Purim 5774

Saturday night we read the Megillah. It's a profound psycho-drama. Words cannot, and perhaps dare not, adequately express the calamitous cataclysmic destruction, like a tsunami on a quiet beach. We'd scream in anguish and cry in despair. But rather than dwell on the angst, we wipe out the name of the genocidal Haman, scoff at the buffoon king, Ahasuerus, and cheer the beautiful heroine, Esther. We escaped by God's grace -- this time! We dare not descend to the depths of despair; and besides, we triumphed! But hidden within the playful expression lies the angst of not controlling our own destiny.

Purim is not a child's holiday really. It's as adult as you can get.

In Holocaust commemorations, in our tragic need to explain the incomprehensible, we conjure the Hitlerian demon and vanquish satan by honoring our survivors and their descendants. But Purim admits that no human being can rationally confront or explain such horror. Reading the megillah is superior to xanax. We scoff at our deepest fears, reminding ourselves that we hung Haman on his own gallows.

The real solution is reading of the story in community. The Jewish community coalesces in the Book of Esther. Consider the end of chapter 9, to which few pay attention:
These days of Purim shall be observed at their proper time, as Mordecai the Jew--and now Queen Esther--has obligated them to do, and just as they have assumed for themselves and their descendants the obligation of fasts with their lamentations.

Let's party together Saturday night in the Beth Torah sanctuary, we Jews. Haman and Hitler are dead. We're alive! May it always be so! And let us hang on to one another, for the definition of a Jew is: a person whose history and destiny are the history and destiny of the Jewish people!