I confess, I struggle a lot with the holiday whose eve we have reached: the holiday of Purim — the holiday that celebrates the story of Esther, the Jewish Queen, who upends the plan of the murderous Haman, who, in the ancient persian court, sought to have all the Jews killed after he was offended by one Jew in particular, the pious Mordecai. A theme of the holiday is reversals — Mordecai gets the honors Haman had envisioned for himself, Haman is hanged on the very gallows he had prepared for Mordecai, and the day that the Jews were to be killed is transformed from one of grief and mourning to one of festive joy.
This sense of opposites, of turning things inside out, manifests not only in the holiday’s story, but in the way it is celebrated: adults are invited to drink booze “ad lo yadah” — until they can’t even tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman in the story; the sanctuary, often a place of peace and solemnity, is turned upside down into one of silliness and revelry; as Rabbi Michael Strassfeld puts it, “it is a time when all our rules and inhibitions are swept away, when the superego is pushed away by the untrammeled id” — the Jewish version of halloween or carnival.
Not to be a downer, but in recent years, I’ve struggled to generate this kind of energy. When I walk down Delancey Street on Halloween, overflowing with people in costumes and masks, huge paper mache spiders and webs; I don’t know, I look forward to the peaceful respite of my home. There’s a saying that all rabbis are either Yom Kippur rabbis or Purim rabbis, more at home either in the solemnity of the Yom Kippur sermon, or the bawdy humor of the Purim spiel. While I try to reject typologies, embracing the idea that we can build up any muscle if we exercise it, there is no doubt that my home base these days is more the classical religious experience of a shabbat or a Yom Kippur than it is the unique, irreverent brand of Purim.
Still, it’s telling that these two holidays share a word. Rabbinic teachers have often pointed out that the formal name for Yom Kippur is Yom Ha’ki-purim, which, in addition to meaning the day of atonement literally means the day — ki’purim — the day like Purim.
So what does this mean, what could these two days, one the most solemn day of the year, the other the most irreverent, possibly have in common.
On a surface level, it’s pretty simple: Purim comes from the words for lots, like a lottery — luck of the draw. The traditional explanation is that Haman cast lots to determine exactly which day was to be the day of doom for the Jewish people. The lots fell on the 14th of Adar, the day the reversal of fortune took place, and ever after the 14th of Adar is the day we celebrate Purim — the holiday of reversals of fortune; of twists of fate — of the recognition that that sacred brew of divine fortune and heroic human action can bring about dramatic results.
In Yom Kippur, too, fortune, that which is beyond our control, plays a central role. In the biblical depiction of Yom Kippur, lots are cast to determine which of two goats is going to be brought as an offering to God, and which is going to be the scapegoat — the goat over which we confess our sins, and which we then send off to the wilderness, praying that we feel our burdens lifted as it journeys off.
The theme continues in the central liturgy of Yom Kippur. We say in the year to come, we don’t know who will live and who will die; who shall be at peace and who pursued, who shall be serene and who tormented — but we do know that in the face of this we are called upon to carry out of teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah — acts of return, reflection, and repair. Making life sacred however we encounter it.
So both holidays play with this blend of that which is within our control, and that which is outside of it; of taking life as it comes and taking matters into our own hands.
On a deeper level, however, there’s probably an even more profound theme linking the two holidays, and that’s the theme of rachamim — compassion.
Yom Kippur — despite the ritual of the fast — is undoubtedly a holiday of compassion. It is the day upon which we bring an offering of ourselves, saying to God, “God, over the course of the past year I have misstepped time and again from my alignment with You, and I want to make that right. I want to realign with your divine flow of compassion. I want to be embraced with love and sincerity, and I profess to dedicate myself, time and again, to that alignment.”
And, the liturgy suggests, God accepts. God embraces our return, again and again. (We’re not supposed to count on that; we’re not supposed to say, “I’m allowed to mess up, so I will, and God will embrace me anyway,” and take advantage of God’s compassion, but nonetheless, the liturgy says, God will embrace us as we return.)
So Yom Kippur is a holiday of compassion.
But wouldn’t you know that Purim — Yom Ha’kippurim, a day like Purim, Yom Kippur is — Purim is a day of compassion, too.
As we said earlier, Purim is the day when we turn everything inside out — when, as Rabbi Strassfeld put it when the superego is pushed away by the untrammeled id — or, to perhaps put it more gently, when we give a little more external shine to those inner parts of ourselves we often relegate to the dark.
Herein lies the compassion. In our daily morning liturgy, we chant “elohai neshama she’na’ta’ta bi, tehora hi” my God, the soul you placed within me is pure. We all have inner parts of ourselves we might be a little bit ashamed of, that we’re not sure what we’re supposed to do with — rebellious streaks, eccentricities, wayward insticnts; parts of ourselves that society says we need to put on a shelf or in a drawer. In a closet, if you will.
Purim is the holiday that gives a permission structure for these parts of ourselves — which says, they, too, are Godly; they, too, every part of us, comes from the divine.
It doesn’t mean, to use Rabbi Strassfeld’s phrase one last time, that our id can be untrammeled every day of the year; it doesn’t mean we never have to check our instincts or reactivity or impulsiveness; we do mediate how we present to the world through the interactions of multiple parts of ourselves into a unified self. But it does mean that we don’t have to be ashamed of any of those parts; showing compassion for them — even putting them on transparent display one day a year to say “we are proud of them, too.”
Purim, too, is a holiday of compassion, because it is a day when we say even those parts of ourselves that we have some questions about, that we’re unsure about — they, too, are godly, and, when married to the other parts of ourselves, can produce the godliness that we’re called upon to bring about in the world.
So yes, I may ultimately be more Yom Kippur than Purim Rabbi. But as this teaching suggests, the differences between the two holidays may not be as stark as they appear. Both call on us to be compassionate — with God, with one another, with ourselves, calling us forward to a place of holiness.
