February,2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
The new president has called for one hundred days of mask-wearing. Perfect for Purim! We’ve all learned a lot about masks this past ten months, haven’t we? Masks make it hard to recognize people. Masks mess up your skin if you leave them on too long: you get “maskne” or chapped patches. You don’t need to wear a mask when you’re home by yourself, but you gotta wear one in public. Even with a mask on, you’re not supposed to yell or sing. Masks are the twin of social distancing. You’ve probably seen the clever use of pool noodles or hula hoops or antebellum skirts to make it clear how far away six feet really is. Masks and distancing keep us out of each other’s faces.
Masks are gross. They smell bad. They get damp (which is why you wear them, right, but still…). They pull your hair or hurt your ears. You have to remember to have one with you. You have to figure out the right degree of snark or obliviousness when you pass by someone who is not wearing one. We’ve all mastered the slightly lesser serious eye-roll for the ones who sport the mask Bill Clinton-style, under their noses. Or the ones who use them as chin diapers.
Liminality. Between-ness. Crossing over. Remembering good old days and looking ahead to promised lands. In Torah, and ever so much more in life, the action is in the midbar. As I write this, COVID vaccines are traveling the country and world in quickly-manufactured super-coolers. Committees are urgently delineating stages for the roll-out, wrestling with impossible ethical dilemmas as they do: all first responders or just those on COVID wards? Everyone 75 and over or just those in nursing homes? What about prisoners? How serious does a pre-existing medical condition have to be? Meanwhile, a soon-to-be former president is disintegrating on the world stage, holding hostage the economic relief for millions. On Christmas people are traveling or not traveling, hosting or not hosting. We anticipate a surge-upon-a-surge of COVID infections in the weeks to come. The action is in the midbar.
Interestingly, wearing a mask doesn’t really protect the wearer so much. If someone else gets in your face and breathes heavily or coughs or shouts, your mask isn’t a very dependable barrier. But masks protect others from your spew: we wear masks to protect other people from our inner toxicity.
At Purim we celebrate the downfall of a vain and stupid king and his evil advisor. We exalt that one of our own—and a woman!—has taken the throne. We feast, we dance, we exchange gifts, we let money fall recklessly out of our pockets so that poor people can pick it up. We don’t worry if they go spend it on booze…we’re going to do the same. Over the centuries, Purim has grown into a bacchanal, a Carnivale, a festival of bawdiness and overdoing and bad taste. Yes! Bring it on!
Costumes are a big part of Purim and, in many communities, the costumes don’t have to have anything to do with the story. Any costume, any alternative personality, is welcome. Purim is the one day a year when traditional gendered prohibitions against cross-dressing were lifted in communities where they were otherwise imposed, and celebrants could revel in the presentation of their choice. The year I was in Jerusalem for Purim, I was dressed as a nun and strolled around the streets with a friend dressed as a Torah scroll. No one batted an eye. My own favorite costume ever was a gorilla suit. I don’t know why; it just suited me.
We read the Megillah (not this august publication, but its predecessor, the story of Esther from the Bible) cranking our groggers when we hear the tale of the evil henchman and the dumb king who over and over does his cruel bidding. Usually there is a Purimshpiel, the silly play that mocks whoever needs to be mocked. It is customary to be pretty tipsy while engaging in all of this, though this is somewhat controversial thing and certainly problematic for people who deal with alcoholism.
But then we take off our gorilla suits. We sober up and clean up and get to the more serious and wholesome business of preparing for Passover.
I’ve long seen Purim as the date on the festival calendar that holds space for revenge and schadenfreude, glee at the downfall of enemies. It is one day long. It both welcomes and contains rowdy behavior. Implicit in how we celebrate Purim is a kind of auto-critique: we make a burlesque of being commanded to do things we’re generally not permitted to do. “This isn’t how a proper Jew acts, except for tonight!” Tomorrow, tired and hung-over, we return to our higher selves.
I’ve taught about this before, so forgive me, please, for the repetition, but this year I find Purim both especially compelling and especially troubling. Never before have I felt myself, or heard expressed by others, more loathing for a departed administration or more exuberance at its termination—and especially that of its leader. It’s not so unusual, I guess, to wish that politicians you dislike will land up in jail. But I’ve never heard it or felt it so fervently much less seen it to be likely, and found joy in this.
I wonder… for people who see the world more or less as I do, maybe it would be superhuman not to desire a big public humiliation, comeuppance, payback for people we have seen cause so much harm and foment so much hatred. But what do we do with that very human impulse? I for one don’t want to make it the air I breathe for very long. I don’t want humiliation, comeuppance and payback to be my ongoing passion and preoccupation; I’d rather focus on healing, restoration and new life.
Some say—though not I—that comeuppance is justice. They say that it is necessary for the healthy functioning of our democracy that the cravenness of leaders is punished. I’m not questioning that need for punishment here. What I am questioning—not necessarily disowning, just gazing at—is my own pleasure in that prospect, my own hunger for retribution, not (just) because it is what democracy requires, but because it comes from a deeper, more hidden part of my own make-up.
At various hideous times in the past four years—when Neo Nazis marched in Charlottesville, immigrant children were detained behind wire fences, African-Americans were killed by police, the Capitol was invaded in early January—I heard people say something like, “Well it’s good to get all this awfulness up and visible. It’s like popping a boil. You have to let the pus drain out before it can heal.” I have wondered about that analogy. I have wondered whether these horrific events drained the pus or exacerbated the infection. I wondered whether they constituted a floor below which no one would want to go or whether they normalized violence.
All of which makes me question my long-held theory about Purim, which is that it is a useful container for the Jewish longing for revenge. Does telling the story of Ahasuerus and Haman and Esther and Mordechai drain the pustule of Jewish longing for the downfall of the enemy? Or does it celebrate that response?
I don’t know. I deeply don’t know, but we can’t have our usual mini-bacchanal this Purim anyhow, with our fun little nods toward schadenfreude. Maybe that’s a gift of COVID. On the night when ordinarily we would put on our costume, come to the shul and watch the shpiel or act in it, swing our groggers at Haman’s evil name, maybe take a little swig from Vashti’s Revenge,… what should we do instead?
Maybe, since we’ll be home by ourselves or with our own little pod, it’s time to take off our masks and contemplate our own capacity to infect others. Maybe it’s a night to look more deeply at what we really want for this world, including the people we think have put it most in peril.
Maybe it’s a night to think about what happens when we breathe out, when we sing, when we raise our voices. Maybe it’s a night to try to take charge of our breath and how we use it.
If that sounds a little too serious, here’s another plan. I’ll put on my gorilla mask and suit and lie on the couch with a hot toddy in my hand. I won’t think about my enemies at all. I’ll think about all of you, my friends, in your costumes on your couches and how beautiful and silly we all are. I will just laugh and laugh and hope you’re doing the same.
