Purim: How To Erase The Past (While Also Remembering It)

The Shabbat before Purim is Shabbat Zachor — the Shabbat of Remembering. Specifically, we remember the pain inflicted on our people by Amalek, ancestral line of Purim villain Haman (boo!). But why are we commanded to simultaneously remember and forget this traumatic memory? In this drash, Rabbi Lizzi teases out how the story and mitzvot of Purim can inspire us to live with life's contradictions and make blessings out of our pain.

This episode is the sermon from Mishkan's Friday night  service on February 25th. For full recordings of Friday services, click here. For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Learn more about Mishkan Chicago. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

[00:23] Producer
Welcome to Shabbat Replay on Contact Chai, your weekday dose of shabbos rest. Today’s episode is from the March 11th Friday night service at Second Unitarian. This Friday the 18th will be a virtual-only service on Facebook Live. Then, Saturday the 19th, the Mishkan is heading to JCYS for an in-person service you’ll also be able to stream on YouTube. Learn more about our upcoming services and programs on our events calendar — there’s a link to it in the show notes. Now, take a deep breath, relax, and listen to this pre-Purim drash by Rabbi Lizzi.


[01:26] Rabbi Lizzi

This coming Wednesday night, as the full moon rises, Jews all over the world will gather to celebrate the fun and singularly bizarre holiday of Purim. And we will show up in costumes and masks — the kind of masks that you would have thought of before a global pandemic. And we will eat and drink and celebrate life and we will fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the Megillah, The Book of Esther, from a handwritten scroll on parchment. And if you've ever been to a Megillah reading before, then you know it's not like attending a docile poetry reading or a book talk. It's not even like hearing the Torah read on Shabbat. It's more like attending a midnight viewing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or like watching Frozen with anybody born after 2009. It is a participatory experience! There are lines that you read or shout along with the person who's reading. There is the custom of booing a particular name of the particular character. I feel like I’ve forgotten. Who is it? Haman. [crowd boos]

[holding up a grogger] A friend made this at Mishkan, this is her grogger. It's made out of rocks. It's very dangerous. [laughter] Okay, so, this custom of blotting out Haman’s name. [crowd boos] Exactly. Thank you.

Blotting out the name of the villain is not just Purim theatrics, although it works for Purim. You might have heard this in other Jewish contexts too — whenever the name of a villain is said, especially in more observant circles, you will hear the person who said it say, “Yimakh shemo!” — may his name be erased. So you know, when teaching about the Holocaust, and you mentioned Adolf Hitler, you would say “Yimakh shemo,” may his name be erased, which is like the opposite of you know, if somebody has died, “may their memory be a blessing.” Because if you're saying their name, and you want to remember their name nicely, for a blessing, say their name, if you want to erase their name, why did you say their name in the first place? Like, actual question. If you want their name to be erased from the world, if the person and what they stood for was so terrible, why say their name at all?

One obvious answer is that if we didn't say Haman’s name, then when would we shake our grogger or drink during the Megillah reading? But this is a paradox. What we say and what we don't say and how we remember and what we don't remember and what we choose to remember and how often we say what we remember. This paradox is lifted up in the reading that we do every Shabbat before Purim.

The Shabbat before Purim has a name. It's Shabbat Zachor, which means the Shabbat of remembering. And it's not just thematic — it's named for a particular verse in the Torah. It comes from Deuteronomy. Moses is giving his last instructions to the Jewish people before they go into the land of Israel.These are the children of the people who walked out of Egypt. Their parents had built a golden calf and, ultimately, God deemed them as unprepared to go into the land of Israel, it would have to be their children. That includes Moses. God has also deemed him unworthy to go into the land. And so he's trying to give over everything he can give over, knowing that he's not going in with them. So he says to them, among other things, remember what Amalek did to you on the road out of Egypt. How undeterred by fear of God! He surprised you on the road when you were hungry and tired and cut down all the stragglers at the back of the line. And so, when God grants you rest from all your enemies around you in the land that God is giving you as an inheritance, you will block out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Don’t forget!

You see the problem here right? Let's just peel the onion back a little bit. First, who is Amalek? Basically any evil character who comes to pursue the Jews at any point in history is called a descendant of Amalek by the sages. But where does Amalek start? Amalek starts in the Torah as a marauding band of warriors that attacks the Israelites as they're leaving Egypt. As the text says, they pick off the old and the weak and the infirm and the people who are at the back of the line. They're cruel and inhumane. Moses tells the children of the people who survived this attack that they must erase the memory of Amalek, don't forget. Okay, so you already kind of got the paradox here. Remember, forget, remember, erase.

My grandma Alice was not unique. As a survivor of Nazi Germany, when she came to America, she did not talk about what she went through. She didn’t talk about being a Jewish teenager, under the Third Reich. Many families share that story. They started new lives in safe places and tried to erase the memory. You know what it's like to try to remember a memory or a past trauma. You tell stories about it, you share about it. These are two very different orientations. One: “In a place of safety, you will remember what was done to you.” The other: “When you find a place of safety, erase the memory of what was done to you.” 

