PURIM 5784
True confession: Purim has always been my absolutely least favorite holiday in the Jewish calendar. As a child and as an adult, I have dreaded this holiday. Why?
I think it is a combination of four related things. First, I hate costumes—I also dreaded Halloween as a kid. Maybe because I don’t have a firm grasp on my own identity and as a kid I was holding on for dear life, and that still persists. Second, the aspect of getting so drunk that you can’t tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai, a teaching I learned early on, also scared me. That lack of control is totally frightening to me. Third, I hated the whole story of secrets. As a keeper of family secrets when I was a child, I was petrified that they would be revealed. I would have preferred Esther just stay hidden, as it were. Lastly, the idea of people wanting to kill us and instead we murdered them (Megillat Esther, Chapter 9) is and was scary. There are people who want to kill us because we are Jews—that’s terrifying. Then us getting revenge and killing them felt a little too close to home to the rage that is within me that I keep bottled up.
So not a holiday I have ever enjoyed. Sure I liked getting to make noise in synagogue, though it was a little too noisy for me, and I love hamantashen. But this is a holiday I would gladly skip. You might say I have some healing to do, and you’d be right.
I want to discuss the following themes of the holiday
· What is hidden and what is revealed
· The sacred feminine and the sacred masculine
· Fertility and contraception
· Esther and invoking the directions.
The theme of hiddenness and revelation is a prime theme in our story. Mordechai tells Esther to hide his relationship with her (Megillat Esther 2:10) and she maintains this secret, hiding her Jewishness from everyone, including Ahasuerus, Haman and the whole court. She then reveals it in the most dramatic fashion in the second banquet, dragging out the revelation that she could have easily enough done in the first banquet (Megillat Esther 5:3-8 and 7:2) since Ahasuerus was just as favorably inclined towards her in the first banquet as the second using the same formula of favor “What is your request? Even to half the kingdom it will be granted.”
Even more, the story begins with Vashti’s refusal to reveal herself to the drunken party, if you follow traditional midrash (Megillah 12B) The text says that she is commanded to appear wearing her royal crown (Megillat Esther 1:11-12)) and the midrash takes that to mean that she is to appear wearing only her crown i.e. naked. While it all works out in the story, hiding what needs to be revealed isn’t exactly a recipe for mental health and often doesn’t work out.
What is hidden in your life that needs to be revealed?
The sacred feminine and the sacred masculine are prominent themes in the story. Sacred masculine and feminine refer to energies that are present in people of both genders. This is probably a minefield, but I’m going to walk into it because otherwise I think we miss an opportunity to understand how we might be whole. I am assuming that there are only two genders, but that the expression of them is infinite. I am rejecting what I believe is a faddish view that there are an infinite number of genders. As for transgender people, I am assuming that the change from the gender of their birth is to the other gender which feels more at home for them. The story of Purim is a myth, it is not history. There’s no evidence that any of this ever happened, and the idea of a mass pogrom against the Jews would have been out of character for the Persians who were generally tolerant of their minorities following the introduction to the book in the Jewish Study Bible by scholar Adele Berlin Ph.D.
Let’s start with Esther’s name. It’s a commonplace interpretation that the name is derived from Ishtar, a Babylonian Goddess whom the Jews new by the name of Astarte or Asherah in the land of Israel. (https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5872-esther and https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/unmasking-the-purim-heroes/ among others) Then the sacred feminine is always involved when we are discussing archetypal Queens. On the one hand, Vashti is a certain kind of archetype of a Queen who has had enough of her drunken whoring husband. There are a lot of contemporary Jewish views elevating Vashti (e.g. https://rabbisylviarothschild.com/2017/03/07/vashti-a-heroine-not-just-for-purim-nastywoman/ and https://forward.com/opinion/484117/queen-esther-is-a-jewish-hero-but-queen-vashti-is-a-feminist-icon/). On the other hand, Esther is also an archetypal kind of queen who absolutely uses her feminine wiles to get her loutish husband to do what she wants. To be clear, I’m not blaming her for manipulating Ahasuerus, a king who is begging to be manipulated. Esther’s approach is probably the only possible approach within her given context.
The sacred masculine is also a prominent theme. We have three major male characters in this story. Ahasuerus is the worst kind of king, subject to flattery, interested only in pleasure and not caring about his subjects at all. Haman is the insecure, obsequious flatterer that kings like Ahasuerus deserve, out for revenge against perceived slights (Megillat Esther 6:13). We see his type all over Trump world, male and female (for males think Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon or Mike Flynn, for females think Kimberly Guilfoyle or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Elise Stefanik). May all their names be erased from history. Mordechai, however, is the archetype of the good king. He’s named after Marduk, a Babylonian God (Megillat Esther is the only place where the name appears in the Hebrew Bible). He’s dedicated to serving his people, even if he could duck and prosper—he could get riches for saving the king from the plot against him that he uncovers, but asks for nothing because, like all true kings, it isn’t about him, it’s about his people.
