We had our usual Purim Spiel at synagogue this year – a musical version of the Purim story, set to Taylor Swift’s music, performed by adult congregants and synagogue school kids. In the past we’ve had a Wizard of Oz themed Purim Spiel, a Star Wars version, and a Billy Joel version, for example, and the dialogue and new lyrics are written to tell the story of Queen Esther, while also making jokes about our modern world and local and national news stories and whatever else can make people laugh.
The kids love doing the Purim Spiel, because they get pizza at all of the rehearsals, and then they get to dress up and be on stage and sing and dance. The adults, who do it year after year, are often really talented singers and actors who love the chance to ham it up once a year as a break from their day jobs.
Given the news of the day in Israel and Gaza, though, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Purim Spiel this year. I, personally, was not in the mood for it, but four of my current students were in the play, so I had no choice but to go and support them. And it was just as outrageous and funny and zany as usual, and the kids and adults had just as much fun as usual, and people shook pasta boxes (instead of groggers) each time the name Haman (the villain of the story) came up, and then we ate Hamantaschen (triangle shaped cookies with jam or chocolate or poppy seed fillings), and after it was over the pasta boxes were donated to a local soup kitchen. It was all very much as it usually is on Purim, and I was surprised.
For some background, the Purim story is about a man named Haman who is second in command to the king of Persia (Achashverosh) some time before the birth of Christianity. Haman decides that he wants to kill all of the Jews and asks the King for his stamp of approval, and gets it. Why? Because, the King is sort of an airhead and easily swayed, because antisemitism has existed forever, because Haman was angry that Mordechai, the Jew, wouldn’t bow down to him (because a Jew is only allowed to bow down to God). But what the King doesn’t know is that his new wife, Esther, is really a Jewish girl named Hadassah (and Mordechai’s niece). In the end, in the Book of Esther itself, Haman’s genocide plan can’t be undone but the King gives the Jews the right to fight back, and orders the death of Haman and all of his children (the spiel usually tempers the ending so that there is no obvious violence or loss of life).
It’s a dark story to read, even in the most peaceful of times, but a bit too on-the-nose for the current situation, especially given the bizarre coincidence that Hamas is only one letter away from Haman, at least in English.
It’s important to say that the Purim story is fiction. It is, as far as I know, the only acknowledged fiction in the Hebrew Bible, though it is inspired by many real life stories in the seemingly endless history of anti-Jewish violence. The point of the book, and the holiday, is to celebrate one time when Jews were able to thwart a genocide against them, and to celebrate the power of being able to stand up and say I am a Jew.
The trappings of Purim – the party atmosphere and the costumes and the drinking and the spiel – are more modern developments, likely inspired by Carnival and Mardi Gras, but the Purim story itself was written before the Common Era, and the holiday used to be celebrated in a more serious way, and still includes a fast day before Purim itself, to mirror the fast done by Esther, the heroine of the story, when she is praying and hoping for the survival of her people. And I guess I thought that, this year, with the Hamas attack on October 7th and hostages still being held in Gaza, and the death toll and imminent state of famine in Gaza, there would be some attempt to change the tone of the holiday back to the original seriousness, or at least to make a point of the deeper resonance of the themes this year. And from what I understand, that was true in Israel. The mood of the holiday was muted and the celebrations were somewhat altered. But not here. Or at least, not in my community.
In a way, maybe, this highlights the gap between American Jews and Jews in Israel; that in America we have so much distance from the recent traumas that we can continue with the regular patterns of the liturgical year, and continue to treat the Purim story’s antisemitic storyline as a distant memory, rather than as a page pulled from the news of the day. It’s possible that other American Jewish communities had more subdued Purim celebrations, or used their Purim celebrations to help them reflect on the situation in Israel in a new way. I don’t know.
But, for me, the easy victory of Esther and Mordechai over Haman in the story was jarring this year, and the violence of the response to Haman’s deadly genocidal intent was overwhelming too; not that it never bothered me before, but in the past it felt like a blood thirsty dream, a wish fulfillment story, rather than something that would actually happen in real life. The Book of Esther is written in the form of a court intrigue or a farce, with all of the exaggerated caricatures and deceptions and misunderstandings that come with that genre. It’s not meant to be naturalistic, or even realistic, in tone; it’s meant to be outrageous.
