Fake Views for the Jews from the Writers You (Shouldn’t) Trust

Challenge

Can Mishpacha’s op-ed writers pick up the pen as someone else… without AI?

Starring

JAKE TURX as YONOSON ROSENBLUM
GEDALIA GUTTENTAG as YISROEL BESSER
YITZCHOK LANDA as JAKE TURX
SHMUEL BOTNICK as GEDALIA GUTTENTAG

T

he only thing Trump loves more than smashing the mold is flashing the gold.

Sometimes, you get to do both.

For a leader still gleeful about his new rule over numerous states, what better celebration party is there than a party celebration? Shushan-esque, only closest allies were invited, sending a message for ends and frenemies that in this White House, if you want a ticket to the ballroom, you have to play ball.

The inaugural White House Purim party, inaugurating the White House Ballroom by a newly inaugurated president, marked a similar inaugural party put on millennia ago by the flashiest chief executive without orange hair. But for a player with a memory longer than his own tie, history is just dessert.

The message Trump’s feast sent to Iran is already being dissected like frogs in France or shrimp in Shushan, and analyzed in greater detail than zachor versus zecher in Brisk. For critics, it’s another example of nepotism, intoxication, and indulgence to rival Xerxes himself; for supporters, it’s a masterstroke of historicity, a no-nonsense decision to use the gaudy and tawdry as a tactic, pushing for the art of the deal during the art of the meal, even if it comes at the expense of golden chalices. So, which is it? Seudah or suitor?

Maybe it’s both, unless it’s something else entirely.

As I stood in an ornate, golden ballroom that combined column capitals of Corinthia with the rapture of Rome, I couldn’t help but appreciate seeing my own name on the exclusive guest list. For little old me, having a front-row seat at the first real Purim since, well… Purim, put on by the first Achashveirosh since Darius, is not an honor — it’s an opportunity.

I couldn’t ignore how everything I beheld, which you will someday read about in the news, was reported centuries earlier in Megillas Esther. Tanach doesn’t just reflect the news, it refracts it. Clearly, Trump was preparing for war with Persia in more ways than one; embracing the good guy role in the Megillah from the first verse to the last.