Purim Lies and the World We Create

"I had to decide whether to lie or tell the truth," I heard someone say this week about creating a Purim play to share with kids.

Ultimately, this person chose to "lie," to not tell the truth about what the Megillah really says. "It reads like a Harlequin novel," she said, not without merit - and not even bringing up how we reduce/remove the violence.

My initial instinct with regard to the "lying" was, "is it really lying?" But to be honest, I often  feel the same way - that I am lying, or not telling the real story - and not just at Purim, but throughout the cycle of Torah reading and holiday celebrations.

When I was a kid, we sang "Oh, once there was a wicked, wicked man...he would have murdered all the Jews." I did not hear that song once, this year, in the celebration of Purim at the day school where I teach, in my child's preschool. I included it in Purim celebrations as a congregational rabbi, a few years ago, received by a palpable tension among parents.

When political correctness (PC) came into vogue in the 90s, it instantly became a joke in itself. We have followed it with helicopter parenting, and now parents calling the police on other parents for letting their children walk alone to/from school and in the neighborhood. In elementary school, I walked alone and with friends to school, park, and neighboring homes within a few blocks of my own Capitol Hill, Seattle home. Did I encounter creeps out there in the small world I traversed? Yes, I did. And as a result, I have a much stronger sense of what the world is, I think, really like.

What world do we make when we shield and protect our children from knowledge and experience of violence, even as it is found in our wisdom traditions, from Torah (bible) to fairy tales and folk song?

Our wisdom stories are there to teach us not only about the glory of the good, and how to behave well in the world. They are also there to teach us to protect ourselves from the likes of Esther's Haman, or Hansel and Gretel's witch, or the Three Little Pigs' wolf.

On the other hand, as a parent, I am astonished at the violence in old cartoons from my generation (and before), and I find myself not wanting to share a lot with my son. I'm talking everything from gratuitous bopping on the head from character to character in such cartoons as Woody Woodpecker, a staple of my childhood, to the violence of the superheroes of comic book and television fame, let alone the war propaganda of old Donald Duck and Three Pigs & Wolf cartoons. Even the good guys are violent in so many of these, and I find myself cringing.

What I wonder is, what are the benefits of the old-style stories with at least some violence? What does it teach our children when Haman is hanged at his own gallows? What does it say about us when we glorify this with a whole holiday? Yes, I know, the holiday is more than that; but as I have heard said/sung about so many Jewish holidays, "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." What does it teach our children when we eliminate the violent sections of our stories (let alone the sexist, not to mention sexual parts) in our telling them to children, and then they go and read the whole book as teens or adults?

But what happens in each generation when someone stands up and says, "I felt like I had to lie"? What value are we teaching with this?

Are our old wisdom books passé? Should we stop reading them altogether? Do we continue to change them for younger children, but intentionally teach the more difficult parts to young teens, even as part of sex(ual) education and tikkun olam (for the violence), so that they don't discover it on their own and feel "lied to"?

How do we intentionally make use of the more difficult parts of our stories -- and our neighborhoods -- to help our children become wise world navigators? Or do we need to consider tossing these wisdom stories out entirely and creating new gentler stories?

I don't have an answer. Indeed, inside my head there continues to be a jury of my younger ("lied to") self, my parent self, my rabbi self, my anthropologist self, and an odd assortment of other voices debating the various values and issues associated with how we pass down wisdom about good and not-good in our world, how we teach caution, and how we make the world a more loving and peaceful place with less violence, less danger, and yes, less patriarchy (or frankly less domination by any one class of people).

Olfactory Memory and Temple Sacrifices

The inner doors to my son’s school opened to let through the onslaught of parents picking up our children, and we were instantly surrounded by a moist, bready smell.  “Why are they baking bread?” another parent asked, “it’s not Friday!”  And I remembered - they were going to bake hamentashen this morning - at least in my son’s class, and probably others.

In the Torah reading cycle, we are in Leviticus, full of bloody, gut-flaying animal sacrifices - and a few somewhat cleaner bread and grain and incense sacrifices.  But in the holiday cycle, we are at Purim, that joyous holiday on which we eat (depending on Ashkenazi/Sephardi background) yummy pastries designed like a man’s hat, or the slightly more disgusting version of his ears.  

In a post-sacrificial Judaism, the holiday yummies are probably more likely to conjure some level of religious connection than the sacrifices.  But where the Mishnah makes the transition from sacrifice to prayer, I would like to suggest that our own experiences of holidays through food, tasted but especially smelled, may in fact hold a more direct connection for us.

The phrase ריח ניחח - re’ach nicho’ach - a fragrant (pleasing) scent, appears numerous times in Torah, all in direct relation to various sacrifices - four times in this week’s reading.  Whether grain or beast or fowl, a fire offering provides a pleasing scent, often specifically described as “for G-d.”  The fact that these sacrifices were commonly consumed by the priests (and, in the case of the Passover sacrifice, by the masses), we can begin to see the connection between the altar that stood before the Holy of Holies and our grandparents’ (for example) kitchens.  

For me, the smell of latkes frying or chicken soup cooking on the stove can bring me home to my mother’s kitchen.  Fresh baking challah, tzimmes, brisket, roasting chicken, cholent, and yes, hamentashen, may be among foods that bring you to various kitchens of your memory.  

And not just any memories, but memories of Jewish time, exactly the kind of time that the sacrifices helped to mark.  The everyday, the Sabbath, various holidays and seasons.  

The association Jews have with food (there’s some idea that you can’t attract Jews to a program without it) is, therefore, not just about putting something in the belly.  It has the potential to be so very deeply spiritual -- in the sense that our kitchens are our altars, filled at their best with ריח ניחח, re’ach nicho’ach, pleasing odors that permeate our very souls and bring us into relationship with each other. It is an inherently spiritual relationship, in the sense that neshamah, soul, is related to breathing (as is smelling), and ru’ach, wind, another word for soul, is directly related to the word re’ach, odor.

Chag Purim sameach - a very happy and joyous Purim to all.  May your olfactory memories tingle, this week and always, with your own efforts or the efforts of someone you love.