Musings about Purim
Telegrams, shtelegrams… Nowadays we have WhatsApp, messenger, SMS… we do not send telegrams anymore. Once we used to do it, and I am old enough to remember that time. Those days, we had to pay for each word, so the Jewish telegram was something like: “Start worrying. Details to follow”. That is because we Jews tend to be self-conscious and somehow we worry too much.
Now that the Megilla reading is over, and we are already thinking towards Pesach, I want to share with you some worries and fears regarding, indeed, Purim. It is often said that Purim is a festivity with a dark side. We enjoy the masks, the costumes, the mess, the boos…. We love the food, be it Hamantaschen or the wonderful Purim bread, that looks like challah and has chocolate inside, which my wife bakes perfectly. We also love preparing mishloach manot and sharing with people of our community. But the story is gruesome!
On Purim, we read the Megillah. This is not only the story of a massacre avoided thanks to the heroism of a young beautiful Jewish princess, (first of a long line if you ask me). The Megillah is also the story of the revenge of the Jewish people against their enemies. Haman and his sons were not the only ones who were executed. The Jews massacred all their enemies and were even allowed to carry on for an extra day with the slaughtering of their Persian neighbours, some of which converted to Judaism out of fear.
And the gruesome aspect of the festivity is inscribed; guess what, in the food. Hamantaschen means “ears of Haman” because of the medieval custom to cut off the criminal’s ears before the execution. And the delicious Purim bread, which is my favourite Purim treat, in case you hadn’t noticed, has the shape of a noose; the knot of the gallows from which Haman and his sons were hanged.
There is a dark side of Purim, and if you are looking for proof of how revengeful the Jews can be, I am sorry, but the celebration of Purim offers many examples. Not by chance, Purim had been for a long time a source of embarrassment for those theologians and Rabbis who subscribed to Liberal Judaism.
Liberal Judaism is the denomination that aims to reshape Jewish practices according to liberal values, and a modern ethos. Not all the Liberal congregations refused to celebrate Purim, but Purim was certainly not the favourite holyday for authorities such as Lily Montague and Claude Montefiore! And I personally remember how I and my fellow Rabbinical students used to have fun on Purim at the expense of those Liberal teachers of ours who shared the same deeply rooted feelings of disgust and embarrassment.
Do you remember Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 perpetrated a massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron? According to a long-standing rumour, Goldstein selected Purim as the date of the massacre, because he thought he was re-enacting the story of Purim. There is no proof of such a theory, and Goldstein himself never mentioned Purim. Most likely he selected a day when he knew the mosque would be packed, being Ramadan.
But the fact that the rumour is still around, and many serious people accept it as a truth, is very telling. Deep inside, in our very self-conscious Jewish soul, we are afraid of the violence celebrated in the Megillah and on Purim. We have internalised the fear of being perceived and represented as violent, revengeful, chauvinistic etc. up to the point that we believe those rumours, or one would say the fake news, that confirm how dangerous and intoxicating for our souls the celebration of Purim can be.
Do not get me wrong. I reckon that the moral objections to the celebration of Purim come from a very honest place. I absolutely share the horror that the most problematic passages of the Megillah inspire to us, modern readers.
But at the same time, I believe we should be aware that the story of Purim is not real. It is a tale, a legend. It took place in a far-away place, during the reign of a Persian Emperor who never existed. And when rivalries between Jews and non-Jews were totally non-existent, yet Jews like Mordechai were in a powerful position. There is not one single historical record of a situation like this, let alone in the ancient Middle East.
So if we start worrying because of the violence narrated in the Megillah, why not worry about the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which is full of violence against children and animals? And what about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with its patriarchal content; and what about the shaming of vertically challenged people?
It is a pointless exercise to filter old tales according to our contemporary values and to look for the moral implications of ancient legends.
Not to mention the human, universal need, which is present in every culture, to provide an outlet for ritualised violence. Be it Carnival with its universal mocking of those in power. Or Guy Fawkes Night, e.g. in Lewes when they burnt images of various world leaders, such as Donald Trump, this year and the last. Or the weekly meetings in the stands where two different tribes shout bad words and curses against each other while watching twenty-two young men running after a ball: football matches.
Like every culture, we Jews have our own time for ritualised violence, which in the end consists only in shouting boo! at the name of an evil character. Plus eating delicacies whose shapes and names remind us that, shockingly!, we do have enemies. That there are people out there who hate us for no other reason than the fact that we Jews exist. And these evil and ignorant people can sometimes become ministers and have an influence on our lives. They can even become the leader of the opposition and, God forbid, maybe even Prime Minister.
But Purim is there to tell us, each year, that the Jewish people survive. It is, after all, a message of hope and this is the reason why we celebrate it.
[March 2019]