Thought for the Week

Shabbat Ki Tissa

Dear Members and Friends,

In case you thought you missed our community’s celebration of Purim on Thursday night 13 March, let me reassure you. This year Purim falls on a Friday and here, at the LJS, we took the decision to combine our observance of this minor festival with Shabbat on Friday evening and, for the young people of Rimon, on Shabbat morning – in effect, a day late.

We are not alone in our celebrations. In the walled city of Jerusalem and in the city of Shushan, now called Susa in Iran, where the fictional events of the Book of Esther are located, Purim is celebrated one day after the rest of the Jewish world on 15 Adar, when the Jews in Shushan rested from their exertions and made it a day of celebration (Esther 9:18).

The Book of Esther tells the story of how a Jewish woman, married to the Persian king, saves her people from annihilation, helped by her cousin Mordecai. This is the book that is read at the festival of Purim, our own Jewish ‘carnival’, complete with costumes, raucous mockery and a bizarre Talmudic prescription to get so drunk that one cannot distinguish between “Cursed be Haman” and “Blessed be Mordecai.”

When the Jewish people lacked sovereignty and political power and were persecuted and oppressed, permission to make a mockery of one’s enemies, to laugh at their downfall, to dress up and overplay the buffoonery of Ahasuerus the king and the villainy of Haman, could perhaps be understood. Although some of the reckless rites – the image of Haman impaled on a cross in mediaeval illustrations, and similar effigies – certainly overstep the mark and would have done little for Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages.

In recent decades, and especially since the massacre of 29 Palestinian Muslims on Purim 1994 in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein, the celebration of Purim has become more muted, more thoughtful, and today, deeply disturbing to many.

Celebrating our festivals is at the heart of our Jewish identity, even this supposedly light-hearted festival in which we consume ‘Haman’s ears’ – hamantaschen, folded pastries filled with poppy seeds and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

Yet, turning to the end of the book, the chapter which we skate over in our reading, perhaps omit altogether and certainly do not refer to in our retelling of the story to children, is sickening – whether fictional or not. And we ignore it at our peril.

The book ends with a complete reversal of power. On the day the decree to kill all the Jews, the opposite happens. Suddenly the Jews acquire power and attack those who have sought their hurt - ‘no one could withstand them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all the peoples.’ Seventy-five thousand are killed by the Jews, in addition to hundreds elsewhere throughout the king’s provinces.

This is what we must swallow when we read through those closing chapters. Not only an ending of feasting and merrymaking, an occasion for sending gifts to one another, but a retaliatory blood bath. Yes, the numbers are exaggerated, in keeping with the hyperbole and over-inflation of the whole book. No, the battles are not to be taken literally; the characters are not real people. But the text lies before us, part of our reading of the megillah.

It is hard to read this chapter and the ‘permission’ to carry out violence against other people. It is painful to read of the history of violence around Purim and the knowledge that in our contemporary world, there is a failure of moral courage and imagination to think of ordinary men, women and children, whose lives are ruined and made hopeless by violence and war.

In searching for alternative endings to Esther, I found nothing. Many of the midrashim are silent on this chapter, although the Talmud in Megillah 16b comments that some members of the Sanhedrin parted from Mordecai once he was appointed second only to the king. Why? Because his high political position left him no time for the study of the Torah. It lowered his stature.

But perhaps there are alternative endings. Imagine the king, not simply as a man who wants to satisfy his appetites for food, drink and sex, but as a humane ruler who is curious about the religious background of his new queen. Imagine a conversation between Mordecai and Haman, that ends not in the killing of one and his ten sons, but in a genuine desire to be reconciled, to become leaders together modelling a partnership that is based on ethical principles, creating a kingdom of stability and peace.

Remove the obsession with and abuse of power, remove the violence and resentment against women that is apparent in the book, remove the pervasive sense of othering and enmity, the revenge fantasy that feeds into readings of those who want to go out and kill people, and you would have no Book of Esther.

But perhaps at this moment in our history, where being Jewish after October 7th and after the destruction of Gaza, is causing continued trauma and painful moral injury, we can do without a story that gives the Jewish people permission to destroy their enemies.

Shabbat Shalom and belated Purim Sameach.
Alexandra Wright