March 2024 - How Can We Celebrate Purim This Year?

Friends, our hearts still ache, 5 months after October 7th. Yet, Purim will be here very soon and it is a commandment to celebrate and to be happy! Yes, the first blessing I will chant at our Megillah reading says we are commanded to read the story of Esther and to rejoice. Today? How?

Do you remember when I wrote about how the bar and bat mitzvahs still took place in Israel, even a week after 10/7? And how I described the young women going to the base and organizing pop-up weddings with their intendeds? Consider this too: Elie Wiesel reminded us that they joyfully celebrated Simchat Torah in the concentration camps.  

Purim is a silly time, and things are all topsy-turvy. Even the chanting melody for The Book of Esther is such that the end of a sentence sounds unfinished, like it should keep going, and the comma after a phrase in the middle of a sentence sounds like it is finished and at a stopping point. And we should get so tipsy that we don’t know the difference between Mordechai and Haman! Oy!

While we acknowledge our sorrow and frustration with the world situation, we need to find joy – perhaps a bit tempered, but joy,  nonetheless. I know we can, and we will. We will also keep doing everything we can to work toward peace, in small and large ways. 

B’shalom,

Cantor Rena