What to do with Purim?

Isn’t the meaning of Purim – the quintessential exile festival that reflects the issue of protecting the dispersed people – bound to fade away once the Jews have given themselves a state charged with preserving them from persecution? This is the question Danny Trom reopens in light of October 7 and its aftermath. How should we understand the circulation, for this year’s Purim, of calls for children to adopt Ariel Bibas’ Batman costume? Is it not the case that the Jewish political condition in exile remains latent in the realization of the Zionist project, merely awaiting its actualization?

 

Among the festivals that punctuate the Jewish calendar, Purim is special in that it is not linked in any way to the land of Israel, nor to the pilgrimage in its direction, nor to its agrarian cycles, nor to the Temple. With no basis in the five books of the Torah and yet anchored in the scroll of Esther (eventually included in the canon, albeit with some hesitation), it was, like Hanukkah, instituted by the rabbinical authorities, but by reversing the logic of the relationship between the center and the periphery: while Hanukkah has as its epicenter the recaptured Temple, the events recounted in the book of Esther take place in exile from beginning to end. There is a discreet reference to Jerusalem in the scroll of Esther, when the text indicates that Mordecai, a Jew (Yehudi) residing in Susa, the capital city of the Persian Empire, is a descendant of King Jehoiachin, who was once exiled (Hagleta). Thus, the megillah immediately indicates that the Jewish name and the galut belong together.

The present of the Book of Esther is exile, with no other horizon. This has struck the rabbinic commentary down through the generations, as has the absence of any mention of the name of God, to which they could not bring themselves. Such is the impetus of the countdown that this little chronicle depicts: in exile, under the rule of nations, the Jewish people are always potentially threatened by the ill-advised and easily influenced king, and yet saved in extremis by the intervention of an intercessor close to the supreme power. By listening to Esther, the queen he had chosen, the king changes his mind and suspends the execution of a decree condemning the Jews to death, a decree that he himself had issued. The life of the people in exile is therefore always suspended, a life of survival.

From the omission of the name of God in the story, should we conclude that he is absent in exile or that his presence is veiled there, or that he deliberately turns his face away by abandoning his people to the natural life of the other peoples? Or perhaps he is hiding at the heart of the megillah, lurking in the very name of Esther, since the veiling of his face (astir panai) chimes with the name of the queen, hence the hope that his reassuring presence accompanies his people. The accumulation of responses tinged with uncertainty reflects the precarious political condition of the Jewish people in exile, whose survival will also depend on their own ability to perpetuate themselves by taking the initiative, by getting by without divine intervention if necessary. At least, here a margin for maneuver opens up, which the commentary on the Scroll of Esther constantly weighs and measures, since providence must be at work despite its absence.

“Where will help come from?” asks Queen Esther in the antechamber of the court as, gripped by anguish, she prepares, at the risk of her life, to intercede for her people with the king, just before the decree takes effect. In doing so, she formulates the central question of the megillah. In relation to this question, the commentary remarks that this ”place” (Makom) is one of the names of God. The traditional commentary considers this overly simplistic answer, too hopeful to be credible, as unsatisfactory and endeavors, by reviewing the identity of the characters involved in this chronicle, to examine the nature of the links they maintain throughout the narrative. In order to identify the place of rescue, the commentary revolves around the structure of power in exile.

This is particularly salient in the midrash on Esther, which states that the word “king”, which appears many times in the megillah, is polysemic. When it is written “King Ahasuerus”, it is indeed this king, this flesh-and-blood character who currently reigns over the empire of Persia-Media, made up of 124 provinces. But when it is written “king” without his name being specified, reference is made either to this same King Ahasuerus or to the almighty King of kings who reigns everywhere (god). From this technique of reading “as if” (Ke-ilu) derives a thesis relating to the political condition of exile: if “king” is likely to refer alternately to the king of the foreign kingdom, the one who reigns over the country of residence of the Jews, and to the King of kings who is the King of the world, it is because the two instances have an affinity. The midrash then invites us to read the megillah by oscillating between the two instances contained in the word “king”, without ever confusing them.

This polysemy splits the “place” of power in two, so that we can conclude that the two instances share the same function, that of protecting the Jewish people. This sharing is deduced from an analogy on which the midrash insists: just as the Psalm promises that ‘the guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps’, the king suffers from insomnia in the megillah, insomnia which, according to the commentary, heralds the beginning of salvation in the story. In exile, therefore, the imperial king watches over Israel (Shomer Yisrael), thus substituting himself for the one whose principal function it is. In exile, the midrash clearly suggests here, the king of the country of residence is like God’s auxiliary, in the sense that he is implicitly delegated the function of protector. Will he assume this role or, on the contrary, will he destroy the people who, with exile, have been entrusted to him? This is what the story is about. The Book of Esther can therefore be read as a promise of survival in exile, whether God has disappeared or is watching over his people with one eye only, it does not matter. Since the two entities readable in “king” share the threatening and protective power, the eyes of the reader of the megillah are riveted on the conduct of the king.

