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Hag Purim same’ah — a joyous and festive Purim holiday!
See below for a teaching I offered Friday night on the spiritual importance of pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones every once in a while, an experience which Purim facilitates.
What follows is the Purim drash I delivered this past Friday night:
We are coming up on the moment in the Jewish calendar in which, I confess, I am most out of my element, in which I am least comfortable.
But the premise of this D’var Torah, this teaching is: am I sure that this is such a bad thing?
I spend all year in this sanctuary trying to make moments of reverence, moments of sanctity. We recognize that life is extremely busy, that it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind, and so, here at Society Hill Synagogue, and in synagogues and religious communities all around the world, we try to carve out moments that allow us to re-engage with the eternal, the sacred, the transcendent — that which is beyond us and yet also within us, all one.
And to get there, we try to build a framework that has some solemnity — sure, sometimes sprinkled with levity and ease, but generally one where we take seriously this act of gathering together to facilitate an experience of holiness.
Next week, for one day out of the year, we turn all of that on its head.
Of course, I am referring to the holiday of Purim, the holiday which this Shabbat, Sophia’s Bat Mitzvah, sets up for us. It is Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat of remembrance, where we remember Amalek, the people from whom the Purim story’s villain, Haman, is said to descend.
Purim is a holiday — and the Book of Esther, around which the holiday is built, is a story — whose central theme is turning things upside down, reversals, carnival, farce. It’s the holiday where there’s a tradition that people get so inebriated that they confuse the villain of the story, Haman, with one of its heroes, Mordechai. In the Book of Esther, Haman creates an elaborate ritual by which he is to be honored, but the king ends up honoring Mordechai with that same ritual instead. The same happens for the gallows that Haman builds for Mordechai; they instead get used for Haman. A people that had historically been subjugated by other peoples experiences the reverse. That possibility was essentially a fanciful notion at the time, and Purim is a fantasy/action/comedy in which the Jewish people get to experience that fanciful reversal. In fact, in the culminating chapter of the story, it says, on the very day — the 14th of Adar, on which we now celebrate Purim — for which lots had been cast and it was expected the Jews would be subjected to Haman’s plan, vanahafokh hu, literally, the opposite happened, the world was turned upside down.
For one day a year, this special sanctity we’ve carefully cultivated, in our sanctuary, and really in our whole lives, is turned upside down. Not eliminated; it’s still here, but it’s turned upside down. I come on to the bimah, wearing not a suit and a tallit, but dress-ups that have, in recent years, included an oversized banana; Olaf the talking snowman; Ken from the Barbie movie; and an oversized carrot, returning to my agricultural theme. (Spoiler alert: this year follows none of those themes, as my upcoming costume was dictated by my highly inflexible, soon-to-be three-year-old daughter, Nina.)
So once a year, we take all the rules we’ve set for ourselves in the sanctuary, and again really in our lives, all the disciplines, and we toss them out, we turn them on their heads.
So why might we do this?
I’ll start by saying it’s not easy for me.
My comfort zone is up here with my podium and my prepared remarks — a sense of decorum settling in over the sanctuary, trying to facilitate an encounter with holiness; not the bawdiness, revelry, silliness we’ve come to experience at Purim. There’s a saying I invoke around this time every year that there are Yom Kippur rabbis and Purim rabbis, and I am very clearly a Yom Kippur rabbi.
But that doesn’t mean I get to skip Purim. Jewish tradition has the intuition that it’s this very discomfort, stretching ourselves, playing by a different set of rules, coloring outside the lines, that is not in conflict with the holiness that we try to facilitate, it’s necessary for it. We need to stretch ourselves, every once in a while, to break out of our comfort zones. There are popular images floating around the internet of a picture with two circles: one circle says “your comfort zone,” and the other circle, very far away from it, says, “where the magic happens.”
Now, I don’t want us to entirely sleep on comfort, structure, rhythms, order. Judaism very much makes space — a lot of space — for those, too. We have our rhythms of davening, of thrice daily prayer, our rhythms of Shabbat and the week, and the order of the service. Predictability is an important feature of a stable, loving environment in which we can flourish. Having a sense of predictability and discipline can provide the frameworks that give us the space to be our best selves.
But not every day.
Jewish tradition, in the form of Purim, says you gotta shake things up every once in a while, you gotta let loose. The same religious tradition that is obsessed with laws, that loves to tell you exactly how many hours to wait between eating meat and eating milk, that says which words in the prayer service you bow for and for which words you stand up straight, has canonized a book — the Book of Esther — in which laws and legalisms are made fun of, in which it teases a king for needing to reference the law every time he wants to make the simplest decision. The same religious tradition that reveres its rabbis sanctions a holiday in which we rabbis, who take ourselves so seriously and think so highly of ourselves, dress up as a banana, Olaf, Ken, or a carrot.
My teacher, Rabbi Jacob Staub, says that he had a therapist who told him that he knew how to work well, and how to love well, but that he was still learning how to play — how to have fun.
Purim is the holiday which comes to teach us that that play, fun, and even discomfort are part of the full picture of holiness. We have not fulfilled the mitzvah of the Jewish year if we’ve only focused on the serious and not made space for the preposterous.
It’s fitting that we are celebrating the holiday of discomfort on the heels of celebrating a Bat Mitzvah, for in some ways, what is a more uncomfortable chapter in our life than adolescence, that transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, not fully in either camp but on the bridge in between? And yet, it’s that very stage of life that B’nei Mitzvah celebrations sanctify.
What both Purim and B’nei Mitzvah ceremonies do is recognize the sacredness and the necessity of these moments of occasional discomfort — to say we need to make space for these moments, to honor them, to let our full selves come out; to say our full selves can only come out when we make space for these different moments, saying these, too, are holy.
Hag Purim same’ah,
Rabbi K.
