where enemies become anemones

Each week I crawl inside the quiet of my own heart and dig deep to connect the dots and draw out some words of wisdom (ideally!). But today is not an ordinary Friday, it is also Purim! 

Purim is a holiday devoted to blurring boundaries, subverting power and inverting reality. It is a brave, cathartic and risky spiritual practice to loosen our moral grip and allow the absurd to be our primary teacher. 

The enduring irony of the Book of Esther comes to a spiritual head in Chapter 9. Last night, as Avra chanted Rabbi Tamara Cohen’s brilliant and necessary rewrite of the 9th chapter, I was transfixed by its capacity to imagine a world at once whole and ridiculous. I found myself thinking, “Yes! This is the world I want to live in.” A world where enemies become anemones and all trees are made for climbing. 

In her vision I also felt grief. How far we are from that world. And how far her vision is from the canonical 9th chapter of Esther (which we also read in lament). 

In her Yom Kippur sermon last year, Rabbi Alana Alpert of Detroit’s Congregation T’chiyah spoke about a phrase near the end of the Book of Esther in Chapter 9, “V’nahafoch hu” — “And the opposite happened. We confuse ourselves to the point of being unable to tell the difference between good Mordechai and evil Haman, because there is no actual difference between them, not essentially. When the tables are turned, we have the same capacity for cruelty as anyone.”
In a recent OpEd in The Forward entitled, “Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza demands a new reading of the Purim story’s final chapter.”  Michael Lukas comments, “This is the moment in the story when the Jews’ fortunes reverse, when everything is turned upside down, the origin of the holiday’s tradition of getting so drunk you can’t tell the hero from the villain…

Once we recognize our own capacity for evil — and by us, I mean not only Jews, but anyone — once we see our own power and the suffering it can cause, the violence at the end of the Book of Esther becomes something much more meaningful than fantasy or farce. The holiday is an invitation to put on the clothes of another, to forget for a moment who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.”

In truth, the entire Purim story and our communal observance of the holiday, hinge on these two potent words in Chapter 9: “וְנַהֲפ֣וֹךְ ה֔וּא // V'nahafoch Hu!” 

In his commentary, Ibn Ezra notes, grammatically speaking, the verb N’afoch is in the passive voice. As if to say, “On the contrary, everything inverted itself all by itself.”

Well to that I say, On the contrary! 
While God may not be an active voice in the book of Esther, its characters certainly are. They repeatedly assert their own agency to chart a new destiny. 

May we too have the courage to reclaim our voice, act with courage and feel called to answer Mordechai’s charge to Queen Esther: 
“וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃”
“Who knows – maybe you were made for exactly this moment!?”

In a stunning poem that evokes the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, the teacher, poet, and
theologian Joy Ladin writes:

“The soil between your toes is damp.
You lost your shoes some ways back.
This is holy ground, the waters said . . .
You were trying
To learn to walk
When you needed to learn to swim. You part
The grass that whispers
Through the waters that sing in your ears.
You can’t make out the question
So you answer Yes.”

On this absurd day, when everything is possible, may we have the necessary courage to answer Yes!