It would have been quite understandable, given the circumstances of the harrowing escape from total slaughter and annihilation, if Mordechai and the sages who followed him had established a sombre, reflective holiday to celebrate our rescue.

After all, the profound sense of relief in avoiding the murderers’ malevolent scheme lent itself quite naturally, emotionally and psychologically to quiet reflection and thankful recitations of Hallelujah.

But in their wisdom, our sages  decreed that we should commemorate Haman’s demise with loud, effusive merriment. Hallel would be recited on other holidays, but not Purim.

As U.K. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has succinctly observed, “The Megillah turns tragedy into comedy. The banging and clapping at Haman’s name teaches us, even as children, to recognize evil but not to fear it. Purim’s festivities are the most eloquent testimony I know to the unbreakable spirit of a people who, more than most, have walked through the valley of the shadow of death but kept an unshakeable hold on life.”

This year, it seems the holiday comes just in time to help us affirm and reaffirm even more urgently the unshakeability of our Jewish hold on life.

Jews around the world are reeling once again from the putrid smell of anti-Semitism that ominously rises from the dark bogs and soggy marshes of ignorance and bigotry. Israel’s fight against Hamas was the latest pretext for the release of noxious anti-Israel and anti-Jew hatred. From the Middle East and Europe to South America and Eurasia, mobs were let loose on the streets, often with the complicity of governments, to shout their hateful slogans, threaten the Jews in their midst, and deface and disfigure Jewish property, places of worship and cemeteries.

Closer to home, the monstrous lie of “Israeli Apartheid” is the drumbeating buzzword this week on campuses around North America, rocking the minds and spoiling the hearts of the ill-informed and meek of character.

The story of Purim and the merriment it prescribes teach us, among many important lessons, that we do not bow down or bend our knees to the tyrants  who propagate hateful anti-Jewish lies or to the tyranny of racism and discrimination they strive to create.

The holiday teaches us to unite against external enemies, to join forces one with the other, to set aside differences, to have courage, to have faith and to resist.

Purim is the quintessential holiday of responsibility. As Mordechai reminded Esther, in the dreaded moments of crisis, we cannot, we must not, run from our personal responsibility to act. Neither station in life nor paucity of spirit absolves the individual from being responsible or from taking responsibility each for each other.

Thus, Mordechai and the sages also decreed that the celebration of the holiday requires that we give matanot l’evyonim, monetary aid to the poor and needy among us.

We cannot celebrate fully, truly, in the intended manner if there are among us those who have not the means to do so. The entirety of the community was rescued; the entirety of the community must feel the requisite sense of celebration. This, too, is part of what Rabbi Sacks referred to as our “unshakeable hold on life.” It is the core value that inspires the ethics of our social responsibility: the dignity of our friend and neighbour is as precious to us as is our own. And this year, more than ever in recent times, the holiday of Purim helps us affirm the unshakeability of that value, too.

The economic uncertainty of these times has harmed individuals, families and institutions. It falls to all of us to help those who are in financial need as much as we can, and, if we can, even more than we have in the past.

Ours is a religion of responsibility. It reminds us at every turn of the calendar that we do not live alone, that we are here on earth for the sake of each other.

Thankfully, however, our responsibilities also include the responsibility to be happy, to celebrate.

So let’s celebrate.