Purim
is for being stupid and silly and soused, for thinking evil thoughts
and saying them, for being off-color and sleazy and gross. Purim
is for too many jokes. Purim is for booze and dice. Purim
is for sleazy outfits. Purim is for letting all that stuff
we work to repress every other day hang right out there.Purim is for mocking people* (*especially rabbis.) Purim is for yelling in shul, for making tons of noise, for eating cookies in great quantity named after a genocidal maniac?s hat (or ears, depending on where you come from.) Purim is for cheering when we win and jeering when the other guys lose.
Purim is for laughing at the King. Purim is for drowning out the authorities. Purim is for being totally, unabashedly happy when the underdog pulls it out, against all odds. Purim is for being especially happy when the underdog is a preteen girl -- and Jewish! -- who learned her wiles from watching Paris Hilton on Survivor (which she was probably never on -- but then, the story of Queen Esther probably never really happened either.)
Purim is for not trying to understand every side. Purim is for not trying to listen respectfully to intolerable positions. Purim is for taking a day off from Nonviolent Communication. Purim is for mocking the creeps. Purim is for ?by any means necessary...?
Purim is the yearly black-out date on the calendar of leading a good life. You have to do a lot of mussar (cultivation of virtues) every other day of the year to earn a really good Purim.
Smart rabbis -- giving us a day to let it all hang out like that. They know that secretly we want nothing more than to think of ourselves -- and to have our kids think of us -- that we?re really good folks, that we would never do anything like THAT. Judaism, after all, is about justice, about ethics, about righteousness, about living a good life. ISN?T IT?
So they let us do THAT for a day. In fact, they command us to do THAT, well, at least a little of that ("putting the ID back in YID," as Philip Roth so memorably put it.) Even God does THAT -- hiding out, appearing in the disguise of a little twit of a queen whose name means -- hahaha -- "hidden."
As I write, this week in our mussar class we are working on cultivating the virtue of anavah -- humility. Rabbi Mendel of Satanov (no, I did NOT make up that name) teaches that, if one finds herself prone to being a little holier-than-thou, she should engage in some "reverse conditioning." She should go a little overboard in the other direction: maybe, say, not displaying her great virtue and wisdom when some blowhard is sounding off. Maybe just letting them hold the floor. Maybe even joining in a little. Maybe even going ahead and laughing at their disreputable jokes.
What better "reverse conditioning" could anyone devise than a good yearly dose of Purim? Imagine how insufferable we would be as a people if there were no Purim; just Passover and Yom Kippur and Shavuot. We can think of Purim as the holy humble-izer, the kosher corrective to our generally estimable ways.
Then, of course, the very next day, we get right up and start cleaning for Passover. Too much humility, like too much of anything, is bad for the soul... Happy Adar, happy Purim, my dear and silly community!
- Rabbi Margaret Holub © 2011