March, 2024 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
At a recent rabbis’ meeting I was surprised—I was going to write “shocked,” but that’s a little strong—to hear someone ask the group, “Are any of you celebrating Purim this year?” Most of the rabbis replied that they were not. I kind of understood, but Wow! The tremendous destruction visited on Israel on October 7th and then the vast ongoing retaliation in Gaza (and now, increasingly, in the West Bank as well) just feels so horrifying that, I guess, many Jewish leaders find that the laughter and play of Purim, especially around these very themes, is just too discordant this terrible year.
Purim is kind of a horrible and horrifying holiday, taking us right into the center of hatred, fear, powerlessness, power, and revenge. It’s a holiday where we sing and dance about the threat of genocide, and, when that threat is overcome, we eat cookies representing the ear (or some say the hat) of the enemy and act out impaling his children on a stake. Not to mention drinking ourselves insensate.
For me Purim, of all holidays, provides necessary medicine for times like the one we’re in, when hatred and division and failure of imagination run rampant. But it takes some serious (or un-serious) tweaking for the medicine to work. So I’ve been inspired to see an outpouring of wise and creative Purim-related projects offered this year to unleash some of the healing potential of this day.
First a word about holidays. Holiday observance is a powerful spiritual practice. I look at the holidays of the Jewish year as a kind of parcours, or maybe a mandala—a circular pathway that we move through annually that takes us into, and then out of, different kinds of consciousness. Over the High Holy Days we go deeply inward, towards holiness and mystery. At Hanukkah we savor momentary hope at a dark time. On Tu B’Shevat we feel the vulnerability of the whole Creation. On Purim, well, more about that in a minute. At Pesach we feel ourselves to be liberated from bondage. On Shavuot we experience revelation. On Tisha B’Av we mourn violence. Then, with the beginning of a new year, back to deep inwardness, holiness and mystery, and the circuit continues. However, each year we ourselves are different, as is the world. As we move through the stories, songs, foods, prayers, and rituals, we see the moment that we are in—personally and collectively—through the lens of each place on the holiday carousel.
None of these holidays stands alone. A consciousness of the holy without awareness of our political and social situation is unbalanced. Rejoicing in our own liberation without acknowledging the fragility of the whole world is short-sighted. And so on. We need them all. And we need to notice the transition from one point on the mandala to the next: from the hope of Hanukkah to the vulnerability of Tu B’Shevat. From the liberation of Pesach to the enlightenment of Shavuot. Each point, and the path from one to the next, provides a specific nutrient for the wholeness of our own life, the life of our community, our people and our world.
As with any medicine, we need to be thoughtful about how we take it. Some doses need to be imbibed with interpretation. Some with additional prayer. Some need to be recalibrated in various ways in order to be efficacious. Some need some flavoring so we can swallow them. In that spirit, I am so happy to tell you about some new formulations of Purim:
I received an invitation from my lovely Bay Area colleague, student rabbi Elizheva Hurwitz, for a Tent of Mourning Ta’anit Esther Actifest being organized by the Shalom Center. Ta’anit Esther (“Esther’s fast”) is observed the day before Purim itself, when, according to the story, Queen Esther gathered with her women and fasted and prayed for success in averting the genocide of the Jewish people. Elizheva writes:
We are erecting a physical Tent of Mourning in the Bay Area on Ta'anit Esther for all those whose hearts are open and tender enough to grieve both Gazan and Israeli lives lost on and beyond 10/7. Inspired by Queen Esther's ritualized grief in the Purim story, we are curating a full day of sessions, teachings, and ritual to support attendees in deepening and expanding their grief. With a mix of traditional and creative mourning practices, we are opening to the possibility that, through our shared grief, new paths forward might shake loose for us as individuals and more broadly.
Here’s a web link if you want to learn more about the Tent of Mourning Actifest: https://theshalomcenter.org/tentofmourning
Another tweaking of the Purim holiday, also emerging out of the Shalom Center, is the Chapter Nine Project. Chapter 9 of the book of Esther recounts the bloody revenge exacted by the Jews of Shushan against the people of the kingdom once Haman’s evil decree had been averted. I have always found it terribly painful to read this chapter of the Purim Megillah (I remember once reading it aloud in a purimshpiel and dousing myself in fake blood as I read…). This year it is excruciating. Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Nate de Groot, leaders of the Shalom Center, write, “In response, we're inviting a select group of people to reimagine a new Chapter 9 that centers wholeness and dignity for all and offers different endings to the Purim story.” Here’s a link for the first installment (which includes a wonderful painting called “What Would Esther Do?”) https://theshalomcenter.org/shalomreport/purim-iii-what-would-esther-do-today.
Finally, there’s the ritual that Rabbi Paige and I are cooking up for our own community, which we think and hope will be fun and funny while imbedding in our consciousness a bit more moral awareness and spiritual courage than we already have. You may remember last year when we held a ballroom dance on Purim and danced with the names of each other’s friends and enemies taped to our backs. No one knew if they were waltzing with someone’s mortal enemy or their greatest hero. It was pretty amazing, but this year’s Purim extravaganza won’t be anything like that one. Nonetheless, it will be wild and exploratory and will help us all pull from Purim the energies that will enable us to meet the moment with extra clarity, energy and joy.
Skip Purim??? Oh no! How could we live without it? But tweak it, dive deep into it, seek out the parts that inspire and strengthen us…. That’s the work. And the play.
PAIGE NOTES
We begin March this year as the Adar Aleph moon wanes toward the new moon of the month of Adar Bet. Once it waxes near full again, we will encounter the playful holiday of Purim, as well as the Spring Equinox, within just a few days of each other. We will once again return to the perfect balance of equal hours of dark and of light in one 24-hour period. We last experienced this on this past Autumn Equinox in 2023, which fell just a couple days before Yom Kippur 5784. Yom Kippur and Purim counterbalance one another on the Hebrew calendar wheel, like complementary colors on the color wheel. They share an etymological connection, of Yom KiPURim, as one has us refrain and be introspective, heading toward the darkness of winter, whereas the other has us indulge and be extroverted, blossoming into the light of spring. The Zohar (Kabbalistic thirteenth-century text) teaches that in the World to Come, on Yom Kippur we will rejoice like it’s Purim, transforming our afflictions into celebration. Like most lessons in life, it seems to always come back to finding balance. Balancing our year between repenting and partying, hibernating and planting, and light and dark helps to keep us whole. Our sunset just finally crept past 6:00 PM and, by the time we receive our next Megillah, it will be at 7:40 PM (also thanks to Daylight Savings Time, of course), so let us cherish the balance of these 12-hour days and 12-hour nights, leaning into the medicine that both Purim and the Spring Equinox are here to offer us.
with blessings for balance,
rabbi paige
