Child’s play

Purim madness has come to Israel.

This morning, all three of our children dressed in their costumes to go to school and gan. There was a fair in the commercial center with music blaring. I headed home after dropping off Peach at her gan to start baking (hamantashen and chocolate peanut butter cups for mishloach manot) and planning our Purim seudah for Tuesday afternoon. The kids get out of school and gan early today, and are off from school for the next three days (Fast of Esther, Purim, and Shushan Purim).

One of the songs for Purim goes, “Chag Purim, chag Purim, chag le’kol hayeladim” (Purim, Purim, holiday for all the children). I often feel uneasy at this time of year, as though this is only a children’s holiday with the costumes, sweets, noise, shpeels, drunkenness, and general tomfoolery.

And yet I believe it’s not. I once had a conversation with a friend in Beit Shemesh who told me that she had learned that Purim, with all of its silliness, masks an act of God little less miraculous than the Exodus itself. As if to shield our eyes from blindness at the brilliance of God’s orchestration of events, we cover our faces with masks and face paint, don costumes, and dull our senses with sugar and booze to keep from being overwhelmed by the importance of that act of salvation of the Jewish people. Even the hamantashen, another Beit Shemesh friend told me, contain hidden filling, symbolizing the hidden hand of God in the Purim story.

Living in the United States, I related a little better to the holiday since I, too, lived in the Diaspora, and Jews in the Diaspora tend to be more aware of how they are perceived by the non-Jews around them. I often find myself tempted to see the holiday as irrelevant to Jewish living in Israel, and only a story about the Jews living in the Diaspora.

And yet. Here in Israel, I know exactly how we’re perceived by the non-Jews around us, and prefer not to be reminded of it by a holiday or anything else (including the latest bulldozer rampage in Jerusalem). To read the Megillat Esther is as much to read about the contemporary Arab world’s plotting against the Jews and the State of Israel as about the ancient Persians’. Amalek hasn’t gone anywhere; it just takes on different forms in each generation. The fair in the center of town was surrounded by police and security personnel since historically, Purim time has been a time of particularly vicious attacks by Palestinian terrorists.

So perhaps Purim isn’t child’s play after all. But what is remarkable to me is that while adults are keenly aware—either in the fore or the back of their minds—about how little has changed since Esther and Mordechai’s day, the turning of our children’s ganim into palaces, our children into kings and queens (and viziers and clowns and Spidermen), and us adults into fools, perhaps provides us with a temporary escape from the seriousness of our lives, and forces us to revel in each other’s company by giving to the poor, exchanging gifts of food, and sharing a meal with friends.

Chag Purim sameach!

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