Purim I — Why a Purim Massacre at Abraham's Tomb?
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Friends — Here The Shalom Center begins an adventure into the Festival of Purim that will lead us all into several ways of transforming Purim and, we hope, the world —through actifests. Each week from now until Purim you will find here one excitement or incitement.
— AW, ed.
Dear companions in the struggle for a decent world,
Purim is one of the strangest Jewish (or most other) holy days. It seeks to turn everything upside down or inside out for the sake of early-spring hilarity.
For example: Though Torah seems to prohibit men from wearing women's clothes or women from wearing men's clothes, serious traditionalists encourage these practices on Purim — for the sake of joy and celebration.
The text that accompanies and seems to explain Purim — the Scroll of Esther — treats a Jew named Mordechai as the chief hero of the story and Haman, a vicious and genocidal prime minister, as the chief villain.
The Degradation of Haman before Ahasuerus and Esther, School of Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630s
But the rabbis taught that drinking plenty of alcohol on Purim would dissolve the distinction between "Baruch Mordechai," and "Aror Haman" — "Blessed is Mordechai" and "Cursed is Haman."
Perhaps by getting drunk we are simply to have more giddy fun on Purim. Or perhaps we are to achieve the high level of consciousness in which hero and villain in a story are equally necessary to the story. That is, if the story is only a laughable story, not factual history to be imitated.
Purim painting. Safed, Israel.
But in the morning of Purim 1994, one Jew turned the whole point of Purim upside down, from hilarity to horror.
That morning I lazily turned on the radio, warmed by a funny and pleasant reading of the Scroll of Esther the night before. But news from Occupied Palestine jolted me awake — and horrified.
Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who lived with other Israeli-Jewish settlers near Hebron on the West Bank, had broken into the mosque at the Tomb of Abraham, who was considered by Jews, Arabs, and Muslims as the great Forebear of their peoples. With a machine-gun Goldstein had killed 29 Muslims prostrate at prayer — no danger to anyone.
His name was "Baruch" — "Blessed" — but he had twisted the instruction to meld "Blessed" and "Accursed" of the story into twisting his own self into a murderer. Many of us, myself included, had spent our lives writing life-giving midrash with our pens or typewriters. Baruch/ Aror wrote murderous midrash with a machine-gun. Which kind of midrash would shape the future?
I remember shouting "NO NO No no no no" into the wind, the YHWH InterBreath of life Whom I had learned to know as God. I remember calling my children, then in their 20s, because I thought only they would understand my agony. They did.
Goldstein understood and enacted Purim by seeing the Scroll of Esther as a factually true history, especially in Chapter 9, the last chapter. There the Jews in the story take revenge for a failed attempt at genocide of the Jewish people by killing not only its planners but 75,000 other Persians.
The future I was hoping to teach about Purim was foreshadowed by the Jewish scholar H. L Ginsberg. He saw the story as a story — a satiric tale aimed not at a fictional Persian king and prime minister but probably at getting a Hellenistic empire (the Ptolemys? the Seleucids?) to soften their authoritarian ways.
I feared a future in which the murderous machine-gun midrash would win out. But I myself did not fully understand my agony until 2023, when the government of the Jewish state killed at least 26,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza — most of them children — in revenge for a murderous and atrocious attack on Israel ordered by the Military Wing of Hamas.
Why did Goldstein’s machine-gun midrash horrify me so deeply? Because I feared it would sprout an early-spring celebritation in a future Israel armed with an invincible air force, governed by Cabinet members who were followers of Baruch/ Aror and of his teacher Kahane, ultra-right-winng ideologue of Judaism in USA and Israel.
By 2023 my nightmare of machine-gun midrash sprouted into a governing regime had come true. So had an eight-month civil disobedience campaign supporting an independent judiciary and a slightly stronger democracy — for Jews mostly. Some Palestinians tolerated. Most subjugated.
Which model framed the future? Could machine-gun “democracy” last? Or might it explode, as Langston Hughes warned about Harlem, “like a raisin in the sun”?
After all, raisins are dried grapes — celebrated from the grapevines of ancient Israelites and modern Palestinian poetry.
“Explode”? For how many years? From how many ”sides”?
Or can we learn to munch each others’ grapes and raisins wiith pleasure and in peace?
Explode or explore?
TWO peoples safe and free
From the River to the Sea!
— Arthur