Thinking about Purim - The Jewish Standard

I might as well start with an acknowledgment of how the Jewish calendar and the weekly newspaper schedule can work against each other.

Do we use a Purim cover this week? The paper officially comes out on Friday. Purim starts next Thursday evening. So this cover is early. But if we wait until next week, it’ll be late. So it’ll be this week, and yes, we know that it’s early.

And yes, I also know that this should be our worst problem.

Purim is a complicated holiday. It’s a fun time for kids, costumes and noise and games, and lots of running around in costumes making lots of noise playing games at carnivals. But it’s also a dark holiday. The way Vashti is disposed of and Esther is picked as queen can be read in a profoundly uncomfortable way. The antisemitism in the story is overcome, but the way the Jews’ enemies are dispatched — hanged, actually — is horrifying. (I have a friend whose father, who escaped the Holocaust, was otherwise observant but boycotted shul on Purim because he said the end of the Book of Esther was morally unacceptable to him.)

It’s a holiday of masking and unmasking, and I think that many of us think of masking differently now than we did pre-covid. Those masks covered our mouths, while most masquerade masks (that’s probably redundant, right?) cover the tops of our faces; if we were to wear them together our faces would be entirely obscured, with just our eyes peering out.

As our politics now get louder, angrier, and scarier, there’s a lot of unmasking going on. The masks imposed at least the possibility of civility; unmasked faces seem to show rage. It’s starting to seem as if polite masking might not be such a bad idea. Cover that snarl!

Megillat Esther tells us, among many other things, that we Jews have survived enormous danger before. The danger that faces us now is real but minor compared to what we’ve confronted at other times. But we’re not only Jews; we’re also Americans, or Israelis, or citizens of other countries where we live with the same freedoms as our neighbors. Our world is changing rapidly; America certainly is not going away, but its place is the world is changing — not by accident, but through the actions of its elected leaders. As Alexander Smukler details for us, the understanding of our world and our place in it that has held since the end of World War II is changing. We don’t know what it will look like when the change is over; if nothing else, it’s providing us with fascinating stories whose endings nobody knows. The excitement of living through a real-life thriller might not be worth it, but given that we have no choice, we might as well strap in, hold on and look around.

We wish our readers a happy Purim — don’t drink too much! — and if possible a return to sanity once it’s over.

—JP

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