The final chapter of Megillat Esther can be summed up as, “The cogs of empire continue on.”

After all is said and done—the decree to exterminate the Jews is overturned, the Jews are able to successfully defend themselves against the people who sought their extermination—we read that the Persian emperor then reinstates the taxes (Esther 10:1) that he had removed when he first crowned Esther as empress (ibid. 2:18). The machinations of bureaucracy grind back into gear. The Purim story is not one of some grand miracle, but one where the tools of government and violence that are threatened against Jews are leveraged by Jews for their own defense. In the rabbinic imagination, this is indication of the story’s incomplete redemption experienced by the Jews in the Persian Empire. In comparison to the exile from Egypt—the foil to Purim—the Jews in the Persian Empire are still subjects of Ahashverosh (see BT Megillah 14a).

While the rabbinic imagination sees Purim as the celebration of an incomplete redemption of the Jewish people, it also (anachronistically) locates Esther as the progenitor of Cyrus, the Persian emperor who eventually allowed Jews to return to Palestine and build the Second Temple (see BT Rosh Hashanah 3b; see also Vayikra Rabba 13:5). Purim did bring about a redemption—it just came several generations later.

The redemption that brought the Jews back from their exile came not because the Jews in Persia immediately panicked and left as soon as they could. Perhaps in their moment of fear some did not have the means to leave—and perhaps some also did not want to. Perhaps some who were despairing (Esther 4:3) were realizing that the relative comfort that they had experienced in Persia was fleeting and that there was no hope for liberation. Perhaps others still were despairing and raising the alarm and trying to organize to fight back. Perhaps it was that Mordecai, elder statesmen of the diasporic Jewish community in Shushan and mentor/parent to the newly-crowned queen could have pushed the Jewish community to leave Persia and to find a new home. Instead, he chose to stay not just in Persia, but in the capital, Shushan. He dons a sackcloth, the clothing of the mourner, and cries out in fear and panic in the public squares of Shushan (ibid. 4:1).

Our foundational stories are filled with us needing to leave: Sometimes that fleeing is the Passover story, filled with might and the recouped power and wealth of our oppressors. Far more commonly, it is forced exile or our queer ancestors leaving home to find the safety of cities like New York and San Francisco. This is a part of my own family’s story leaving the Soviet Union as well: The story I was told growing up was that my family was given ten days by the Soviet government to leave Moscow. They left the country with dishes still in their sink—and an ask for our family that remained to try to clean up the apartment.

My family’s immigration story belies, perhaps, one of the smaller parts of the Esther story. My great-aunt and great-uncle and their daughter remained behind, choosing instead to leave for Israel in the 1990s after the Soviet Union had dissolved. My grandfather—and now I—have some of the keepsakes that they brought with them a decade later that my family was not able to bring with them in their haste to leave the USSR.

Many of us are told that we are here today because of our ancestors’ wisdom to flee when they had the chance. But, at the same time, our history has within it stories of our ancestors choosing to remain where they were—either because it was impossible for them to leave or because they believed, even perhaps to the derision of others, that a better world was possible.

We could imagine our ancestors in Shushan, despite the joy they had experienced, might have learned their lesson. With their newfound political power, they could have organized to leave Persia. Instead, they chose to stay—not just for the short-term, but for several generations. Esther ends not just with the cogs of empire continuing on, but with the note that the rest of Mordecai’s legacy is contained not within our own Bible, but in the royal chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia (ibid. 10:2). He remained—and he kept his community with him. Perhaps this was because of their newfound power, but perhaps it was also because they knew that a world was possible if they chose instead to remain.

At times like the ones that we live in—one where violent antisemitism continues to rear its ugly head, where the rights of LGBTQ people in general and transgender youth in particular are being assaulted—it can feel that we must tap into our ancestors’ wisdom to leave. Reading stories of our houses of worship being vandalized and the state governments revoking the driver’s licenses of transgender people can awaken within us the same sense that drove our ancestors to flee where they called home. But it is exactly in these moments that we can also remember that our history is, also, filled with moments of those who chose to remain.

Mordecai’s courageous decision to stay might have paid off: In Ezra (2:1-2), someone of the same name is mentioned as one of the returners to Palestine. Even though it was several generations later, Mordecai’s decision not to leave in the moment but to remain enabled him to lead his community back from their exile. If the courage to remain feels far off, then perhaps that is the request that Purim makes of us this year: To remember those who came before us, despite the topsy-turviness of the world, found joy, light, and liberation in their choice to stay.