Why we celebrate Purim

‘Purim’ is plural for ‘lot’ as in the casting of lots. It’s actually a form of gambling but then, as now, very few people had qualms about it, because any choice made by casting lots was seen as God’s will. So in ancient times it was seen as a good way for the undecided to make up their minds, for instance, about whom to point a finger at, or when the best time of year was to murder Jews.

The reason we celebrate Purim today is because Haman (yimach shemo) concluded, by casting lots, that Adar was the most felicitous month of the year for committing Jewish genocide, which proved an incredibly bad throw for Haman and an exceptionally good one for the Jews.

Another example is the decision made by the crew of a ship which was being buffeted by a force 10 gale to cast lots in order to find out who was to blame for their seasickness and imminent death by drowning. That’s how Jonah came to be heaved overboard, which resulted in the abatement of the storm. Jonah, as most people know, was rescued by a large, edentulous sea beast, possibly an ancestor of the whale, who gulped him down and three days later burped him out onto dry land. As a result of this digestive mishap, Jonah saw the error of his ways and went on to become a famous prophet. You can see the hand of God at work in both of these apparently random outcomes to the casting of lots.

Haman, on the other hand, was a ganse macher at the court of king Ahasuerus of Persia, who seethed with hatred towards the Jews for two reasons: first, like antisemites everywhere, he couldn’t get over (for which read ‘he was very envious of’) the fact that the Jews were successful at whatever they undertook. Second – and this was personal – he felt humiliated because a Jew by the name of Mordechai had refused to kowtow to him when he strutted around like Donald Trump.

We must now intrude into king Ahasuerus’s love life. The king’s marriage to his queen, Vashti, just wasn’t working out, so he dispatched a band of marriage brokers to find a replacement. They landed on a sheine meidel called Esther and shlepped her off to meet the king, who was immediately smitten. In those days, as now, three was a crowd in a royal marriage, so Ahasuerus promptly got rid of the incumbent queen and replaced her with Esther.

Esther had never forgotten her Jewish origins but on the advice of Mordechai (who by the way was her uncle) she kept shtum about it. That is, until she got to hear about the plot that Haman was cooking up to murder all the Jews in Persia, at which point she felt confident enough in her hubby’s infatuation with her to disclose her Jewish identity and denounce Haman as her would-be killer simply on the grounds that she was Jewish.

This was enough to send the king into a blind rage. Although he was no particular friend of the Jews, he could not bear the thought of losing his beloved wife. So, in a splendidly ironic gesture, he decreed the the demise of Haman on the very gallows which he had designed for Mordechai. And that, good people, is why we celebrate Purim to this day.

I like Purim, mainly because it gives children the opportunity to dress up in fancy dress, sing, dance and yell. It’s a bit like the Christian nativity play, though not so sedate. Another difference is that in Purim there is only one villain, whose name is gleefully drowned out by the rattling of graggers every time it is mentioned in the annual recital of the story, whereas in the story of Christ’s miraculous arrival on earth the only villain of the piece is king Herod, who has just a very small part to play in the whole drama.

Like Christmas, some of the pleasures of Purim involve an exchange of gifts and the partaking of festive goodies. Who can forget the fressing of Haman’s ears, made out of three-cornered pastries garnished with cheese and poppy seeds? That’s not very different, I guess, from the symbolic chewing of Christ’s flesh occasioned by the swallowing of the communal wafer or the symbolic sipping of Christ’s blood from a goblet of wine.

Pedants and historians alike are challenged by the Purim legend. For instance, no one is quite sure who Ahasuerus was. Was he possibly Xerxes? Or Artaxerxes (there were several of those)? And did Esther have pagan blood? Verr veys? We think that the action took place around 350 BCE, and that the Jews of Persia narrowly avoided being massacred, thanks to the intervention of one of the aforementioned kings, and his Queen who came out as Jewish when she needed to. It’s a lovely bobbemeise of good triumphing over evil.

The beauty of a story like Purim is that it allows for the free interplay of fantasy and reality. Jewish culture is no different from any other. It is replete with its own set of heroes, saviors and villains and we would be remiss if we did not send our children to sleep dreaming of such characters from their communal past. Dissecting out the history behind the legend is a task for those of an older age group.