Alive From an Israeli Bomb Shelter: God’s Purim Story, 2026

I am writing this in Israel, as my family moves to the sound of sirons from bomb and back . My seven-year-old daughter is beside me. My seventeen-year-old. My wife. My son all hours throught the night.

While you scroll the headlines about US, Israel-Iran strikes, radical Islam, and Middle East war — there are Jewish children, women, and civilians sitting underground, waiting. Not soldiers. Just people trying to live. And the force targeting them is no different in essence from any terrorist organization: Iran doesn’t fight for a real cause. 

It fights to wipe out the Jews and seize what is theirs. Rather than accepting the divine plan of unity within diversity, with the Jewish people in their ancient land fulfilling theirrole in the world, Iran wants to replace the original Bible and erase its people from history.

In the silent moments, a question rises from somewhere deeper than politics, deeper than strategy:

What is really happening here?

Because here is the secret almost nobody is saying out loud:

The news is not just news. The headlines of 2026 are not random. They are a story — ancient, breathtaking, terrifying, and ultimately redemptive — still being written in real time -- right now!

The story of life is ultimately God’s story. But here is the twist — the deep mystical secret at the Torah’s center: it is not only God’s story; It is a co-production. Humanity and God, writing together. Every president, every soldier, every sleeping voter — characters in a drama so vast that only in hindsight do we see the hand guiding it all along.

That is what Purim teaches us. That is why we read and reread the Megillah each year. Not because it’s a nice story about a brave Jewish queen. But because it is a manual — a lens, through which we see what ordinary eyes cannot. So Let’s look at our Purim Story 2026 Version.

The True Meaning of Purim: Humanity, Amalek, and the Jewish Vision of Compassion

How Did We Get Here?

Not “what happens next” — that’s everyone else’s question. Our question – the Torah question is – How did we get here?

When you trace the steps backward, something extraordinary happens. The hidden hand becomes visible. The miracle reveals itself. And you realize — as the Jews of Persia did — that nothing is random in God's world.

When the Impossible Happens – God is Behind it. And that's how the United States and Israel entered into a joint military operation against Iran. One global superpower, one tiny sliver of land smaller than New Jersey; One isolated by all and one embraced by all, a partnership no one expected — standing shoulder to shoulder against the most dangerous regime the modern world has produced. 

A regime that spent decades building a nuclear program, openly calling for genocide, and being rewarded with diplomatic patience and billions in sanctions relief.

This only happened because the real Boss of the world decided it was time.

The Miracle Named Donald

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency defies conventional explanation. Indicted. Convicted. Mocked and declared finished by every machinery of institutional power. And then — he won. Again.

Ask yourself how that happened.

And while you’re asking, remember the other president — the one literally, visibly losing his grip on wakefulness while leading the free world. For Israel, is presidency meant an emboldened Iran, a nuclear deal chased desperately, American credibility hollowed out. A sleeping president for a sleeping world.

God, the real Boss, said: Sleeping Joe, you’ve got to go; and along with him went the power of the demicratic far left woke obsessions and of course the power shift from Hamas and radical Islamic sympothizers.

Just like the switching of Achashveirosh’s sleepless night in the Megillah — one restless king couldn’t sleep, his chronicles were read, the forgotten deed of Mordechai the Jew rose to the surface — the entire trajectory of history pivoted on what looked like an ordinary election.

The Megillah doesn’t mention God’s name even once. In the entire Book of Esther, God is never named. And yet He is on every page, in every coincidence, every “lucky break.”

God is most powerfully present precisely where He seems most absent.

Look at the headlines again with those eyes.

Prophecy Unfolding: Downfall of Iran, Purim & The End Of Days - Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer

The Haman Problem, 2026 Edition

There has always been a Haman. In every generation — Torah law, the mitzvah we fulfill every Purim — Amalek rises. Different clothes, different language, different flag. But the essence never changes: an irrational, consuming hatred that cannot be explained by logic, grievance, or politics.

It can only be explained by its spiritual source.

And here is what the world cannot seem to see: if you wiped out every single Jew tomorrow — all fifteen million of us — would the world find peace? Would the wars stop? The hunger end? The corruption vanish?

Of course not.

The hatred is not about land. Settlements and checkpoints are the costume. The hatred is about what the Jews represent — the idea that there is one God, that He has a moral standard, that history has a direction and a destination. The Jewish people, just by existing, make a claim about reality that certain forces cannot tolerate.