What do we do with this? Much Jewish commentary ink has been spilled over this question. Hearing this and knowing what you know about the world and about your own past pain, what do you do with this?

Go ahead and raise your hand. Yeah, please, Nancy. It's okay. Hi.

[07:57] Nancy 

If you, if you have to remember that you blotted something out, then even even if you're making it an empty place, like your grandmother doesn't talk about it, you remember that the empty places there. It's kind of like a reserved spot for a thing that you don't talk about. But you don't you don't forget that that empty spot is there.

[08:20] Lizzi

So there's no paradox because you're remembering it. And by erasing it, you're creating a space where the memory was, and where everyone around you knows something was there. Even if it isn't the memory, the specific memory of the thing that you used to remember, but now forgotten.

[08:40] Nancy 

I mean, I don't know if that's true that it completely erases the paradox. But But yes, there's, there is yes, I think that there's a space there is the important thing creates a space. Okay. It isn't. I mean, is that space like a positive thing? Or is it actually kind of a problem? I don't know. And I don't know that it would always be the same answer. [09:01] Lizzi

That's right. Yeah. Sorry for everybody who's hearing it home. So I don't exactly know. And I also don't know that it would be the same in every moment. Could see times when it could be when it could be a problem. And sometimes when actually, it's like self protection, like important self protection. Yeah. Joshua, were you gonna say, Jeff?

[09:20] Jeff

Yes, I can see for some people, it's too painful to talk about. But if we don't talk about it then the pain can go minimum. And I think you would actually you and I actually talked about this a year ago when I can't remember the people who inscribe a safer car. The first thing they do is write the word on my like, across the back. That's a tradition.

[09:45] Lizzi

And we didn't talk about this because that's really cool. Josh said when the Scribe is writing a safe Airtours is writing the tortoise Girl by hand, the first thing they do is they write the word of Moloch and They erase it, they cross it out, right?

[10:00] Jeff
As to burn. So there's something in it maybe aspirational in being able to forget it when we get to a place where we don't need to remember anymore. But we have to actively get there.

[10:17] Lizzi

That like seeing the name and seeing the line through it reminds you that there is a story there. And that there was a story we are trying to forget. But that maybe we can't forget, for any number of reasons…Remembering that and knowing that and like actually is part of the pathway forward? Because if you don't talk about it, and you don't reckon with it, then you don't move anywhere. You don't go anywhere…

[10:50] Catherine

What do you take “erase” to mean? Go build a world that is better, be more than paper?

[10:55] Lizzi

Okay, so Catherine says erase doesn't mean a negative thing exclusively. It means go build a world where the name of Amalek isn't said because injustice has disappeared. Yes, exactly. Beautiful…Okay, Stephanie.

[11:23] Stephanie

What if erase is actually providing a container for rage? If you have trauma in your background, it has to go somewhere. And to be able to name something, even though you're erasing that name, it provides a literal container to put the rage in.

[11:55] Lizzi
Okay, so Stephanie said, “By erasing the name, it gives you a container for rage.” If Amalek has happened to you, you are traumatized by that, and you have a right to be angry, but you need to put that anger somewhere. Because otherwise it threatens to take up all the space. And so you put it into erasing the name, whatever that means. Maybe like saying, “Haman!” I mean, that’s the funny version, but something like that. You can see how excited I am about this holiday. Alright, good. One more.

[12:35] Ruthy
[inaudible]...It's remembering that bad things happen.

[12:42] Lizzi
So Ruthy says, taking the glory away from Amalek, from the perpetrator, and restoring it you to have agency…Ah, great. Thank you. All right. So I feel right now, this is a little bit more relatable…

[13:10] Lizzi
The Torah is full of stories about what happened to the children of those who escaped Egypt. It’s ever present in the minds of the sages of the tradition.

Remember and forget. A moral binary. These appear to be opposites. Yes, and. Both, and. The art of a Jewish spiritual life is knowing when to apply which strategy, having the presence of mind, being in the moment enough to know how and when to apply remembering or forgetting. Jews from different parts of the world and from different traditions have distinct traumas in their lineages on top of the ones we all share from the canon of Jewish holidays. It’s where we get the old joke: “What's the theme of every Jewish holiday? They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.” Right? Which is funny because it is true. But it’s like, oh my god, is that really what our tradition amounts to? If it is, that kind of feels a little problematic. Like, is there nothing else that we stand for other than survival? We don't want to let our collective trauma cloud our vision or corrupt our way of contributing to the future because we are stuck in our past.

[15:13] Attendee
“Let’s eat!” means we’re not stuck.