Where are you with the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, with the archetypes of queen and king?
The theme of fertility is a bit of a hidden theme in the story. In a story that emphasizes the hidden, that makes sense. I want to introduce three aspects that point towards this theme.
The first is the timing of the festival. The festival is timed for the beginning of spring when life which has been dormant during the winter bursts forth in a crazy mix of color, birds serenading for a mate, babies being born, grass growing. While it is true that the fertility of spring depends largely upon what has happened before, spring is fertility made visible.
The second is the use of fertility and fertility suppressing plants. There’s a twelve month period where all the candidates for the new queen are kept in the harem and prepared for presentation to Ahasuerus (Megillat Esther 2:12). The women are all treated with oil of Myrrh for six of those months. Berlin in her introduction associates this with the lovemaking described in Song of Songs 1:13 and Proverbs 7:17 R. Geoffry Denis on the other hand, argues that both Esther’s and Mordechai’s names are connected to plants used for contraception in the ancient world. Esther’s name in Hebrew is Hadassah which is the myrtle tree. Mrytle trees according to Rabbi Dennis are used in contraception, as is the myrrh tree of the six months of preparation and that is also connected to the name of Mordechai, following the Rabbinic derivation of his name as mor dror or dripping myrrh (Megillah 10B). Where there is contraception, there is a concern about fertility. (https://ejmmm2007.blogspot.com/2010/02/esther-myth-behind-legend.html)
Third, is the hamantashen, Haman’s hat, the triangular cookie that is the food most highly associated with the holiday for Ashkenazi Jews. These pastries are not part of the text nor part of Rabbinic Midrash, even if we were taught as kids some kind of crazy story that Haman wore a three sided hat. Instead, I and others see these as a fertility symbol. The shape of hamantashen clearly resembles a vagina and poppy seeds, like a pomegranate, represent fertility because of the plethora of seeds. For some more reading (Schnur, Susan (Spring 1998). "From Prehistoric Cave Art To Your Cookie Pan: Tracing The Hamantasch Herstory" (PDF). Lilith. 23 (1): 22–4 and ^ Kaplan, Arielle (5 March 2020). "Yes, There's a Reason Hamantaschen Look Like Vaginas". Alma.
Fertility, it seems to me, means different things at different points in our human life. At certain points in my life it meant having kids, as well as tending to the fertility of the land which I stewarded. At other points, it had a lot to do with growing a business, a different kind of fertility. I’ve also been concerned about the fertility of organizations I serve, so that they can continue to give birth to programs. These days I am highly focused on creating this kind of writing. God willing, in the not too distant future, there will be more possibility about my kids fertility and grandchildren.
What wants to be born in your life?
I invoke Esther in my morning prayers when I call upon the four directions to witness and support my prayer. This engagement with Esther came to me this past year as I’ve worked on calling in directions. I had started with the four typical archangels, but it felt too masculine and unbalanced (I have a balance of male and female ancestors). Here’s my practice.
First, I invoke Esther in the east and ask her for help in revealing what is hidden in my heart. I think a lot of what I create is much more about discovery than invention—that is I journey inside and go, oh, that’s what I think/feel/want to share. I hope that this connection to the story is obvious by now. And I see this revelation as an eastern thing, akin to the revelation of the morning after the darkness of night.
Second, I invoke Esther in the west to romance the world. The idea of romancing the world in the west is taken from the work of Bill Plotkin, see his seminal book Nature and the Human Soul. Esther, in my interpretation, romances or seduces Ahasuerus to get him to do the right thing. It’s erotic, or has erotic energy, but it isn’t genital sexuality—that is she gets him to do what she wants not by having sex with him but through a whole body seduction that precedes and does not necessarily include sex. I think there’s a lesson to be learned here in how we might approach the world as a lover. When I garden, I want to partner with the seeds I plant so that they grow strong and fruitful, and there’s an erotic element to that—or there is when I am awake (and I’m not always awake)
Does my invocation of Esther in the east and the west suggest anything you’d like to add to your practice?
QUESTIONS
What is hidden in your life that needs to be revealed?
Where are you with the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, with the archetypes of queen and king?
What wants to be born in your life?
Does my invocation of Esther in the east and the west suggest anything you’d like to add to your practice?
