Purim

What the students probably came home talking about:

We made masks, put on very amusing skits, and had a party.

What really happened:

Our Purim study and celebration spanned two sessions, one before Purim and one on the afternoon of the actual holiday. Here’s what we did on those two days, not in order:

A Purim theme: Revealing the Hidden and Hiding the Obvious

Famously, the Book of Esther – the Purim story – does not contain the name of God. If the story is as simple as many of us suppose, Esther’s name contains the root letters ס-ת-ר, the Hebrew root meaning “hidden”. There is a Jewish interpretative tradition that says God is hidden in the chance twists and turns of this story, in the same way that God is hidden in the world.

The tradition of getting dressed up in crazy costumes on Purim is an extension of the idea of revealing the hidden and hiding the obvious. The idea is to use your costume to discover versions of yourself that you never knew were there.

Another Purim theme: Bad guys. Why are they so important in so many Jewish stories?

Haman. Pharaoh. Hitler. Why do so many of the important Jewish stories center on remembering a particular name that personifies evil? A subgroup of the class addressed this issue by discussing the section about Amalek. We did not come to any definitive conclusions, but we had a very honest and quite personal discussion of the important and the frightening aspects of this kind of memory. It turns out that while it is important to protect yourself by remembering the horrors of your past, there is also a danger in dwelling too much on these horrors.

The Megillah: The Scroll of Esther

We read the story of Purim in an abridged form (see below) looking for the major themes and personalities. As we read the abridged version, people added details that they remembered from years of Hebrew school Purim spiels. Rabbi Helen brought midrashic interpretations to flesh out the picture.

The abridged Purim story was divided into eight scenes. We cut these apart and put them in a hat. We divided into groups, and each group picked one scene out of the hat. Each group also chose a “theme” from popular culture and used that theme to create a skit. The skits were amazing.

The Scroll of Esther, Abridged Edition

1. King A-chash-vey-rosh throws a party. He gets drunk and asks Queen Vashti to come “display her beauty” before all the guests. She refuses. He asks his advisers what he should do to punish her. They say, “Banish her!” because they are afraid their own wives will get the idea that you don’t have to do everything your husband demands.

2. King Achashveyrsosh gets lonely, so his advisers decide he needs a replacement queen. They set him up with every interesting woman they can find. One of the women is Esther, an orphan who has been taken in by her uncle, a Jew named Mordecai. All of the women become part of the king’s harem, but he likes Esther the best, and she replaces Vashti as his number one queen.

3. Meanwhile, the king promotes a guy named Haman to the top spot in his organization. (When we are introduced to Haman we know right away that he is a bad guy. We find out that he is a descendant of Amalek, which, in the Bible, is almost like saying he is a descendant of Hitler. Amalek is the ultimate bad guy.) Haman likes to strut around the kingdom making people bow down to him. Mordecai refuses to bow down, which makes Haman furious. He doesn’t know that Mordecai and Esther are related or that Esther is a Jew.

4. Haman hatches a plan to get rid of not just Mordecai, but all the Jews. He tells the king, “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws. It is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them. If you pass a law that they must be destroyed, then I will deposit $200,000,000 worth of silver in the royal treasury.” The king has no idea that Esther is one of “those people,” and the money sounds great. So he gives his OK and the law is passed.

5. Mordecai finds out about the plan to kill the Jews, and he tells Esther to go to the king and reveal that she is a Jew. She is afraid to do that, because even the main queen is only allowed to see the king when he calls for her. If she shows up at his doorstep uninvited it is legal for him to have her killed. She fasts for three days, and all the Jews fast with her.

6. In a completely unrelated incident, the king can't sleep one night so he opens the only book on his shelf: The Official Police Log of the Kingdom. He happens to flip to a page that describes a plot to assassinate him! It turns out that the plot was foiled by a guy who overheard the would-be-murderers making their plans and reported them to the police. The king notices that this whistle-blower was never rewarded. He asks his trusted adviser Haman for advice on how to reward a very appreciated person. Haman thinks he is talking about Haman himself, so he suggests a magnificent parade in honor of the appreciated person. The person, of course, is not Haman, but Mordecai himself! Haman is horrified and starts to suspect that his tide is turning.

7. When Esther finally goes to see the king, and he raises his golden scepter, inviting her to enter. (She’s all that.) Esther asks the king to invite Haman to a feast. At the feast, she tells the king that she is in trouble because someone wants to kill her and all her people. Horrified, the king asks who would want to do such a thing?! Esther points at Haman. The king is furious, and runs out of the room. While he is gone, Haman begs Esther to forgive him, and when the king comes back into the room Haman is lying on her couch pleading with her. The king says, “Does he mean to ravish the queen in my own palace?!”

8. The king realizes that Haman is the bad guy in this story. He has him killed, and the Jews are saved. The king can’t just reverse his decision, because the law he passed against the Jews was “permanent.” So he passes a new law saying that the Jews can defend themselves, which they do with great success, killing their enemies. Mordecai gets the magnificent parade.