Cancelling Purim
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting here on my 61st birthday, recovering from COVID with Tim now getting sick. I was terribly disappointed to postpone our Purim celebration, but on Saturday after Torah study, I got several pieces of information about people in our community testing positive, and with what I already knew, I had a strong intuitive alarm bell go off about community health. We are blessed with outstanding people in leadership positions, so consulting with Susan Leff, Stacie Gabert, Saragail Benjamin, Aimee Loiter, Mark Leopold, David Wright, David Punia, and several others, we all felt that the community’s health and wellbeing outweighed, in this case, the need for the events. Many of us had worked many hours to create a truly special celebratory Purim: we made parade puppets, wrote and rehearsed the spiel, created specialty “Booster Shots” for the adult party, shopped for the hors d’oeuvre, and all was ready. For me, canceling Purim immediately symbolized all the small losses we have experienced over these past few years, none of which is tragic on its own, but together represent what our lives are built from. These lost parties, proms, school trips, vacations, dinners with friends, Shabbat dinners, birthday parties, dinner parties, Seders, breakfasts, weddings, Shabbat services, dates, and movies seen with kids and friends in a theater--with lots of other human beings--these matter.
When I listen to Ukrainians speak about what they are going through, of course there is the trauma of bombs, of deaths, of terror and screaming alarms, but there is also much talk about simple things like walking to the park with ones’ children, or going to the grocery store, or going to a café. The same is true in memoirs of other dark times in human history. What we humans create at our best is a society where things like these deeply matter, make up a sense of wholeness, shalom, and a sense of the goodness of human lives and of creation. It is no small thing to have those taken away - they are not a loss of privilege, or first-world problems. They are the fabric of human lives in time of peace. They are the prophetic vision of redemption when, “We each one will sit under our vine and our fig-trees, and none shall make us afraid.” (Micah 4)
Cancelling Purim. It’s a great name for a collection of cynical Jewish short stories: Cancelling Purim and Other Stories. This time, it is a reminder that we can do everything in our power to do, be careful, be smart, follow advice, and still, things can go wrong. It is a reminder at Purim time of the message of the High Holy Days--so much is out of our power to control, and life is often profoundly unfair. Of course, as Jews, we know this, but we apparently need reminders regularly.
In this week’s Torah Portion, Aaron’s sons are famously killed for bringing “alien fire” to the altar of the tabernacle. Our sources debate what could possible be meant by “alien fire” and try to make sense of the events. This year, I wonder if they did anything wrong at all. Maybe they did the right thing for the right reasons, but for absolutely no reason, everything went tragically wrong. Perhaps risk, randomness, unpredictability – these are woven into life itself, and play their part in making life meaningful outside the ‘garden.”
The Book of Ecclesiastes is on this theme. “All is futility!” is the heart-cry of the writer, who having lived long and seen much, comes to see that, “The fate of the fool is also destined for me; to what advantage, then, have I been wise?” And I came to the conclusion that that too was futile.” The Book of Job is also built on this profound human experience of having the things that make up our lives taken from us in ways large and small.
At the center of the book MAUS, is a profound scene between the author and his therapist, a Holocaust survivor. Since I’m home sick and have the book in my office, I can’t quote it, but the therapist tells the author that who lived and who died was random; it didn’t matter what you did. If you hid, if you fought back, if you helped others, if you didn’t – none of it mattered in terms of who survived. It was luck.
Our tradition is profoundly acquainted with the unfairness of life, with the unpredictability of safety, of home. When they praise God and the beauty of creation, they do so in the face of experiences as brutal as any humans have experienced. Judaism reminds us to say 100 blessings a day, even in the face of loss, to remind us that we can feel loss while also feeling grateful for the lives and the loves we have around us. We can feel both at the same time. We are made in the image of God and can feel complexly. It makes us beautiful. We make meaning in the face of meaninglessness.
I will leave you with a beautiful poem by Israeli poet Hagit Grossman. In it she captures the sublime, the transcendent beauty of the most everyday moments. To me, it is a Psalm to all these losses, these cancelled Purims, and a reminder of what matters most:
If a friend calls out to you late at night from beneath your window
Never send him on his way. And if you’ve sent him away and still
Insist on rigid rules, regain your composure after a moment
And run to the window and shout his name: “Come, Merhav!
Come back! I’ve got some corn cooking! Come eat something.”
And he’ll placidly retrace his steps and gladly accept
The key you toss down from your window,
Will come upstairs to the first floor and will be impressed
By the large pictures on the walls.
He’ll sit and wait for you to slip into a clean shirt and you’ll put on
The movie in the kid’s room and your baby daughter
Will rush to the kitchen and come back with a red pepper for him.
He’ll decline the warm corn and say he’s already had dinner.
In the meantime your husband will chat with him about Tai Chi
And pour him a glass of cold sweet pineapple juice.
You’ll return to the living room
And go out to the balcony and light a cigarette and sip
A cold beer. You don’t yet realize
That this is a sublime moment in your life.
One of the most sublime you’ll ever know.