Sarah Krinsky

From the RAC's Passover Series - why International Women's Day and women's issues are more significant than ever.

This weekend is one of my favorite holidays of the Jewish calendar – Purim. I like the costumes, the carnivals, the gift-giving. But the story of Purim is, like many of our holidays, filled with darker and more thoughtful elements. The most striking and provocative idea to me is encapsulated in Esther 4:14, where Mordechai tells Esther that no matter what she does, the Jews will in fact be fine; yet, he continues, maybe your whole life up to this point was in fact leading up to this very moment and this very purpose.

There exists today a group that, like the African-Americans of the 1960s, are systematically discriminated against and ignored in our federal policy; a group that lives as second-class citizens due to the ramifications of an unjust system. I am referring to the 12 million undocumented immigrants who currently live in the United States. Many of these individuals came to the U.S. as children, yet are forced to remain in the shadows in the only country they’ve ever called home.

Nothing in the Torah is coincidental. The repeated use of certain words, the choice of names, the span of time—everything is linked to a greater or deeper theological meaning. Nowhere is this more so than with numbers.