the Exodus. However, there is a significant difference between Purim and Exodus: in the events of the Exodus, Israel's enemies were defeated by God himself. The sea sank the Pharaoh's army, but it was not the Israelite soldiers who defeated it. This is clearly stated in the "song of Moses" (Exodus 15). In the events of Purim, the Jews killed the Persians with their own hands.

Let us also not forget that in the events of the Exodus, the Egyptian army confronted the unarmed Jewish people, with women and children. In the events of Purim, everything was the opposite: the Persian people, with women and children, were deprived of the opportunity to defend themselves against armed Jewish pogromists.

The pinnacle of polemical balancing to justify the tradition of celebrating the Purim pogrom is still the construction of Yakov Krotov: "As for the Old Testament bloodthirstiness, it, of course, has not disappeared anywhere. Every evening in Orthodox churches, the choir sings about how the Jews rejoiced at the drowning of the "persecutor of Pharaoh"... As if we did not sing Psalm 136 with particular inspiration throughout Great Lent, including the famous curse of the Jews on Babylon, which had captivated them: "Blessed is he who takes and dashes thy children against a stone." If the priest dares to tell the choir to omit this verse, he will immediately be known as a liberal and a modernist, and a Jew, of course, and at the same time a Catholic, they can shorten the divine services there, and we will not allow anyone to circumcise our Church Slavonic spirituality."[256]

Krotov, who went over to the Unia, and then simply to the sect, has already forgotten that Psalm 136 "On the Rivers of Babylon" is sung not "throughout the whole of Great Lent", but before Lent and ends singing it carefully at the beginning of Lent. He forgot that the irmos about the drowning of Pharaoh is not sung "every evening", but only when the Sunday canon of the sixth tone is read (that is, once every two months). He also forgot that in Orthodox theology there is a tradition of spiritual reinterpretation of those texts of the Old Testament that deal with war, resistance, and attack... The enemy (Babylon, Egypt, etc.) is proposed to be understood as the kingdom of sin and demons. Under Jerusalem and the Temple is the human soul, which must be preserved in purity... And in the sermons before the beginning of Lent, the priests explain that the lines about the "infants" should not be perceived as a call to revenge, that against the "rock" of faith it is necessary to break (through a prayerful appeal to Christ) sinful thoughts, while they have not yet grown in our soul and have not completely captivated it... Yes, however, that I explain: Krotov could not help reading the books of Archpriest. Alexander Schmemann "Great Lent". But in order to defile the Orthodoxy they have betrayed and to defend Judaism, he is even ready to make himself look more ignorant than he really is...

The problem is precisely that Christians tend to understand allegorically the Old Testament texts describing the "holy wars" of ancient Israel (or to see them simply as chronicles of times long gone); for the Jews, however, the entire Old Testament still remains entirely relevant, contemporary, and intended for use in today's life.

And no demands of conscience prevent us from writing to this day about the "merry holiday of Purim" and even calling this day of the pogrom "the day of love and joy."