It was just after midnight when the sound of the Shofar (ram’s horn) blared out through the night and everyone took all their belongings and began fleeing Egypt – two and a half million Israelites ran for their lives.
Egypt had just suffered ten horrendous plagues with the last plague – killing of the first born – left at least one death in every Egyptian household in retribution for slavery, murder, torture, and all the rest.  Vengeance and justice is sweet.  The Israelites moved as far and as fast as they could to put as much distance between themselves and the Egyptians.  

It did not take long for the Egyptians to grasp what just happened to them and realize that this Exodus would totally disrupt the Egyptian socio-economic system.  And on top of that they sought revenge for all the deaths in every household of Egypt – even unto Pharaoh’s palace.

So the Egyptians mounted their horses and chariots and pursued the Israelites to a peninsula with no way out.  They were trapped.  The Egyptians had them in their sights.  The Pharaoh says “נבוכים הם בארץ” – “They are confused (or perplexed) in the land”.  

We now fast forward a thousand years and the Babylonian kings sends his troops to Israel to murder hundreds of thousands of Israelite, destroy the country, destroy Jerusalem, and destroy the First Temple.  And then he has the survivors taken back to Babylonia although stragglers like Mordechai and Yechonyah the king of Judah stray and go to Persia as noted in the Book of Esther.  The Book of Esther continues and explicitly mentions Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 2.  It then continues and discusses Haman and King Achashverosh sitting down together at the beginning of Chapter 3 to plot and plan the annihilation of the Jewish people and formally announce their imminent destruction.  And the chapter concludes with “והעיר שושן נבוכה” –  “and the city of Shushan was confused (or perplexed)”.  Please note that the same words is used although adapted to the correct noun gender (city is female here while in Exodus the “people” is male plural.  But the root word is the same.  So where does “Navoch” actually come from?  Please note that this is my discovery.  “Navoch” is the first 4 letters in Hebrew of Nebuchadnezzar’s name.  But the name also ends with “צר” or hater of the Jews.

And now we look to the current Hamas – Israel War and we see the repeat of the pattern.  What is the name of the leader of HAMAS?  This is Yaya Sinwar.  Similar to my discovery of the “Navoch” in the beginning of Nebuchadnezzar’s name, this time Sinwar’s name begins with “SIN” and ends with “WAR”.  

But the most important element here which is part of the mission of this website is to reconnect the Jewish people to our Holy Scriptures, to our history, and to the full emotion and eternal soul of our people.  We go through all the motions redirecting our focus and attention from the core experiential matters to drinking to excessive on Purim and parading our beautiful children in synagogue and instead of listening to the captivating history of Esther, not Mordechai, saving the Jewish people with her cunning and proper assessment of strategy and logistics.  All too often people attend the irrelevant cute and clever Purim “Spiel” instead of the actual Megillah reading.  This is a problem.