PURIM IN ISRAEL
By Stan Schroeder

As we celebrate Purim this month and look forward to Passover next month, and then realize Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day) is May 1, we see that the 77th year of existence of the State of Israel is nearing its end. This has been another difficult year for Israel. Prior to the October 7, 2023 Hamas horrific invasion of southern Israel, and the ensuing current war in Gaza, Israel had ongoing protests against the Netanyahu government and its plan to change the method of selecting Supreme Court judges. Now with the current hostage/Palestinian terrorist prisoner exchange and ceasefire, Hamas still holds 59 hostages (maybe half alive) and the previous hostages and bodies received amid Palestinians celebrating demonstrate the depravity of Hamas and its supporters.

In the spirit of celebrating the nation of the Jewish people, let’s look at how Purim is celebrated in Israel. In Israel Purim is as intensely ruckus as Carnival in Brazil or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Every city, large and small, has a parade. The one in Tel Aviv is so over-the-top that cross-dressing drag queens can usually be seen mingling amongst the clown-clad kiddies.

School children often have multiple costumes. After all, why pick just one superhero or princess when your teacher lets you come in costume the whole week! In the days leading up to Purim, even teachers and administrators come to school in costume. Every year, the municipalities and local districts organize an adloyada, a parade of youngsters from the regions' schools, all dressed up in a chosen theme. The crowds of children and their parents are enormous - a big street party in costume!

And it's not only the children and teenagers who take advantage of this fun-filled Jewish holiday! Grown-ups enjoy it too, attending fancy dress parties and some even go to work dressed up in something comical!

For weeks, every grocery store and baker is hawking the Purim pastry of Hamantashen. By the time the holiday finally rolls around, everyone has more than had their fill of these poppy-seed and prune-filled delights, so prices are slashed to a dime a dozen.

The actual day of Purim is a holiday from school, so that is when kids attend their neighborhood Purim party, sponsored by the local community centers. These affairs are loud and rocking, with blaring DJs, smoke machines and copious amounts of junk food.

Teenagers get in on the action at night, when the parties feature perhaps mellower music, but a near hyper-like consumption of alcohol.

While there is no trick-or-treating on Purim, the holiday still has that Halloween-like quality that most likely comes from ingesting way too many sugary treats. Religious and secular alike in Israel can be seen on Purim morning delivering baskets of food – usually sweet pastries and candy toffees – to their friends and family members. Let us also remember that Purim is the time to give food to the needy as well as baskets to friends and family.

Let’s pray that next year brings peace and security for Israel and its neighbors.

See my Shir Ami Purim poem in the right-hand column.

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Board Meeting Dvar Torah (October 2, 2019)
By Owen Delman

“Blind obedience without the restraint of reason or morality is dangerous.”

“Abraham should not be honored for willing to kill his child because of a command from God.”

“The key word is blind — this is the stuff of fanatics and terrorists.”

These are some of the concepts regarding the Akedah discussion today. There are rabbis who refuse to include the Akedah in their Rosh Hashanah services because the concept is unacceptable. They reject any of the interpretations which attempt to justify the basic premise of God commanding a sacrifice. Given the holocaust with the murderers using as a defense that they were “just following orders” (an example of ‘blind obedience’) they condemn the whole concept.

Bringing it into our present day, they say if there had been a trial of Abraham he would have used the defense of “God ordered me to do it” and that this is quite similar to the defense stated by the assassins of Yitzhak Rabin who claimed that to give any part of Israel back would be a denial of God’s plan for Israel.

So how should do we deal it?

In Stan’s Torah study group we often hear the refrain “but that can’t be true” or “but that doesn’t fit with something in another part of the bible.” The questioner gets reminded that these are stories, parables used for teaching concepts.

After services yesterday, (where I had posited a number of theories of what the Akedah meant) a friend came up to me and asked me which one was the correct interpretation.

I asked him with which one he felt most comfortable because there is no one answer.

The Bible is not history, not an accurate accounting of past events

Let me stop for a moment: I’ve studied history and literature. Let me explain the differences.  History is a written account of past events based on the author’s examination of events and documents to back up his conclusions. Literature is a creation of an author perhaps based on fact or wholly conceived by the author. The Akedah is a story in the Torah meant as a lesson; a piece of literature. In the study of literature it is accepted that it is less important what the author meant as opposed to what the reader sees in the work — how it affects him. There is no correct answer, only how the viewer is affected by the piece.

Once a piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.) is given to the world, it matters little what the artist meant. What is important is how it is perceived and how it affects the contemporary viewer.

When you understand the Akedah for what it is to our day, to us, it becomes much more understandable. Those rabbis who won’t even allow the Akedah to be part of their Rosh Hashanah story may be missing a wonderful teaching lesson for the sake of political correctness.