Peace and Purim

Here is something I wrote right around Purim (a week and a half ago).

I’m debating being political... What isn’t political anyway? So, here goes. Last week, someone made a comment to me that aggression from Jewish settlers towards Arabs around Purim increases. I didn’t understand why at first, but I thought about it more. The story of the origin of the holiday of Purim is documented in the Book of Esther (one of the books in the Hebrew Bible). In the story the entire Jewish population is about to be annihilated because the King’s right-hand man, Haman (the quintessential villain), issues a decree calling for it. With the help of two Jews, Mordechai and his cousin Esther (who happens to be Queen), the Jews are saved and Haman is hung. A reverse decree gives Jews the right to defend themselves on the day they were set to be killed. (The story is much more nuanced and detailed but that’s the very basic idea.) One of the customs of Purim is to get so drunk you can’t tell the difference between good and bad. So the problems between Palestinians and settlers around Purim is that these Israelis look at Arabs as Haman or those who sided with Haman and decide to “defend themselves”. Obviously this is horrible... But what I want to focus on here is a particular way this reapplying of the Purim story to modern day really troubles me.

In my Tanakh class at Pardes we’ve been reading the Megillat Esther for the past 5 weeks. We talked today about not letting the story fade from our memory. It’s true that I don’t have the same feelings about the Holocaust as someone who survived a concentration camp. Memories slip away and often lose their meaning when we’ve no longer lived them. So how do we make sure not to lose them? By applying them to our current lives. The Torah is absolutely beautiful in this way- we can take things that happened thousands of years ago and apply these situations to our lives now. Torah continues to be actively lived and is what arguably connects us all as Jews.

So we look at the Megillah (Book of Esther) as applicable to our lives today. We call our enemies Haman. Haman who, seemingly out of nowhere, orders all Jews to be “massacred, killed, and destroyed.” (Ch3v13) We want to go after him/them as the Jews did in the story. We think it’s important to stand up for who are. Preserving our identity is worth killing for.

However, this means we are continually caught up in the binary of good and evil. If we say “the Jewish people will always have enemies,” then we’re going to find or create those enemies, whether or not they existed in the first place. I think we need to take note of how the Megillah gives us a more nuanced portrayal of Haman- we can see his weaknesses and his enormous insecurities. Why is the text written this way? Why do we get this window into what makes him tick? During his ultimate humiliation, when he has to parade Mordechai, the man who represents everything he is not, around as a hero, I almost feel sorry for Haman. He’s driven crazy by his obsessions with image, power, and money. Haman, as a person, becomes just sad for me, rather than a threat.

So what do we do about this “enemy” dilemma? The perpetuation of an us/them mentality isn’t getting us anywhere- and it just makes it easy to dismiss those we disagree with and/or don’t get along with, as opposed to trying to engage them or understand why they feel the way we do. By examining the character of Haman, we can see the importance of understanding who we call our enemy. Perhaps this may be a way to work towards a more peaceful world.

Article referencing violence on Purim:
http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=169801