P urim celebrates a second acceptance of the Torah — this time with no trace of compulsion. The nature of the day is complete reversal — v’nahafoch hu — so only in retrospect can the concatenation of events be discerned. But nevertheless hints of the potential dramatic change in the spiritual state of the Jewish People were present even before the decisive victories of the 13th and 14th of Adar — i.e. in the three-day fast of the Jews of Shushan before Esther approached Achashveirosh.
Now no one would be so brazen as to predict a recommitment of millions of Jews to Torah on the level of Purim. Yet still it is possible to identify some converging trend lines in Israel that give cause for optimism about many more Jews drawing close to Torah.
The first such trend line is that there is a great curiosity in the Israeli nonobservant world about the chareidi world and thus the possibility of dramatically increasing contacts between chareidi and nonobservant Jews. Those relationships are the bedrock upon which drawing closer to Torah is built.
When a young avreich named Yehuda Shine unfurled a long banner with the inscription “Chareidim and chilonim refuse to be enemies” at the social protests of 2013 the reaction on social media was overwhelming and immediate. That gesture repeated a number of times since has led a number of major Israeli organizations to reach out to Shine through the Be a Mensch foundation. The leaders of the 80 000-strong Israeli Scouts movement recently contacted Shine and asked him to create programming for a series of meetings between the Scouts and groups of chareidim. The first pilot project of senior Scouts and chareidi women is already under way in Beit Shemesh and a number of groups are being set up in Jerusalem and Ashdod.
