“What makes Purim the most joyous Jewish holiday,” Yehoshua November asks, “and what can the holiday tell us about joy versus trauma in the Jewish literary tradition?”
There are many strange things about Purim, he points out. For instance, he book of Esther is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that doesn’t mention God’s name.
Just as strange, Purim “is the only festival whose name does not derive from a Hebrew word.”
“Purim” is a word in Farsi, a diasporic language Jews spoke during the Babylonian exile. The word itself, Purim, means “lots,” recalling the lottery Haman drew to determine the ideal day to wipe out the Jewish people. Calling a holiday Purim is, thus, akin to calling a holiday “the Final Solution.”
So why is Purim so joyous?
. . . the mystics teach that, in the Purim story, the Jewish people called the world’s bluff, insisting that the divine resides beneath the skin of the ordinary or non-miraculous moment, even when appearances suggest otherwise. Purim teaches that what seems random and disordered—a cosmic lottery—is really rigged with divine intentionality or acute divine providence. Unlike Passover’s ten plagues and splitting of the sea, open miracles and divine revelation do not characterize the Purim story, which theoretically could be chalked up to a series of coincidences. A Purim Jew knows otherwise.
Throughout, November connects this notion of the “Purim Jew” to contemporary poetry, explaining that even secular poets today “intuit at least a secular iteration” of the idea of “infus[ing] light into a lackluster moment.”
