(Jewish Group) Chag Purim Sameach! The Joy of Purim
When you’ve been struggling to overcome evil, Purim feels different.
It isn’t just a silly interlude this year, a chance to be in costume and create cleverly themed mishloach manot—gifts of food. The situation for American Jews right now is far from what we’ve come to consider normal, and it’s affected me on a personal level. It was one thing when the cemetery where my great-grandparents and great-aunt are buried in Philadelphia was desecrated right after the inauguration of the current occupant of the Oval Office. It was quite another to have the bodies of the living murdered in cold blood on the Sabbath in my lovely Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, a place of harmony and goodwill. Can we feel safe as Jews in America again when there are those in our midst who hate us this much?
Certainly it seems to me that this year I need a blueprint for fighting evil. That blueprint is found in the biblical story of Amalek, Israel’s ancient enemy. On Purim, we can learn from how tradition has mandated that we celebrate the four commandments for the holiday. The lessons of the past don’t seem either distant or frivolous this year. Far from being the “Jewish carnival holiday,” Purim is a holiday whose messages are so serious and profound that tradition holds it is the only one, of all the Jewish holidays, that will endure, even to Messianic times.
I first started thinking about this when I spent Shabbat morning of MLK weekend at Charleston’s Brith Sholom Beth Israel synagogue, with some of my fellow congregants from Pittsburgh’s New Light Congregation. Our intent in going to Charleston—along with members of Rodman Street Missionary Baptist Church—was to meet and worship with the congregation of Mother Emanuel church, because like our congregation in Pittsburgh, they’d also had a white-supremacist gunman invade their worship space. We wanted to learn from their experiences and to march in solidarity with them in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. We were with the Jewish community on Shabbat and my husband, Rabbi Jon Perlman, was asked to speak at the kiddush about the Torah portion of the week, which included the first mention of fighting Amalek in the Torah. He spoke about combating Amalek, and how in several weeks, on Purim, we would be celebrating our victory over the forces of a descendant of Amalek: Haman. The point of the month of Adar and of Purim is a chance to be happy, to increase happiness—exactly what Amalek does not want us to do, he said. Our celebration and joy for all of Adar and especially on Purim would be the ultimate domination of Amalek. I had not been thinking that far ahead, and was impressed that my husband could on the spur of the moment speak so eloquently about such a difficult topic.
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Lots of Hamans in the world today.
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