So they slander. They call the most ancient indigenous people on earth “colonizers.” They call the only democracy in the Middle East “apartheid.” They call people nearly annihilated within living memory “oppressors.” And the world — bored, distracted, addicted to outrage — absorbs the lie and repeats it. Even Israel, at its lowest moments, almost believed it.

But truth has a stubbornness about it. And so does God.

Abraham’s Lesson: Kindness and the Sword

Abraham — Avraham Avinu, the father of kindness, the man who argued with God Himself for the sake of sinners in Sodom — this same man raised an army and went to war. His nephew Lot was taken captive, and Abraham did not pray for a ceasefire. He gathered his men, pursued the enemy by night, and fought.

Kindness and strength are not opposites. The deepest kindness sometimes requires force against evil. A world that refuses to confront evil in the name of peace doesn’t achieve peace — it achieves the slow, comfortable, self-congratulatory surrender to evil.

This is humanity’s moment of truth in 2026. Which side are you on? The side of a world that can distinguish good from evil, willing to pay a price to protect the innocent? Or the side that has decided neutrality is wisdom and the only sin is being judgmental?

This is not a political question. It is a human question. The Torah has been asking it for three thousand years.

The Double Message

Nearly four billion people — Christians and Muslims together — trace their faith, their scripture, their entire understanding of God, back to the same source: the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, the Jewish people. Both traditions were born from the Jewish womb. Both claim the mantle of Abraham.

And yet both are largely aligned, at this moment in history, against the Jewish people themselves. The children have turned against the parent whose DNA they carry in their souls.

But the Torah’s response is not bitterness. It is the ultimate Jewish vision: it is not Jews versus the world. From the moment God called Abraham — “through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed” — the whole point was Jews and the world.

Together.

One God, many nations, each with their own gifts — but all walking toward the same horizon. Unity within diversity. That is the Jewish vision for the world.

The First King and the Last King

The first King of the world was God. But from the begining of time, God stepped behind the curtain. He agreed to run His world through human hands — through mortal kings and presidents and generals — and hide Himself inside their choices, their sleepless nights, the turning of their hearts. Proverbs says it plainly: the heart of kings is in the hand of God. Every world leader who ever changed history — God’s hand was in it. Hidden. Invisible. Undeniable only in retrospect.

The President of the United States, the Ayatollah of Iran, the Prime Minister of Israel — none of them are ultimately steering this ship. They think they are. But the hand of God is moving right now, behind every headline, inside every decision.

And the last King will also be God — not a political messiah with an army and a flag, but the universal recognition that there is a God, that He cares, that His world was always going somewhere. The vision of Isaiah: the wolf lying down with the lamb, swords beaten into plowshares, the nations streaming to Jerusalem — not because the Jews conquered them, but because they recognized the light and came toward it.

What changes in the Messianic Era is not that God becomes King. He was always King. What changes is that it finally becomes visible. God steps out from behind the curtain. The Author walks onto the stage. And everyhuman being who lived through the confusion and the darkness and the headlines will suddenly see — with their own eyes — that He was there the entire time. That the hiddenness was not absence but the deepest possible form of presence, waiting for humanity to be ready to see it.

From the Bomb Shelter

So here I am. We are not statistics. We are people sitting together in the dark, with the sound of history happening directly above our heads.

And I think: is this the end? Or is this the passage?

And then — this is where faith becomes not a comfort but a knowing — I remember the teaching of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe: there are not many gods and only this little world. There are many worlds and only one infinite God.

Read that again.

One infinite God holding infinite worlds — with His attention focused on His last one, this one. With its bomb shelters and crying children and ancient hatreds, is cradled in His hands along with all the rest. When your heart and brain reach beyond, something extraordinary happens to fear. It doesn’t disappear; it transforms into a trust so total it crosses into soul knowledge. Not belief. But a Knowledge born form te essence of your soul. The knowledge that God is holding all of us in His hands.

Even now. Especially now.

And even if this were the end — God forbid — it would be God’s will. And God’s will has no real end. Because He is infinite. And we are His infinitely.

The Book of Esther doesn’t begin with triumph. It begins with exile, powerlessness, a people scattered across an empire ruled by a man manipulated by hatred. Haman draws lots — purim, the lots — believing chance rules the world.

But the universe does not cooperate with genocide. The universe has an Author. And the Author had other plans.

The Jews of Persia fasted, prayed, and mobilized. Esther risked her life. And then — the hidden hand moved. The king couldn’t sleep. A forgotten name rose to the surface. And the entire story, spiraling toward catastrophe, suddenly revealed itself to be a story about salvation all along.

We are in that story. Right now. Today.

The headlines are not chaos. They are chapters.