(RNS) — The Jewish holiday of Purim is traditionally a wild and woolly festival wherein costumes, noise making and ingesting are impressed — in synagogue no less — as Jews web for a public reading of the biblical Book of Esther. The Esther story is told as a kids’s story, wherein the villain Haman’s self-discipline against the Jews is foiled by the wits of the eponymous, stunning queen.
However there’s a darkish underbelly to the total revelry, learned in the book’s ninth chapter. After the melancholy self-discipline to abolish the Jews of Persia is uncovered, the Persian king orders Haman’s putting and affords the Jews permission to defend themselves. The Scripture says the Jews “assembled to present protection to themselves and web relief from their enemies.”
That relief? The text specifies it eager killing 75,000 folks.
Biblical interpreters obtain in overall brushed apart that bloodbath, announcing it’s section of the book’s carnivalesque quality and ought to aloof now not be taken severely. Students instruct the Book of Esther is now not historical.
However even assuming it doesn’t describe an accurate match, its depiction of retribution is disturbing, in particular at the tip of a bloody 17 months wherein the Israeli military has killed terminate to 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 Jews.
For many Jews, in particular on the left, the retribution referred to as for in the story of Esther is an self-discipline, one that makes Purim exhausting to live with, in particular to fulfill the commandment to be overjoyed and merry.
“Esther Denouncing Haman” by Ernest Normand, 1888. (Image courtesy Wikimedia/Inventive Commons)
“It’s gonna be much less festive than it had been in the previous,” acknowledged Shaul Magid, a visiting professor of latest Judaism at Harvard Divinity College, of this yr’s Purim celebrations.
Magid acknowledged he began to sour on Purim in 1994, after Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist, killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Hebron that doubles as a Jewish burial region. “After Goldstein, for take care of a decade, I was in level of fact now not in a region to genuinely celebrate,” Magid acknowledged.
Splendid-hover Jewish settlers in the West Bank proceed to see the story of Esther as offering permission for retributive violence. Real two years ago right thru Purim, a total lot of Israeli settlers went on a violent, late-evening rampage in the Palestinian metropolis of Huwara in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, environment fireplace to Palestinian properties and companies and blocking off emergency products and companies from responding. Within the aftermath, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a settler too, acknowledged that “Huwara needs to be erased.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the modern Jewish group T’ruah: The Rabbinic Demand Human Rights, acknowledged it has been apparent to Jewish sages right thru the centuries that Esther’s ninth chapter is now not a prescriptive demand retribution however an act of defense. “For modern liberal readers, what we ought to aloof enact is divulge, no! Any reading that justifies violence is unsuitable,” she told RNS. “Right here’s now not in any formulation permission for violence or glorification of violence.”
As Jacobs wrote in an op-ed in The Cases of Israel earlier this week: “The king’s response to Queen Esther shows a total and tragic failure of imagination. He can now not envision a varied possibility, wherein the safety of one folks or one more is now not a zero sum game.”
Rabbis in quite quite a bit of synagogues elide the problematic text, or level to that it’s now not to be taken literally and that other commandments, comparable to “take care of your neighbor,” supplant it. “In most Reform synagogues, we don’t in level of fact dwell on that ending very much,” acknowledged Rabbi Evan Moffic of Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois.
Different Jewish theologians divulge it’s most necessary to grapple with that text.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has written a book about repentance, acknowledged Jews must retain taking a survey ways to obtain interplay with the horrors of the text. “We’re aloof obligated to reckon with our actions and to acknowledge that folks are harmed,” Ruttenberg acknowledged. “That matters. Splendid now, quite quite a bit of our failings as a folks stem from this childlike must progressively be the good man.”
Splendid-hover Jews who see to the story of Esther as a justification for retribution against Palestinians leave out one more most necessary distinction, acknowledged Magid. Within the Bible, “Haman needs to atomize the Jews for no motive,” Magid acknowledged.
“That’s now not what’s occurring with Hamas,” he acknowledged. “I salvage it very disturbing for folks to impress that claim as if Jews in Israel live their lifestyles and doing their part and they’re attacked. However wait a second. There’s an occupation, there’s a siege, there are claims backward and forward. It’s now not the same instruct.”
Jacobs acknowledged it’s exhausting to summon pleasure on Purim however acknowledged there’s a particular formulation of finding it, by leaning in on one more Purim commandment (misloach manot) which calls on Jews to present affords of food and drink to other Jews and (matanot l’evyonim) affords to the melancholy.
Certainly, some Jews would possibly per chance fair salvage themselves taking a see forward to Purim’s frivolity precisely due to the darkness of the previous few years.
“I assume folks are overwhelmed and perplexed and intensely much tormented by the hot political instruct,” acknowledged Moffic, who acknowledged his congregation’s kids’s Purim celebration final weekend used to be a success. “They’re yearning for some roughly outlet of delight,” he acknowledged. “Extra folks dressed up, and more adults participated and had an perfect time than I’ve viewed in years.”
by 
