Welcome to the month of Adar. I can’t remember the last time that the new month fell directly on Shabbat. Actually, both Adar and March are beginning this Shabbat. So a whole bunch of synchronicity happening.
So here’s a thing about Adar. Talmud tells us:
מִשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אֲדָר מַרְבִּין בְּשִׂמְחָה
When the month of Adar begins, one increases one’s rejoicing. (Ta’anit 29a)
This little snippet, mishenikhnas Adar marbin b’simchah, is the most famous jingle about a month that we have in Jewish tradition. It’s the cultural equivalent to “April showers bring May flowers.” Everyone knows it.
But how do we increase our rejoicing in times like these? How do we even consider growing in joy?
This task, the to be joyful dammit, is entirely tied to the holiday of Purim and the story of Queen Esther which we are obliged to retell two weeks from now. It’s a story that many of us know well, because Purim is and has been a favorite holiday for children. For many of us, Purim was one of the holidays that we knew the best growing up. In part because of costumes and skits and also because of Purim carnivals, which for me were the annual source of the next household goldfish, toted home in a plastic bag.
Purim celebrates the events told in the Book of Esther, which is an unusual book. It’s a late book of the Bible. It takes place entirely outside of the land of Israel, among Jews who had been deported to Babylonia and who stayed after it became the Persian Empire and they were free to go. It is about a community of assimilated or at least integrated Jews – in fact God is not mentioned once in this book. And even though the Persian Empire was more tolerant of its Jews, the fate of the Jews was reliant on the king’s good will.
We don’t know if the Book of Esther is fact or fiction. But it might be that it’s a story that simply captured the imagination of the Jews of the Diaspora and Jews living under occupation. In the nervousness, in the precariousness of your community’s wellbeing hanging on a thin thread, a story like this one, that gives voice to the danger and fear, and that also presents a brave if reluctant hero in the form of Queen Esther, and that offers an ultimate triumph – this kind of story might have been a very potent story to listen to every year.
And that’s the story we grew up hearing. Cheering for Mordecai and booing for Haman. In my childhood, Haman’s plan to exterminate the Jews was told to adults and children alike, and it was unremarkable to us. I don’t remember reading or ever hearing the chapter where the Jews take up arms against those who would have killed them, and instead the Jews killing 75,000 Persians. I suspect it was omitted year after year, just as I have omitted it just about every year here at Ner Shalom.
And now here we are, sitting in a real, honestly precarious time, not knowing where we stand as Jews and as people of conscience, watching the president’s cronies and their Nazi salutes. Watching our leaders bullying the rest of the world and abandoning allies. Witnessing the racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, antisemitic Far Right move into more and more significant mainstream positions of power. Gaping at the systematic (or maybe entirely unsystematic) dismantling of so many of the features of democracy that protect the vulnerable. We watch this and can’t help but think about less than a century ago in Germany. Sitting and wondering, is this what it felt like then? Wondering, the Jews who fled Europe before the storm, how did they know it was time to leave? Or wondering, am I just overreacting?
I don’t have an answer to these questions. I tend not to be an alarmist. I can imagine the country developing the collective will to get the train back on the rails. And I can also imagine the bad-case scenarios too.
So back to Esther. How do you tell the story of Purim in a time when we are already activated, when we are beginning to feel the breath of danger on the backs of our necks?
As a synagogue community, we are now blessed to have a robust community of families with school-age children. Some of these children, I know, are also scared. They feel the mood of their parents. Some of them have a sense that it has to do with the country’s leadership or something about politics. Some of them already have a sense that they have reason to be scared because they are Jews. And that is a little new for me. I know I cannot pursuade these kids – or anyone – not to be scared, especially when I am feeling fear in my kishkes as well.
So how do we tell the story of Purim?
How do we tell it this year, in what we’ve promoted as an intergenerational, all-congregation celebration two weeks from tomorrow. Our Education Director, Reb Mia and I spent considerable time over coffee yesterday talking about this. How do we find a way to tell the story, to rewrite the story, in a way that can leave out the edict to kill all the Jews. Leave out the fact that a high government official and crony of the king is wealthy enough to pay for the destruction of the Jews out of his own pocket. Leavw out the gallows that are built for Mordecai but used on Haman. Leavw out the hanging and the impaling and the killing of Persians at the end.
That’s a lot of leaving out. What does it leave us with?
Where we arrived yesterday is that it can still leave us with a story of adversity and heroism. We can maintain the moral core of the story; a little bit of fear and a lot of hope. A villain who doesn’t want people to be themselves and a well-placed hero who was reluctant, but whose cousin Mordecai tells her, “Maybe it is for just such a time as this that you came to be here.” And then we can encourage every child in the room and every adult in the room to see the way in which they are needed right now. The way in which they have exactly the right skills and tools and insights and instincts to respond to whatever might come. That who knows, maybe it was for just such a time as this that they, that we, came to be here. That story feels momentous enough, important enough, without the additional terror and gore.
I say let’s go with that this year. I would love for all of you to be there. To help us celebrate Queen Esther‘s heroism that could be our heroism. And to go with me this year as we tell the story in a way that gives our children some empowerment, rather than keeping them up with nightmares. They are precious cargo, these children of ours, and we, collectively, are the vessel steering them to adulthood.
Next year maybe we will do it differently. Maybe we will have more than one Purim celebration and you can choose between the G-rated and the R-rated presentation. But this year I invite you all to come and together hold the delicate hearts of our children.
Even with the child-friendly rewrites, we can still revel in the fact that this is the transgressive holiday, the holiday of topsy-turvy, where students teasing their teachers (but certainly never their rabbi); people dress in the garb of other genders: and we thumb our noses at power and its abuses.
Mi shenikhnas Adar marbin b’simchah. When Adar comes, we grow in joy. Talmud doesn’t say to be joyful in Adar only in good years, because then we probably would never do it. Talmud says to grow in joy this month and that is what we choose do. We will face all threats; we will be a bulwark for our children; and we will hold ourselves and our ground with courage and with joy.
With so much joy. So much joy.