Fruits of Gani: Purim Madness

It’s been a week and I am still in the recovery room, still coming down from the crazy trip appropriately named PURIM, coming back from a place beyond the beyond; a place where crazy, unimaginable, miraculous things happen. A place you can only come to when you travel out and above of this world, out of all the heavens, all the intellectually understandable, beyond the gradients of human emotion, beyond what’s right, wrong, left, up, down, straight, moral, sinful, delicious, monstrous, hateful, lovable, desirable, meaningful, spiritual, accessible, peaceful, and finite. It is only once we look past what is within our realm of human consciousness …only when we grab hands with all of the above and spin round and round in circles until it becomes a giant incomprehensable blur, all the colors smear together and everything becomes ONE…and suddenly the buzzing stops, all the rules of nature no longer apply, and a thin still breeze known to some as revelation and to others as nirvana …. this is the Purim state-of-mind and ANYTHING can happen.

Its quite bizarre to walk into a synagogue and everyone is in costume, screaming, drumming, yodeling, howling and dancing until they collapse.

First before I tell you about Purim in Israel…which is perhaps the most intense experience ever experienced. I want to tell you, briefly, the story of Purim Version 2009. Purim is a timeless tale for every generation. Its backdrop is strikingly familiar…living in times of darkness, exile, over-consumption, meaninglessness and pursuit of pure physicality. Purim is a story of bravery and defeating oppressors against all odds, replete with great action scenes, corrupt bureaucracy, power hungry government officials, political agitation, heart breaks, assassinations, and grassroots revolution. The critics would say Five Stars *****, the political philosophers would call it a case study, and of course, the Jews use it as a time of year to rejoice because the biggest joy a person can have is the simple yet profound knowledge that at the end of the day, it’s all in G-d’s hands

Spark Notes verision of Megilla Ester:
The cast:
Achoshverosh: chauvinistic, free-loading king who married into the kingship
Mordechi: the valiant hero who saves the day
Queen Ester: demonstrates that all miracles are initiated by women ;)
Hamen: the egomaniac villain who doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut

SCENE 1: There was a King named Achoshverosh in Persia and he ruled the all the lands, from Cush to Median. He had a party that lasted for over 130 days (talk about endurance) and in a moment of drunken audaciousness, demanded that his Queen, Vashti, appear nude for his friends so he could show her off. She refused; he beheaded her, and then held a beauty pageant in order to find a new queen. Like the Urban Outfitter shirts says, “Everyone Loves a Jewish Girl” King Achoshverosh fell in the love with the poor orphan Jew, Ester. She moved into the Palace and didn’t reveal her identity as her uncle Mordechi instructed her.

SCENE TWO: Evil advisor to the king, Hamen, slowly makes his way up the ranks and gets irked when everyone bows to him except Mordechi the Jew. Hamen, to show Mordechi who the real Cheney is, makes a decree to kill all jews and picks the date for the public execution by means of a lottery. The date picked was the month of Adar. Mordechi tells Ester she is responsible for saving the Jews, she must reveal her identity to the King and kindly request that he declare the decree ‘unconstitutional’ since it goes against First Amendment right which guarantees freedom of religion. Ester says, “Fast and pray for me for 3 days because the king has a set a precedent of opposing feminism and isn’t pro-life. Meanwhile….dum dum dum… the King awakens from his sleep one night, perhaps he was having stomach problems, so he called his scribes to read him a bedtime story from the kingdom chronicles. They read him the story about how a man named Mordechi saved his life by overhearing a plot to assassinate the king in a foreign language (Mordechi spoke 70 languages), and the king wanted to honor Mordechi,

Anyhows…I am getting into too many details for the abbreviated version, the kitzer is…a bunch of seemingly unrelated events all end up being connected, Hamen is hung on the gallows he built for the Jews, and as most holidays go: they tried to kill us, we won, now make a party and eat.

But what is so striking about this holiday is that from a distance everything occurs in the normal course of events. Even more, the story doesn’t mention G-d’s name once. A person could easily read Megilla Ester and not see anything extraordinary happening. But that is the point, my friends. That is what Purim is all about…G-d is there all the time. He doesn’t have to make huge miracles for us, like splitting seas and bringing plagues onto the people who are mean to us. Since G-d created this world and the laws of nature that govern it, doesn’t it make the most sense that he operate through this system? Taking that into consideration, one would realize that everything is a miracle from G-d. This is a big underlying philosophical concept in Judaism…that G-d is in everything, but this revelation is concealed. It is up to us to tune in, to open our eyes and recognize this.

Although in the end, everything turned out for the best, it is worth talking about Hamen (the bad guy) and the fact the holiday is called Purim (the Persian word for lottery). Shall we take a moment and do some psychoanalysis on Hamen, perhaps the most diabolical, brilliant schemer of all times! Hamen was no heretic, he acknowledged there was such a thing as G-d, and therefore when Hamen decided to murder all the Jews in Persia, he knew he would only be successful if he employed G-d as his partner. And so Hamen cast the infamous lottery, he flipped a coin, he left it up to fate. Hamen decisively went straight to the source, to the publisher of the Book of Life itself, by creating a situation where G-d’s hand would be the driver in the decree. What is a lottery? It’s making a situation where all is equal. Hamen wished to access this realm, a place beyond this world, beyond intellectual logic and reasoning.

But when Hamen reached into the hat and pulled out ADAR as the month for the annihilation of the Jewish nation he didn't realize that he choose the luckiest month of all. Adar, the month of revealed goodness, increased happiness, represented by Pisces the fish, the very symbol of good fortune. Adar, a time set aside when we are untouchable and inevitably his evil plan did not exactly work out. It is said that during Purim, the Gates of Heaven and Hell are wide open…so speak all your desires (you still have another week left of Adar).

And that leaves us with the modern day celebration of Purim, whose main mitzvot of the day is to “drink until you don’t know the difference between Blessed be Mordechi and Cursed be Hamen”(…And you thought Arduous Huxely was the first to normalize and publicize substance-intake in order reach new states of consciousness..didn’t you?).

Therefore, on Purim, we drink until we are completely inebriated and don’t know the difference between good and bad, the hero and the villain, right and wrong, sin and mitzvot, because at the end of the day G-d weaved the entire story, He was behind Hamen and propelling Mordechi. And as long as we are stuck in the names and the limitations of what is comprehensible to the human mind, we can’t achieve the level of revelation required on Purim. The solution, according to the Gemera, is to drink drink drink and dance dance dance. Until the joy and happiness is so intense that our brain shatters and we reach a pure state of ecstatic G-dliness and essence oozing all over the place, it is once we reach this spiritual peak that everything suddenly makes sense.

Purim!!! What a spectacular, fantastical concept. All the forces are aligned for there to be magic in the air, the moon is full and red, the weather warm,the wild flowers are blooming, the month of Adar is in full affect. Celebrating in Israel also has an added dimension because Purim is celebrated a day later in walled cities (such as Jerusalem) and so if one is strategic, you can get two complete Purims. The streets are blocked off, thousands of people pulsating to the beat of house music and drum circles, dancing, singing, fires, jugglers, techno music, raving madness...Looking around it’s hard to imagine that it’s a holiday rooted in Holiness, in fact it appears almost demonic...but once we let go of everything it doesn't really matter anymore, its all the same thing. Just let go of yourself, of your ego, of your identity and just be Purim.