This construction has proven to be adjusted to the interpretation of the political situation of the Jews, unless the megillah of Esther is itself already the refraction of a political condition whose contours are fixed. This was to the point that the scenario proposed by the megillah would serve as a script for recording in memory any local event whose features conferred a family resemblance with this chronicle. Called “secondary” Purim (Sheni), these stories, stylistically modeled on the Esther scroll, commemorate a local iteration of the survival of a Jewish community. Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller thus instituted a Purim in Krakow in 1643 to mark the end of a period of intense unrest. The Purim of Florence commemorates the bishop’s rescue of the city’s Jews in 1790, just as the crowd was about to massacre them. Edom Purim commemorates the failure of the capture of Algiers by the threatening expedition of Charles V in 1524, as does the Purim of 1775, also instituted in Algiers, which celebrates the failure of the conquest of Algiers by Count O’Reilly. The 1830 Purim of Oran recalls the avoidance of massacre when the Muslim Arabs accused the Jews of the city of colluding with the French invaders. Hitler’s Purim, celebrated in Casablanca, is fixed on the date of the American landing in North Africa, which prevented the city from being taken by German troops. The list of these “little” Purim (Purim katan), sometimes ephemeral, is long, open to extension, each occurrence materializing in the writing of a specific megillah intended to be read publicly in the synagogue. Each element of this chain is certainly inserted in its particular context, but it fits in under the auspices of a common spirit, marking the relief that follows the avoidance of a predicted catastrophe. Forming a series in which the event that has just occurred is seen as one of the multiple aftershocks of an earthquake, the series in turn reconfigures Esther’s scroll into “Purim of Shushan,” which is, in short, only the first iteration of a critical situation that is bound to repeat itself.

This practice, which consists of deciphering current events through a matrix of which they are only variations, makes the megillah an exception. While the Jewish festivals, by transporting inaccessible objects, cut off from the reality of exile, such as the Land or the Temple, are as if shrouded in a halo of unreality, Purim handles objects that are at hand – the king, the enemy, the intercessor – drawing a reality completely focused on the present of exile. While the fruits of the Earth or the sacrifices of the Temple require an immense effort of abstraction in order not to sink into an outdated past, Purim immediately touches on the most concrete experience of the vulnerability of Jews thrown into a chaotic historical world. It is significant that of the scroll bearing the name of Esther (sometimes also called the scroll of Mordecai, named after the tutor who guides Esther and whom she obeys) there are copies titled “scroll of Ahasuerus”, recalling that in the last instance, it is perhaps not so much the activism of the Esther-Mordecai pair that saves the people, but through the Ahasuerus-God pair that the rescue comes about.

The megillah and the popular festival that accompanies it also situate the Jews simultaneously on the immutable plane of the Hebrew calendar and on the variable and random plane of political life in exile. The carnival of Purim mirrors this hope of reversing the places of the weak and the strong. The reversal of positions, that of the vulnerable minority and that of the potentially destructive power allied with murderous crowds, marks the inversion of the narrative curve: Haman, the viceroy who manipulates the king into agreeing to eliminate the Jews, is finally hanged by the rope he had prepared for Mordecai, while the Jews threatened with extermination massacre their enemies with the king’s authorization. Historians have detected in this fall of the narrative a fantasy of power intended to compensate for the real powerlessness of the Jews wherever they reside, noting that the Jewish war against their enemies, the final segment of the megillah, certainly comes from another configuration, that of the Judean revolts against the Greek occupiers, which is the context of Hanukkah.

Rabbinical commentary, which is very uncomfortable with Jewish violence, does not dwell on this overly bloody conclusion of the megillah, which it immediately endeavors to euphemize, sometimes even suggesting that it was a simple act of self-defense or wondering, incredulously, if despite the king’s authorization to eliminate their enemies, they really did it. To expunge the warlike violence of Hanukkah, the tradition centers on the commemoration of the miracle of the supernatural duration of the candles during the re-consecration of the Temple delivered from the occupier, like an inoffensive conclusion of the war. But the Jewish war in exile that closes the megillah is so unreal that it had to be denied by covering it with the miracle of survival entirely assured through intercession. And so that God could still take control in a chronicle that ignores him, the commentary adds that Providence had Esther installed in advance in the palace of King Ahasuerus.

