CHAG SAMEACH: HAPPY PURIM - Part One

I was walking down a busy street one night and a truck pulled onto the median divider with a totally smashed up car hanging from a crane on the back. Four guys jumped out and set up a sign which I'm told said, "A drunk driver killed two people with this car." As they were setting up, a huge traffic jam developed with screeching brakes and honking horns. In the morning I came out to get a better picture and the whole display was gone. Weird!

Today was Purim, actually Purim was yesterday in Tel Aviv and today in Jerusalem because of the biblical rule that holidays in walled cities happen a day later, Don't ask why, nobody knows, but it does mean two days off of work for many people regardless if you live in a walled city or not.

Another rule which is not really written down is that Purim in a farm town in the Midwestern U.S. among a handful of Diaspora Jews is celebrated differently than in Jerusalem. I have vivid memories of a fantastic Purim in Aurora, Illinois around 1952 when I dressed up as King Ahasuerus and my beautiful bride, Judy Pollack, the only Jewish girl my age within about 40 miles, dressed up as the lovely Queen Esther; someone, I forget who, came as the evil Hamen who wanted to kill all the Jews and we hung him up to die. The rest as they say in The Wild Things is that we spent the day, "making mischief of one kind and another."

In Jerusalem the holiday is spent in one of three ways, the seculars go shopping, which seems to be the case for any holiday except maybe Holocaust Memorial Day. The kind-of-religious/kind-of-secular people treat the holiday much as we do Halloween with lots of candy and costumes with non-religious themes, (see photos in Part 2) and the ultra-orthodox, well they get really, really drunk. According to the Bible, Purim is the one day of the year when a Jew is allowed to get so drunk that he can't remember his name. In America this concept is better known as "boys gone wild" or as we say on Sport's Center, "let's go to the video!"

The highlight of the day was when Vardit took me to the Ultra's "hood" called Me'a She'arim. The men were dressed in their finery, with expensive Bear fur hats from Russia. (Yes they kill bears for a showy religious outfit) the kids dressed up in costume, some very creative, some just like their dad's only smaller, and of course very few women on the street. I'm told the women also can get drunk to the point of not knowing their names, but they have to stay hidden in such a state, for OBVIOUS reasons.

Here was a really interesting twist on the story. Several years ago I told one of my Iranian friends about Purim and King Ahasuerus and he said, "oh, you mean King Artaxerxes" and I said, "NO I mean King Ahasuerus." It seems the Persians have a similar story, actually they have the REAL story. Artaxerxes did in fact foil a plot to kill Jews and freed them from the Babylonian Captivity. There doesn't seem to be a beautiful Queen Esther in the story, since a Persian King would probably not have married a lowly Jewess (perhaps a one-night stand), but more importantly Artaxerxes had 350 wives (if one is to believe Wikipedia) and if there was an Esther she would have found it difficult to compete for the number one slot on the King's busy schedule.

This got me to thinking that instead of getting so drunk you can't remember your name, wouldn't this be a nice time to call Iran and thank them for freeing us Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. Instead, (if the newspapers are to be believed) the drunken crowds are all calling for the preemptive bombing of Iran's nuclear weapons labs. I'm sure such hawkish talk is making the Iran's wish that Hamen had never been hanged or at least that their King had never come under the spell of an IJP (Iranian Jewish Princess).

The market was packed with trays of Homentashen the traditional poppy seed pastry for Purim. In Jerusalem they just use the poppy seeds, perhaps in the Persian tradition, they also smoke the discarded parts of the opium plants. :-)

In any case, in Part 2, I included a photo essay of the day's adventures.