March, 2023 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
March is more or less bookended by Purim at one end (March 6th) and Pesach at the other (beginning the night of April 5th). The two stories are both basically the same—cruel rulers oppress their Jewish subjects; but the Jews are saved and the despots are punished. (That old joke I loathe: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat”).
Just to continue the reductionist theme, we could look at much of life the same way: things go terribly; they get better; they go down the tubes again; we get a reprieve; the ones who were making things hard, now they’re suffering; now they’re on top, and here we go again.
It’s not objectionable to look at life as a constant oscillation between more desirable circumstances and less, better, anyhow, than seeing it as a steady downhill slide! I prefer a messier model: things sometimes go sideways too, and often (always?) fortune and misfortune overlap, bits of joy stick out of the sorrow and spots of sorrow poke through times of joy. “They tried to kill us. They tried to help us. We tried to kill them. We tried to help them. Things took various surprising turns. Some of them did unexpected things. Some of us did. There were changes. Things got better in some ways and worse in others. Everything is in motion. Let’s eat.” But who is “they” and who is “we” anyhow? I’ve got a lot of them in me, and they have a bit of me in them.
On the face of it, Purim is very binary about the hero and the villain. The evil Haman, taking advantage of the King’s dimwittedness, plots genocide against the Jews. Queen Esther, advised and supported by her guardian, Mordecai, subverts the plot (also by taking advantage of the King’s dimness and fecklessness: is the real hero here that stupidity?) and enables the Jews to save themselves and avenge the would-be murderers. We celebrate by getting dimwitted ourselves, cheering the heroes and booing the villains.
But hidden in this blunt-nosed story is the matter of hiddenness itself: Esther’s name is a variant of the word astir, “hidden”); there is the hidden divine Name (God is never directly mentioned in the Book of Esther); and there are other little obscure matters as well—who WAS Mordecai to Esther anyhow? Her cousin? Her adoptive parent? Her “nursemaid?” (he is called her omen, a masculine form of the word commonly used for a wet nurse). Her pimp, selling her into the King’s harem? There is an ambiguous, veiled creepiness surrounding Mordecai. In a slapstick misdirection Haman is forced to escort Mordecai through the streets on a horse, proclaiming, “This is what is done for the man whom the King wishes to honor!” Haman goes home to his wife and tells her and all his friends this humiliating story, his head covered in mourning, like this is as bad as things can get. Then his wife, Zeresh, sees the (hidden) writing on the wall: “If this guy Mordecai, before whom you are already going down, turns out to be Jewish, you’re doomed.”
There is a tradition of wearing masks and disguises to tell the story, and a custom in some orthodox circles of cross-dressing (forbidden in many of these same circles at other times of the year). There is the matter of inebriates: in the Talmud it is said that we must become so drunk that we cannot distinguish between Haman the villain and Mordecai the hero. We givetzedakah on Purim in a profligate way so that we might just be giving money to people who don’t really need it. Don’t forget the line from the Talmud, in Ketubot 67b:
“Rabbi Ḥanina said: This is what Rabbi Elazar said: Come and let us appreciate the swindlers who ask for charity that they do not need, because were it not for them, who command our attention and receive our charity, we would be sinning every day in failing to properly support the truly poor.”
Underneath the booing of Haman and the cheering for Mordecai and Esther, there is a loosening of moral binaries, an encouragement to mix it up, to tell the story backwards and sideways, the good behaving badly and the bad, well, at least being confused. I love this loosening, this ambiguity. It feels, dare I say, so adult: a training in seeing nuances, feeling countercurrents, smelling what is unripe, and listening for secrets. Purim is an exercise in complication. What if we could listen to the morning’s headlines with this same sense of complication?
As soon as Purim is over, we start getting ready for Pesach, specifically by cleaning out the hametz(the leavening) that has worked its way into the crevices of our houses. People who really clean for Pesach boil dishes, change shelf liners, vacuum and shake out furniture, comb the ingredient lists of their spices and condiments looking for any hints of flour, yeast, and any other stuff that can rise and swell. We bake flat, crisp bread from grain that has been scrutinized to ensure that no dampness or mold has made its way in.
When we finally sit down at our clean, bright table with its special dishes and cloths, we tell the story of divine deliverance from Mitzrayim, from perdition. And yet, the night before the seder we deliberately spread some bread around our clean house and, using clumsy tools like wooden spoons and feathers, we “hunt” for hametz. Once we find what we have spread around, we announce, “All the hametz in my possession is heretofore ownerless, like the dust of the earth.”
Which is to say that there is always hametz, that, like dust, it is everywhere and impossible to completely remove.
Throughout the Passover seder there are countless ambiguities, digressions, non-sequiturs, symbols that don’t make sense (the roasted egg, anyone?) And there are those four lovely glasses of wine, inducing in those of us who imbibe a pleasant lack of crispness, so that, by the end of the seder, things can get really strange, odd but right.
At this season of seemingly binary stories, I’d like to lift up complication. I anticipate looking for contradictions, ambiguities, hidden jokes, things I could see in ways different from the way I think I am supposed to see them. I plan to seek out places where the counter-narrative peeks through, where we suddenly start to feel sorry for the enemy or annoyed (or worse) by the character who is supposedly doing everything right. So too maybe in life, in the stories large and small that make up our own pasts and presents,perhaps it is helpful (or at least more interesting) to lift up complication. Maybe there is something sweet, or at least tenderizing, in our enemies, and maybe there are tendencies to watch out for in our heroes. Maybe some of the answers we seek are not ahead but sideways, or dispersed in many places, like hametz, like dust.
Wishing us all a month-plus of hidden hopefulness, laugh-inducing contradictions, engaging mysteries, and spaciousness as we hold it all, or as we let it float ownerless over the earth, as it always does.
PAIGE NOTES
Chodesh tov! This past new moon brings us into the Hebrew month of Adar, a month all about joy! The Talmud teaches משנכנס אדר מרבים בשמחה “when Adar arrives, joy increases” (Taanit 29a). While I’m sure many of us feel that it’s often not as easy as simply choosing to be joyful, this month invites us to lean into that edge. In every moment, including this very moment in which you are reading this, you are choosing what you are doing.
This means that you can also stop reading this suddenly and instead choose to go make a cup of tea, go out into the woods, call a dear friend, fake a laugh until it turns into a real laugh, in short, to do something that can bring joy to you.
Other non-joyful moments might arise this month too, but right now, right here, in this moment, let the energy of Adar spring us into some joy. Maybe, just maybe, that way we can en-joy more of the harder moments too?
with the kavana of springing joy,
paige
