Pi Day Sameach!

If you’re a rabbi aiming your shul’s Purim observance at children, it’s easy. And fun. The Book of Esther is full of adult themes and dark outcomes, but it also gives itself to carnivals and costumes.

If your main audience is a little older but still rowdy, there’s always the idea of drinking until you can’t tell the difference between Mordechai and Haman, although practicing that one to the extreme has gone, quite properly, out of fashion.

But if you have a shul of people who no longer wish to dress up like Queen Esther, aren’t interested in drinking to excess, and have come to rely on you to find offbeat but fascinating and ultimately meaningful connections between seemingly unconnected things — if you are, say, Rabbi Joseph Prouser of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey in Franklin Lakes — Purim is a challenge to be solved every year.

This year, Rabbi Prouser noticed that Purim falls on Pi Day. (That’s “an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π,” as Wikipedia puts it. It’s more commonly known as March 14; 3.14 are the unending number’s first three digits.) March 14 is also both his father’s birthday — Melvin Prouser was born on that day in 1917 — and Albert Einstein’s — born in 1879.

It’s also the day that the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died, in 2018.

What to do with all those coincidences? That’s easy! Tie them all to Purim!

“We are going to pay tribute to both those historical characters, and to my father too,” Rabbi Prouser said. “We’ll really focus on Einstein.

“Hawking had a checkered history with Jews and the Zionist enterprise — he went to Israel four times, but then at the end of his life he supported the BDS movement and canceled a trip there, and we will fully acknowledge that — but we’ll also show some of the insights he had in common with Einstein.

“One of the ways that we acknowledge the people we focus on during Purim is with a toast” — that’s the drinking theme, although certainly not to excess here — “and we’ll toast both of them. One of the things I’ll say about Hawking is that he proves the truth of one of Einstein’s most famous” — if apocryphal — “sayings: that two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.

“Even brilliant people sometimes do stupid things.”

Rabbi Prouser moves on to Einstein. “The more I read about him, the better I think the idea of connecting him to Purim is,” he said. “Einstein was an outspoken and active Zionist. Even before Hitler, he was a Zionist. Of course, he was offered the presidency of Israel but declined it, saying that he was not so good with people, but he was honored by the offer.

“It is clear that no matter what his views of religious life were, he was a proud Jew. He wasn’t a blind nationalist, he hated and decried war and violence, but he understood the need for force as a response to evil, and that makes him tremendously relevant this Purim.

“Although he was a very early critic of Nazism, and that’s well known about him, something that’s less well known is that he was an active critic of racism in the United States.”

Rabbi Prouser talked about Marian Anderson, “the contralto who was denied the opportunity to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington” because she was Black; Eleanor Roosevelt helped arrange for her to give a concert at the Lincoln Memorial instead. “When Marian Anderson came to New Jersey to give a concert at Princeton, she couldn’t get a hotel room, so Einstein hosted her at his home. After that, every time she traveled through New Jersey, she stayed with Einstein.

There are three other facts about Einstein that are striking in their relevance to today, Rabbi Prouser said. The first is that Einstein understood the power of one person taking a stand and how that can make a difference.

The second is that he believed in science — something that now no longer can be taken for granted.

And the third is that he was an immigrant.

“So throughout the megillah reading, we will draw attention to all those elements of his life,” Rabbi Prouser said. He’s put some of Einstein’s words next to the lines in the megillah, so that they’re almost in conversation with each other.

“One of the things that fascinated me about Einstein is that he had an early Jewish education,” Rabbi Prouser continued. “His parents got him a tutor. He had a traditional Jewish education, and he abandoned it when he was around bar mitzvah age. That’s not unusual. The tragedy is that if he had been engaged by a deep-thinking Jewish religious thinker or leader, what might he have contributed to Jewish learning and knowledge?

“His formal Jewish education ended at an early age, so this intellectual titan did not have an adult Jewish education.” But even without that education, “he did contribute tremendously to the Jewish people’s fight against Nazism and advocating for Zionism.”

Rabbi Prouser plans to show three short videos of or about Einstein during the megillah reading. One of them, from 1951, narrated in that official newsreel voice that cannot be recreated by a human throat today, shows Einstein meeting David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. (If Einstein had accepted the presidency, the two men would have worked together.) The images in the video are striking. The men are not dissimilar in appearance — both have improbable shocks of wild white hair — and they smile together in what seems to be genuine happiness. It’s hard not to smile back at them.

His goal for erev Purim, Rabbi Prouser said, “is that people will come away knowing more about Einstein and with a new understanding of the relevance of Purim and the megillah and what it says about antisemitism and genocide.”

And also that they’ll have fun, because that’s all part of Purim.

The service is open to everyone; it starts at 7 at the shul.