Some Purim thoughts

I’m back from hearing the women’s reading (by women, for women) of Megillat Esther, and a few things leapt out at me.  Here they are:

– Ordinarily, the audience at a megilla reading rasp their graggers, toot their horns, and moo (not boo, moo) when Haman’s name is read and in addition, hiss upon hearing the name of Haman’s wife, Zeresh.  Tonight at the women’s reading there was no catcalling or hissing when Zeresh’s name was read.  I wondered why, though there might have been some sort of understanding by the group of women involved in this reading that perhaps Zeresh had a story too that we never hear.  Either that, or women are generally more decorous than men or mixed groups, and don’t make more noise than is traditionally expected of them.  I’ve been to megilla readings where the reactions to Haman and Zeresh’s names bring to mind those of an enthusiastic and participatory audience to Brad (assh*le!) and Janet (slut!) in The Rocky Horror Picture Show: loud, crude, and infantile.  Definitely not the stuff of a roomful of religious Jewish women reading a holiday text.

– In the year I spent living, working, and studying in Jerusalem prior to undergoing my conversion in the United States, I attended a weekly women’s beit midrash.  The week before Purim that year, I studied the connection between the Purim story and the giving of the Torah.  While Mt. Sinai is generally believed to be where the Torah was offered to the Jewish people, there is a midrash that suggests that it was not actually willingly received there.  (The midrash tells a story of how God turned the mountain upside down and held it over the Jewish people, in essence making the Torah an offer they couldn’t refuse.)  This was the first year I actually caught the words “Kimu v’kiblu,” the words in the megilla that inspire the belief that after God saved the Jews from destruction at the hands of the Persians, the Jews were able to take the step of reaffirming their commitment to the Torah and accepting it along with the adoption of the holiday of Purim for themselves and their future generations.  The reason catching those words is meaningful to me is that this issue of giving and accepting the Torah came up during a particularly intense grilling session with the Beit Din during my conversion process.  I got the story right, but didn’t know the two magic words.  Now I do, and I’m reminded of that session every year when I hear the megilla read.

– Holding the cheap plastic noisemaker Banana chose for me tonight, I remembered my sister’s frustration the year she finally discovered that a noisemaker is called (in Yiddish) a gragger.  Up until that year, she’d been pronouncing it as does my mother, with her thick New England accent: grogga.  (Stick to the Hebrew for this one, Sis: ra’ashan.)

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