Tisha b’Av, which falls this Sunday, is a day of national mourning that marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples, while Purim celebrates the salvation of the Jews of Persia as described in the book of Esther. Yet Laura Lieber points to a link between them: two ancient poems that, while written in the style of Tisha b’Av dirges (kinot), are attributed to Queen Esther:

It is difficult to imagine two holidays with more disparate moods: the giddy joy of Purim juxtaposed with the bleak solemnity of Tisha b’Av. There are, however, points of connection. . . . [W]hile the book of Esther does not name God, it does refer to the exile and the loss of Jerusalem, particularly when introducing Mordechai. . . . [There is even a] custom of chanting those verses that recall the exile of the Judeans from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar to the melody of Lamentations, which is read on the Tisha b’Av. . . .

A potent affinity between the book of Esther and Tisha b’Av can be found in the composition of kinot placed, as it were, in the mouth of Esther. These works expand upon the moment in the biblical story when the Jewish queen embarks on a fast and calls upon fellow Jews to engage in penitential rituals with her, as she is to risk her life by visiting the king uninvited. Her community, already vulnerable in exile, faces another existential threat.

Esther’s laments . . . lack any of the carnivalesque irony or frisson of the subversive humor that we expect in Purim poetry. Instead, Esther’s two laments sound authentically penitent. The rhetoric and aesthetics of Tisha b’Av kinot provide the author of these “literary” Purim poems . . . with a set of norms to which Esther’s prayers should conform.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.