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Since a part of the Jewish people became territorialized in a state called the State of Israel, the meaning of Jewish festivals has inevitably been affected. The festivals and rituals linked to agrarian life such as “Tu b’Shvat”, the most unreal of all festivals for Jews cut off from the land since exile, even more so than those linked to the destroyed Temple whose measurements were scrupulously discussed, have been colored with a layer of new reality. Purim, on the other hand, became the most surreal festival for those Jews now gathered in a land where they form a majority within a state dedicated by definition to their protection. Depending on whether one is in the land of Israel or in the diaspora, the Zionist revolution brought about a kind of permutation of the effects of reality, with unpredictable consequences.

Where Jews are territorialized and nationalized in a State for Jews, the perspectives have diffracted. For the orthodox, the Haredim living in the land of Israel, the birth of the State of Israel has no repercussions on the Jewish condition since the land of Israel itself enters into the exile configuration, in expectation of the messianic era. Hence the immutable nature of the festivals, including Purim, and this form of internal secession that only pragmatism marginally and reluctantly influences. For the Eastern Europe style of Zionism, who generally viewed the national revolution as being at odds with rabbinic tradition, the Jewish festivals were at best nothing more than a repertoire of customs that could be manipulated to further the project of rebirth by superimposing modern values on them. Despite everything that opposes them, orthodoxy and hegemonic political Zionism nevertheless converge on one fundamental point: whether for better or for worse, the birth of the State of Israel is in no way correlated to the end of exile. And even if Zionism, in its classic form, readily used the traditional metaphor of the gathering of exiles, its project was above all based on the need to protect Jews from persecution in Europe, in a context of uncertainty as to the attitude of the “king” in the post-emancipation period.

This is why its organizational impetus came from Western Europe, with the Viennese Herzl as its guiding light. Zionism was a path of modern politicization, cut off from the traditional world, dictated by the European situation whose disastrous slope was glimpsed in its most perceptive diagnoses. That Zionism is only the passing instrument of providence on the path to redemption is what the religious type of Zionism, very much in the minority, will first affirm discreetly, without tangible consequences, before it aggressively claims the rediscovered ancestral land and, for the most radical, fantasizes about the prospect of rebuilding the Temple. What rabbinic tradition had transported from the unreal, he wants to give it the concreteness of a renewed experience, without regard for those who share this land, condemned to become strangers there.

But what can be done with Purim when its content is gradually becoming progressively unreal for the citizens of the State of Israel, beyond the schematic tripartition between Orthodox, hegemonic Zionists and religious Zionists? How can the megillah be read and understood when Jews form a majority population in a territory governed by a state dedicated to their protection, a reality shared by all? If this state changes nothing in the condition of exile, if the state of Israel is a sovereign strictly equivalent to the foreign king, as the orthodox maintain, then the megillah is read as it always was, closing itself off to new experience, an unrealistic stance that results in isolation within the state. And if this State heralds the end of exile, if it has already done so, as religious Zionism maintains, then the megillah seems obsolete, harking back to a bygone era, testimony to a dissolving political condition of exile. But from the perspective of Zionism, which is still hegemonic today, the State effectively transforms the empirical experience of Jews while anchoring itself in the exile configuration, since it does not aim for Redemption at all. How then can we read and understand the megillah? This is, in short, the dilemma, here retranslated into the language of tradition, of political Zionism in its still dominant version, the one that gave birth to the State of Israel.

In any case, Purim is celebrated by everyone, with a one-day time difference between Jerusalem, a city fortified like Susa, and Tel Aviv, a city without fortifications like the cities of the provinces of Persia, according to the instructions of the megillah. In Tel Aviv, since the 1920s, it has given rise to a great festive carnival in the streets of the city, an opportunity for popular jubilation over an event dating back to the dawn of time, but belonging to a world that, especially since the birth of the State, seems obsolete, almost unreal, without current relevance. The “Zionist” Purim would then no longer be a carnival where the positions of the dominant and the dominated are reversed for the time it takes to survive, causing that relief so characteristic that every reader of the megillah experiences as consubstantial with the experience of exile, but a parody of carnival, as if, it was now just a matter of having fun by taking a sometimes condescending look at the life of yesteryear, at a time close enough to be able to access it furtively and yet far enough away to consider it with the distance of a newfound serenity. The galutic spirit of the text thus remains intact in people’s minds, but its dramaturgy is somewhat blunted.