And, every year, I wonder how Purim became such a big holiday on the Jewish calendar, with all of the food and parties and drinking and costumes, when the story should have been shelved a long time ago, left to be read and studied with sober intention, if at all. Especially this year, I wanted some acknowledgement of how contrary this revenge tale is to our morality, and how simplistic the characters and plotting are compared to real life dilemmas like the ones we are facing, and how unhelpful it is to act as if heroes and villains are so black and white.
But Purim, like Halloween, has become a children’s holiday, at least here in the United States, and just like Halloween has lost most of its religious connotations in favor of fake gore and candy and fun, Purim has lost the seriousness of the original story in favor of big laughs and silly costumes and carnivals and food.
At the same time as these Purim celebrations were going on, the UN Security Council was debating ceasefire statements on the Israel/Hamas war, vetoing one by the United States and then passing an alternate version that didn’t tie the release of hostages to the ceasefire demand. And, by the next day, Hamas had, inevitably, refused the latest ceasefire deal authored by the United States, which Israel had accepted. And, as Israel and the United States and Jordan and Egypt and many other countries were trying to come up with new ways to safely bring aid into Gaza, despite complicated conditions on the ground and many different political perspectives, the world was branding Israel’s failures to solve these problems as an intentional genocide.
I kept thinking that an alternative Purim celebration could, maybe, have helped us deal with the simplistic characterizations and statements made at the United Nations, versus the complicated and messy reality on the ground; or it could have helped us acknowledge that simple answers may be morally satisfying, but often don’t actually work. A thoughtful Purim celebration could, maybe, have helped people who are feeling like it is dangerous to be Jewish right now, and are tempted, like Esther, to hide who they are; or it could have helped people look at the differences between justice and revenge, and to try to define where one ends and the other begins, or to acknowledge that there is no clear or obvious line between the two; or it could have addressed how people use exaggeration to tell a story and to make their arguments, in real life even more than in fiction, to the detriment of any real understanding or path to compromise.
All of these could have been helpful discussions, even cathartic storylines to address in a more serious Purim play, but maybe it’s all still too raw, or too frightening, or too easily misinterpreted, given the high stress of the moment we are living in, for us to handle right now as a community. There is so much outsized and overwhelming criticism of Israel, including criticism of its existence in the first place, that even the more subtle and nuanced criticisms become too hard to hear, because every criticism starts to feel like a domino ready to take down the whole country, or even the whole Jewish people.
There are truths in the Book of Esther that are important to face, despite its fictional format: one, anti-Semitism is and has always been part of Jewish life and the temptation to hide who we are in order to fit in has been felt in every generation; two, people who are constantly under threat will crave revenge against those who have hurt them, whether we are talking about Jews or Palestinians. Many people have called the Palestinians who celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Jews and others on October 7th inhuman, and others have used vengeful comments made by Israelis as evidence of genocide, but the Purim story tells us that we can all become so enraged that we crave and celebrate the death of the other. It’s part of human nature, rather than evidence that we are something other than human.
We need to be able to know all of these things about ourselves if we are ever going to truly make ourselves better, instead of just pretending to be better. My sense of the UN, and related humanitarian organizations, which were seemingly created for the specific purpose of preventing another Holocaust like what was done to the Jews during World War Two, is that they have become a performance of moral clarity rather than an attempt to reach real moral clarity. No one lives up to all of the Humanitarian statutes as written, but some people are called out for their failures, and others are not. We deserve an international organization that we can turn to in times of conflict and despair, but we need it to be an honest broker and not just another form of political power to be wielded against an enemy.
I wish these were conversations we could have had during Purim this year, along with the laughs and the silliness and the cookies, but I think I understand why so many people needed distraction instead: the current reality is so painful and frightening and complicated that those of us who are far enough away from the immediate horror are looking for an escape, in whatever form we can find it.
I can only hope that a ceasefire will actually be possible soon, and that the hostages will come home, safe and sound, by Passover or soon after. Maybe then we can continue to have some of these difficult conversations, integrated with the regular prayers and holidays that make up our usual religious lives, to help us through whatever will come next.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
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