(RNS) — The Jewish holiday of Purim is traditionally a wild and woolly festival in which costumes, noise making and drinking are encouraged — in synagogue no less — as Jews gather for a public reading of the biblical Book of Esther. The Esther story is told as a children’s tale, in which the villain Haman’s plot against the Jews is foiled by the wits of the eponymous, beautiful queen.
But there’s a dark underbelly to all the revelry, found in the book’s ninth chapter. After the evil plot to kill the Jews of Persia is exposed, the Persian king orders Haman’s hanging and gives the Jews permission to defend themselves. The Scripture says the Jews “assembled to protect themselves and get relief from their enemies.”
That relief? The text specifies it involved killing 75,000 people.
Biblical interpreters have often dismissed that massacre, saying it’s part of the book’s carnivalesque quality and should not be taken seriously. Scholars insist the Book of Esther is not historical.
But even assuming it does not describe an actual event, its depiction of retribution is disturbing, especially at the end of a bloody 17 months in which the Israeli army has killed close to 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 Jews.
For many Jews, especially on the left, the retribution called for in the story of Esther is a problem, one that makes Purim hard to live with, especially to fulfill the commandment to be joyful and merry.
“Esther Denouncing Haman” by Ernest Normand, 1888. (Image courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
“It’s gonna be much less festive than it had been in the past,” said Shaul Magid, a visiting professor of modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, of this year’s Purim celebrations.
Magid said 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 site. “After Goldstein, for like a decade, I was really not able to really celebrate,” Magid said.
Right-wing Jewish settlers in the West Bank continue to view the story of Esther as offering permission for retributive violence. Just two years ago during Purim, hundreds of Israeli settlers went on a violent, late-night rampage in the Palestinian town of Huwara in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, setting fire to Palestinian homes and businesses and blocking emergency services from responding. In the aftermath, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a settler too, said that “Huwara needs to be erased.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the progressive Jewish group T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, said it has been obvious to Jewish sages throughout the centuries that Esther’s ninth chapter is not a prescriptive call for retribution but an act of defense. “For progressive liberal readers, what we should do is say, no! Any reading that justifies violence is incorrect,” she told RNS. “This is not in any way permission for violence or glorification of violence.”
As Jacobs wrote in an op-ed in The Times of Israel earlier this week: “The king’s response to Queen Esther displays a complete and tragic failure of imagination. He cannot envision a different possibility, in which the safety of one people or another is not a zero sum game.”
Rabbis in many synagogues elide the problematic text, or explain that it’s not to be taken literally and that other commandments, such as “love your neighbor,” supplant it. “In most Reform synagogues, we don’t really dwell on that ending very much,” said Rabbi Evan Moffic of Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois.
Other Jewish theologians say it’s important to grapple with that text.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has written a book about repentance, said Jews must keep looking for ways to engage with the horrors of the text. “We are still obligated to reckon with our actions and to acknowledge that people are harmed,” Ruttenberg said. “That matters. Right now, many of our failings as a people stem from this childlike need to always be the good guy.”
Right-wing Jews who look to the story of Esther as a justification for retribution against Palestinians miss another important distinction, said Magid. In the Bible, “Haman wants to destroy the Jews for no reason,” Magid said.
“That’s not what’s happening with Hamas,” he said. “I find it very disturbing for people to make that claim as if Jews in Israel are living their life and doing their thing and suddenly they’re attacked. But wait a second. There’s an occupation, there’s a siege, there are claims back and forth. It’s not the same situation.”
Jacobs acknowledged it’s hard to summon joy on Purim but said there’s a specific way of finding it, by leaning in on another Purim commandment (misloach manot) which calls on Jews to give gifts of food and drink to other Jews and (matanot l’evyonim) gifts to the poor.
Indeed, some Jews may find themselves looking forward to Purim’s frivolity precisely because of the darkness of the past few years.
“I think people are overwhelmed and confused and very much affected by the current political situation,” said Moffic, who said his congregation’s children’s Purim celebration last weekend was a hit. “They are yearning for some kind of outlet of joy,” he said. “More people dressed up, and more adults participated and had fun than I’ve seen in years.”
