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A few years ago, I went to my niece’s bat mitzvah and was delighted that they had a Mardi Gras theme. The room was decked out with tents, each one housing costumes for the guests. With lots of beads and masks, partygoers went into the tents and came out looking mysterious. I thought it was cute to celebrate Mardi Gras at a bat mitzvah. Then I realized it was all about Purim.
It was amusing to see the merriment. Guests were joking about characters from the Megillah, the Book of Esther that’s read on Purim: The beautiful queen Esther, the “starter wife” Vashti, the silly king Ahashverosh, the villain Haman, and the wonderful hero Mordechai.
I was so amused to think of the Purim story and see some similarity to Mardi Gras. If you took Mardi Gras and mixed it with Halloween, it would look something like Purim. Purim is a fun-filled holiday with a wonderful story of good guys, bad guys, kings, and queens — and it has a kind ending. But I had always thought of it as a holiday for kids.
This year, our synagogue is putting together a Purim program using popular music. It is based on “Saturday Night Fever” and a cast singing mostly Bee Gee’s music. Songs like “Jive Talkin’” (to Ahashverosh) and “More Than a Woman” are turning out to be quite adaptable to the holiday. I had thought that so many aspects of Judaism were for kids, but our community is having fun merging music from the 1970s with the ancient story of love and rescue. And the kids are getting a lesson in American culture, singing the infamous song by Kool & the Gang, “Celebrate Pu-rim come on!”
If you are looking for a fun Saturday night party with modern themes, and maybe some alcohol, check out your community’s Purim festivities. There are events for young and old, hip and square, kids and adults, everyone! You might just have a blast! Now if you will excuse me, I have to go dust off my disco shoes…
Purim is a great holiday for families and kids: there are costumes, excuses to make noise and act silly, and many communities have parties, carnivals or other celebrations appropriate for the littlest members or our families (or those who feel young at heart). This post is about making Purim fun for the whole family. Let us know how your family celebrates by sharing your customs, ideas and suggestions in the comments!
The mom who blogs at Bible Belt Balabusta explains that she’s “worked hard to go from zero to….whatever speed I’m going these days, and I love sharing what I’ve learned with anyone who is even vaguely interested.” She’s all about the DIY as she says, “I especially love the ‘why’ behind it: I explore the customs and traditions behind holiday projects. If I’m learning, I’m happy.” So I was totally excited to see her LEGO gragger for Purim, that actually works! But if that’s still not geekily awesome enough for you, she has 4 different models and instructions to make your own. Amazing.
There is not a Jewish holiday that comes around that I do not partially practice – and reinforce my own Jewish identity as a cultural Jew – in the kitchen. To me, Mordecai Kaplan was correct when he first stated in 1934 that “Judaism is more than a religion; it is an entire civilization. Not merely religious texts but also language, literature, and even arts and crafts are a part of it.”
Kaplan taught that Jews would be drawn to new and exciting forms of Judaism that simultaneously retain “strong ties to the past”. Speaking as a “Kitchen Jew” – Purim provides wonderful opportunities for observing this holiday in addition to making costumes, attending a Purim Shpiel, and buying multitudes of tickets for your children to play games at the Purim Carnival. Not to put down these activities, for what is Purim without coming home from the Purim Carnival with bags of goldfish soon-to-be-named Vashti and Esther?
As a bonus, there’s always the intersection between kitchen Judaism and math. Yes, math. Because you too can bake your way to the “Sierpinski Hamantaschen.”What’s that? “You may be familiar with the Sierpinski triangle, a mathematically attractive, self-repeating fractal that starts with one equilateral triangle and breaks down into ever-smaller triangles.” Some basics of the Sierpinski triangle:
First of all, when rotated to any side, it looks the same; I couldn’t even tell where I’d started it. Also, as the triangles get smaller, notice a pattern in the quantity of each size: 1, 3, 9, 27…. I’m sure it would go on if I could make really really tiny hamantaschen, but I don’t have that much power. Also, technically this triangle has no area, so maybe all the sugar doesn’t count? But careful with that logic: it has infinite perimeter, and that dough for the perimeter is full of not-healthy ingredients like flour and sugar and oil.
So bring your love of math to the kitchen, teach your kids about the wonders of fractals, and have fun creating this uberhamantaschen.
Want a fun way to encourage your kids to act on one of Purim’s four commandments (mitzvot)? Try using unopened boxes of pasta as noisemakers during the reading of the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther). Shake those boxes for a satisfying rattling noise each time Haman’s name is read. Then donate the boxes of food to a local food bank, fulfilling the mitzvah (commandment) to give to the poor on Purim.
And, finally, for those of you with teens or older kids who appreciate the finer offerings of Broadway, enjoy this new video made by Reform rabbinic and cantoral students studying at HUC-JIR Jerusalem campus. “The Book of Purim” is a spoof of The Book of Mormon.
It’s so simple, all you need are two ingredients. Seriously. It’s great for making hamantaschen at your office (as they did) or in a dorm room. And if my count is correct, you only need five other items in addition to your two ingredients: a paper cup (“cookie cutter”), a paper plate (serving double duty as a “spatula” and a “plate”), a can opener (optional, depending on your hamantaschen filling), a spoon (optional, depending on the filling type) and a toaster oven. Done.