Carefree, that was what would now color the recitation of the megillah, whose fundamental spring was, however, the restlessness proper to the condition of exile. Armed resistance, Hanukkah, and the military prowess of the Maccabees, that is what resonated from tradition now in the ears of the Israelis. The experience of the vulnerability of Jewish life was obscured for those who stand in the shadow of a sovereign who bears the Jewish name, while the Jews became accustomed to living in the shadow of the eclipse of God. As logical as this slope may be, it nevertheless veils the very meaning of this State, as it has become a phenomenon. For this Jewish sovereign was judiciously baptized the “State of Israel,” and not the State of Judea as some proposed, signifying that it is the State that watches over all Israel, and not primarily a territorial entity resurrecting Judea. Something had been fabricated and not rediscovered. In other words, the State of the Jews is the modern form, built and constructed by will, of the flesh-and-blood king of the megillah, the one who protects the Jews by proxy. It is a symmetrical part of this incarnated foreign king, but one so reliable that Purim is excluded.

That he should come to occupy this place is perceived with particular acuity by those who are still immersed in the diasporic configuration, for whom the Book of Esther retains the freshness of a very current reality. Except for this, and this is a fundamental transformation, that to the splitting of the king effected by the midrash, which separates the foreign king from the King of kings in order to rearticulate them in terms of the protective function, a second splitting is now added, also relating to protection, this time dividing the king of flesh and blood himself into two entities. King Ahasuerus, worldly power, split into two parts: he is either the foreign sovereign or the sovereign that the Jews have given themselves so that he may watch over them. Between the two, the Jews are now led to oscillate. This was precisely the fulfillment of Zionism if we translate it back into the language of tradition: with the emergence of this State, there is now a safe “place” from which salvation comes, in the sense that the king is by definition clear and constant in his intentions.

For the Jews of the diaspora, the “king Ahasuerus” is therefore embodied twice. They now have recourse when the king of the country of residence fails. However, as reliable as it may be in this respect, the State of Israel does not signify the end of exile, since, precisely, it proceeds from an artificial fabrication of the protective function. It is by no means, to use the words of the rabbinic commentary, the place of redemption (Ge’ula), but the place of deliverance from the arbitrariness of power. It is a guardian state, an institutionalized place that acts routinely, imperceptibly, in the direction of all Israel, wherever it may be. The Megillat 14th treaty makes it clear: at Passover we were freed from Pharaoh, but after Purim we remain the servants of Ahasuerus. From the liberation of Egypt, East European Zionism produced modern updates – the fulfillment of the right of peoples to self-determination, the liberation from servile or alienated labor – but Purim remains untransfigurable, inseparable from the experience of the galut.

This is precisely what October 7 and its consequences have brought to the surface abruptly. The long hours during which the place of refuge seemed to collapse, the anguish of abandonment similar to that of Esther, the massacre within its very borders, the sudden suspension of life, all this brought the Jewish experience to the surface at the heart of the device, yet one intended to make the tension contained in the megillah inaccessible. It is important to emphasize this: this fortunate inaccessibility to the experience of the tension of exile is in no way due to living in that land, but to having a State that, this time by vocation, watches over Israel. The anti-messianic motif of the megillah manifests itself here with all the force of the intrusion of reality into the national life shaped by Zionism. Also, on March 25, 2024, the date of the first Purim after October 7, bakeries will be offering these traditional pastries called Oznei Haman, but renamed “Oznei Sinwar,” the face of radical enmity that we are convinced will ultimately be defeated. Suddenly, it seems that Zionism and its realization have not brought the series of secondary Purim to an end, as if, to everyone’s stupefaction, both for Jewish citizens of this State and for Jews of the diaspora, the megillah is still full of shocks, precisely where the end of the series had been announced with great fanfare.

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In this first post-October 7 Purim, a photograph by Ariel Bibas also circulated on social networks, dating from the carefree Purim of the previous year, in his Batman costume, a 4-year-old hostage who we now know was slaughtered in captivity. If the current call for small batmans to proliferate in public places this Purim is heard, it’s because the image of little Ariel crystallizes all the ambivalence of the Megillah – the threat of destruction, Esther’s anguished question, the soothing answer of the rabbinic commentary, but also the hope of survival despite the countless failed Purim. Costumed as a superhero, whose original vocation was none other than to defeat Nazi evil, he condenses the disappointed hope that the megillah invites us to keep. This disappointment in the king of flesh and blood, at the two poles of splitting, necessarily tarnishes the reputation of the King of kings. That October 7 should be tinged here, during the time of the turnaround, with the memory of the Shoah — this failed Purim par excellence where the criminal king did indeed destroy the Jews without anything stopping him, thus directly contradicting the promise of the megillah — is by no means coincidental: this spontaneous association is due to the excessive optimism of the megillah, of which Zionism is the very consequence. The image of the murdered little Batman thus reflects the unity of the people, wherever they may reside. The rabbinic commentary emphasizes this: Purim will be celebrated forever, its commemoration will never be abolished, as if tradition had indicated in advance that exile had no end, nowhere.^[1]

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Danny Trom