[15:20] Lizzi

“Let's eat” means we're not stuck, or at least maybe we're trying to not be stuck. So there are many Jews —you might know some of them, you might be one of them — whose identities kind of staked on the first part of that verse, “remember.” The recent Pew study done in 2020, said that 76% of American Jews believe that remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish. That was the highest percentage of Jews agreeing on anything! And for many of these Jews, remembering the Holocaust is not just a matter of looking at our history of oppression. It's knowing that it's just a matter of time before Amalek rears his ugly head. Rabbi Sid Schwartz calls this kind of Jew a “tribal Jew.” And he doesn't mean that in a pejorative way, it’s a descriptor reflecting that some Jews understand the world through a lens of the historic persecution of our tribe. People attacked us for no reason other than our being Jewish. Therefore, we need to rely on only ourselves for survival and for protection, because when push comes to shove, no one will be there for us when we need them. It's not an unreasonable thing for a person to think!

I highly recommend Dara Horn’s book, “People Love Dead Jews.” Very provocative title.

However, when our identity as Jews is grounded primarily in remembering a traumatic past, this leads to living in the present with a constant low-grade anxiety, a paranoia that we are constantly about to be slaughtered. But that cannot possibly be true all the time, and it affects our judgment and wellbeing in the meantime. We don't make good decisions from a place of fear.

Rabbi Schwartz talks about another kind of Jew: the Covenantal Jew. Covenantal Jews stake their identity not on history so much as social responsibility. They believe in a covenant between the Jewish people and a higher power that obligates us to make the world a better place. It’s a more universal approach to ethics, this belief in the commandment to heal the world. According to the Pew report, 72% of Jews in America agree on ethical and moral action as being an essential part of a Jewish identity. Most people are some combination of both Tribal and Covenantal. Like Moses’ remember/forget binary, this one's false, too!

The question is not “Should we worry about ourselves or the 99.72% of other human beings on earth?” Of course we should worry about ourselves! Our tradition is right to emphasize this point. But also, it's necessary for us to use our tradition’s moral imagination to care for the health and welfare of the people around us. 

Purim is a blueprint for doing this. We can hold both the remembering and the forgetting, the tribal and the covenantal, with joy. Purim shows us how to remember our history of victimhood without letting it limit our actions in the present and actually leverage that painful past on behalf of others. 

We are given four mitzvot to uphold in keeping this ingenious holiday:

1. Hear the Megillah.
2. Have a party.
3. Give gifts of food to people you love.
4. Give generously to the needy.

Of course, some people say there are actually five mitzvot, because you're supposed to party both in the evening and in the morning. Which might lead you to make the mistake of thinking that Purim is a frivolous holiday, because of the costumes and partying. But people who call it “Jewish Halloween” is missing the deep, disturbing reasons why people created this holiday. And if you read the story, you’ll see it’s people that created this holiday. God didn’t give it to us; God isn’t even in the Purim story!

Scholars consider Esther a biblical farce, like a Saturday Night Live sketch playing off of the fears and anxieties and fantasies of Jews in the ancient world. So you get sex and drugs and partying and genocide and revenge and power. You get male insecurity paired with female power. These juxtapositions are delightfully funny, but they also invite us to hold the messy contradiction of being a minority who is sometimes persecuted yet also has access to authority. 

So, Number One: I invite you to listen to the Megillah with new ears. Purim 2017 was just a few months after the election of Donald Trump, and it was like, “How did they know about 2016? A leader who loved to throw parties with a penchant for women and money and a complete disregard for the rules of law?” Every single year, it relates to something happening in the world in a different way.

Which brings us to Mitzvah Number Two: we feast! It feels like it needs no real explanation. But we party to maintain joy in the midst of fear. Purim is considered the same holiday as Yom Kippur, and they actually share a name: Yom ha-Kippurim. Which is weird, because Yom Kippur is opposite on the calendar and in practice. But ultimately, both holidays are about reckoning with the fact that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. The world can turn upside down in an instant.  A few weeks ago, the world changed in ways nobody could foresee. Who could have predicted that states would be rolling back rights for women and LGBTQ+ and trans people in 2022? Or the war in Ukraine? Things turn on their heads. You wake up one morning and the world is a different place. On Yom Kippur, the answer is: “Life is short and we don’t know what tomorrow brings, so fast, forgive, and apologize.” On Purim, the answer is: “Life is short and we don’t know what tomorrow brings, so eat, drink, and be merry!” The genius of the Jewish calendar is that these extremes on either pole show us how to live the rest of the year in the gray.

Finally, there’s Mitzvot Numbers Three and Four: give food to your friends and give money to the needy. These mitzvot remind us that the Purim story is neither about indulging our history of pain and oppression nor forgetting it. It's about leveraging that history to give! The tradition actually says to give excessively, ridiculously, to train us to be just a little more generous the rest of the year. There’s probably an intersection you drive by where there is always someone in need. Well, put money in the car so that this time you can stop and give as much as you can. 

The rabbis of the Talmud say that one day, when the Messiah comes, when we've all done our homework and all gone out into the world and transformed it so that we've erased Amalek from the planet, Purim will be the only holiday we still celebrate. We won't need any of the other holidays, we will only have Purim. Why Purim? I think one reason might be because this holiday actually encapsulates the Jewish tradition. The story and mitzvot of Purim are a rubric for an integrated Jewish identity, one that holds onto the past but isn’t defined by it. That is our people’s alchemy: taking the pain of our story and turning it into a blessing for the whole world.