{"id":1030,"date":"2021-02-24T09:34:01","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T14:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/?p=1030"},"modified":"2021-02-25T08:18:57","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T13:18:57","slug":"jewish-mardi-gras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/2021\/02\/24\/jewish-mardi-gras\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewish Mardi Gras"},"content":{"rendered":"

Purim, as I see it, is a Jewish version of Mardi Gras. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.\u00a0In any case, it is\u00a0not in the Torah of Moses and it wasn’t\u00a0commanded\u00a0at Sinai. It was instituted, according to the scroll of Esther, which provides the legend\u00a0of\u00a0Purim, by the Persian Jewish community, in the days of King Ahashveros or Ahasuerus, presumably a reference to the Persian shahinsha\u00a0<\/em>Xerxes\u00a0(5th century BCE), to celebrate the\u00a0rescue\u00a0(after a casting of lots, hence the Persian name of the festival) of Persian Jewry from the evil plot of Haman. Heroine of the story is Hadassah Esther (Ishtar) who braves the great king by approaching him unbidden and, by doing so,\u00a0she risks her life for the sake of her fellow-Jews.\u00a0There is also her good uncle Mordecai, a loyal subject to the same king who earlier discovered a plot against the same king. The Book of Esther is the only canonical biblical\u00a0book not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Hebrew version does not mention God at all. The Greek version adds a prayer, while the Hebrew version plays out entirely on the human plane.<\/p>\n

Timed to announce the coming of the First Month of the Jewish calendar, i.e., Nissan,\u00a0whose New Moon is associated with the birth of the Messiah and which culminates in the Passover,\u00a0Purim has much in common, in terms of its place in the seasons of the solar year, with Mahdi Gras, which marks the beginning of Lent and leads up to Easter. These liturgical similarities are not coincidental. Both Jewish and Christian celebrations hark back to earlier times, when the natural cycle \u2013 and human dependence on the mercy of the gods \u2013 was the essence of religion. Both Jewish and Christian celebrations\u00a0obscure the agricultural origins of these moments in cyclical time by means of narratives about divine providence and salvation in history.<\/p>\n

Purim is the only holiday where, as the talmudic rabbis suggest, a man is to drink to the point that he begins to confuse hero and villain of the story, Haman and Mordecai. How so? When the scroll of Esther is read in the synagogue, people are supposed to make noise whenever\u00a0one of these characters\u00a0is mentioned. You are supposed to cheer for Mordecai and hiss or boo\u00a0when Haman appears. Sometimes both appear in the same sentence. It is easy to get confused in the emphatic expression of opposite emotions in short order. It doesn’t take much alcohol to become too sluggish to quickly make the right response.<\/p>\n

I once attended a reading of the scroll of Esther at the synagogue of the Satmar Hasidic community in Meah Shearim.\u00a0Men and children\u00a0had dressed up. Some looked ornate in their usual Satmar garb, others \u2013 especially some of the boys \u2013 looked burlesque. As I was trying to find the place in the printed edition of Esther I was handed, a boy dressed as a voyager on Star Trek, complete with a noise making laser pistol, passed me by a number of times. It seemed like everyone around me was moving and making a lot of noise. I stood out by the fact that I quite obviously neither belonged nor had any sense of where we were in the reading. After a while, the boy in the space\u00a0outfit took pity on me. He took the book out of my hands, leafed for a moment, then gave it back to me, this time opened to the right place.\u00a0It was a gesture of kindness and inclusion.<\/p>\n

In that spirit: Happy Purim, everyone!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Purim, as I see it, is a Jewish version of Mardi Gras. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.\u00a0In any case, it is\u00a0not in the Torah of Moses and it wasn’t\u00a0commanded\u00a0at Sinai. It was instituted, according to the scroll of Esther, which provides the legend\u00a0of\u00a0Purim, by the Persian Jewish community, in the days of King […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1355,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1355"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1030"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/mzank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}