Most businesses are hiding something. Not fraud. Not deception. Something quieter. Their real value is often invisible to those who do not know how to look.
Several years ago, my partners and I acquired a battery manufacturing company. To most buyers, it looked like a commodity business in a crowded market. Even the broker struggled to explain what made it special. But when we looked closely, we found what others had missed. Custom batteries must meet strict safety certifications. Once certified and built into a customer’s product, switching suppliers is expensive, slow, and risky. In reality, customers almost never switch.
That single insight changed everything. This was not a commodity business competing on price. It was a recurring revenue model with built in retention and real switching costs.
Seeing that required more than financial analysis. It required perception.
Warren Buffett calls this a “moat,” a structural advantage competitors cannot easily cross. Phil Fisher, one of Buffett’s early influences, spoke of “scuttlebutt,” the discipline of asking uncommon questions to uncover what numbers alone cannot show. Sam Walton built Walmart by noticing patterns in small town retail that others ignored. Each, in his own way, mastered the art of seeing what others missed.
This is one the core skill we teach in the Reichman University’s MBA course Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition. The model is simple. A student identifies a business owned by someone nearing retirement, often without a successor. The student raises capital, acquires the company, and becomes CEO.
In class, we study businesses that seem ordinary. Our task is to uncover what even the owner may not fully see. Hidden advantages, structural asymmetries, quiet sources of durability. The central discipline is not financial engineering. It is learning how to see.
Megillat Esther teaches the same lesson on a different plane.
It is the only book in Tanach where G-d’s name does not appear. There is no open miracle, no prophecy, no explicit divine intervention. On the surface, Purim reads like court politics in ancient Persia, a villain, a queen, a dramatic reversal of fortune. Events seem driven by personality and power.
Yet the Sages say the absence of G-d is the message. In the Talmud, Chullin 139b, Esther’s name is linked to the verse “V’anochi haster astir panai – I will surely hide My face” (Devarim 31:18). The hiddenness is not a flaw in the story. It is the point.
G-d’s presence is felt precisely where it is not named. Mordechai happens to overhear a plot. Esther happens to win the king’s favor. Haman falls through the unintended consequences of his own arrogance. Each moment can be read as coincidence. Together, they form a pattern.
To read the Megillah well is to train ourselves to see meaning beneath apparent randomness.
We celebrate Purim this year in a world that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago. The Persia of the Megillah is now Iran, a regime that openly calls for Israel’s destruction. The threats are real. The stakes are high. It is natural to interpret events through the language of strategy, deterrence, and diplomacy alone.
Purim pushes back.
Its message is not that G-d acts through spectacle. It is that divine action often moves through ordinary history, through political decisions, personal courage, and human choice. Our responsibility is to cultivate the clarity to recognize it.
In business, we call this due diligence, the discipline to look beyond surface metrics and understand what truly drives long term results.
In Jewish thought, we call it emunah. Not faith as blind belief, but faith as the willingness to look past the surface and trust that a deeper design is at work.
The art of seeing what others miss is more than a competitive edge. It is a way of living.
This Purim, may we merit what our ancestors in Persia experienced, the unraveling of those who seek our harm. And when history turns, may we have the clarity to see that it was never politics alone.