I’m way behind on my Purim prep. Yes, I made hamantashen, last night, but I’m still writing my chapter of the Purimspiel, which will be performed on the eve of Purim–Saturday night! My husband is making my son’s costume. (I cannot tell you what my son wants to be for Purim, or I will start cackling hysterically again.) I am going as…a very tired mom, probably, even though I think that’s what I went as last year.
What a great holiday for introducing your non-Jewish partner, friend or relative to the Jewish community, though. It’s traditional to have parties, eat yummy sweets, drink alcoholic beverages and dress up in costumes. It was also the start of Jewish theater–the Purimspiel, based on the Book of Esther, is always full of satire. (And sometimes actual humor. Jokes, anyway.) Plus it’s a holiday all about a Jewish woman who preserves her religious and cultural identity in an intermarriage and saves the Jewish people. Can’t say better than that.
Here’s this year’s 92nd Street Y Purim video. It’s about a werewolf dentist. I have no idea why it’s about a werewolf and not a vampire, but whatever. Enjoy.
Do you celebrate your birthday on the Jewish calendar? February, in addition to Valentine’s Day and Purim, two great holidays for interfaith couples, happens to contain my son’s and my husband’s birthdays. My son was born on the first day of Jewish month of Adar, the month in which Purim falls, which is traditionally a month of rejoicing.
If you were hurting for celebratory days–and if you are in an interfaith family, I know you aren’t, having at least one or two calendars of them to choose from–it might be nice to celebrate your birthday on the Jewish calendar. (Especially if you aren’t Jewish, that would make it cooler!)
If you want to find out when you were born in the Hebrew calendar, Hebcal.com has this date converter. Just put in your secular calendar birthday (including the year!) and you’ll get your Hebrew birthday.
This is the song I was singing on the day my son was born–I had trouble finding a great recording. It means, “the one who brings in Adar multiplies happiness.” Something like that.
Birthdays are big with first-graders. My son knows that his Gregorian calendar birthday was also Gertrude Stein’s birthday, and the date of the Japanese holiday setsubun. Some of his classmates celebrate their half-birthdays or their name days, which is a Catholic custom that has apparently been secularized. So why not your Hebrew birthday?
I didn’t mean to let the entire Purim holiday go by without a greeting on our blog! Today I was the designated parent at home with my son, who has the bug that is going around. I think I’ve caught it too. I feel achy and chilled.
It’s not a hangover, though it feels like one. It’s traditional to get wasted on Purim but that’s one tradition I didn’t think fit my lifestyle this year. Nope, I didn’t have anything alcoholic to drink at the megillah reading last night. (The megillah, newbie Judaism fans, is the biblical Book of Esther, written on a scroll and traditionally chanted in Hebrew. Some people call it “the whole megillah.”)
Purim is a great holiday if you like to party and act silly. This is the first year in about 20 that I haven’t contributed writing to a purimspiel, a play that parallels the plot of the Book of Esther and features contemporary satire. It’s performed at the megillah reading. I did appear in other people’s sketches in the one we performed last night. (I got to wear a black cape!) It was fun, but I was sad that my son couldn’t be there. He’s been gearing up for Purim for a couple of weeks at Hebrew school. He was excited to dress up and be in a play. He was too sick and my husband decided to stay home with him.
This morning, there we were with a pile of articles that need to be edited for IFF, a stir-crazy child and a huge box of sugary treats. My mom sent a special new noisemaker for the kid to use during the megillah reading, and he was making head-splittingly awful noise with it.
I remembered one year when I was little that my parents read us the Book of Esther in English translation instead of taking us to synagogue to hear it read in Hebrew. I decided we could do that. Continue reading →
Purim comes but once a year and when it comes you know it’s here–because people get really silly. I am not sure whether this article about Christian salt is for real. Yes, OK, maybe there is someone out there who doesn’t understand that Jews use kosher salt for removing the blood from meat and feels weirded out by salt with a Jewish star on it. But this part of the article made me think this could be a put-on:
If the salt takes off, Godlewski plans an entire line of Christian-branded foods, including rye bread, bagels and pickles.
Matthew Scott, who wrote a nice article for InterfaithFamily.com about being in an interfaith relationship and learning to cook and eat Jewish food, was one of several people to bring the Christian salt story to my attention. He was also the first person in my network to find the new 92nd Street Y Purim video, Meshugene Men–though I’d read about it on jbooks.com, in a fun interview with comedy writer Rob Kutner, who made the video. I’ve embedded it below the cut. Continue reading →
My five-year-old son is very subtle. The morning after our HavurahPurim party, my son told me, “You know, not everyone knows what a Purimspiel is.”
“But you do, honey, because we saw one last night. It was the play people were acting out, about Queen Esther.”
He nodded. “But not everyone knows what that is.”
Sometimes my son will start using words correctly and then ask me later what they mean. I’m always sliding new words by him and finding out that he’s picked them up when he hands his dad a board book of the Noah’s Ark story with the request, “Read me the abridged version.” My big challenge is to introduce the words in such a way that he gobbles them up like a little Pac-Man and doesn’t shut off his attention.
This is also my challenge at my job. The difference is that I am writing here for adults who are, generally speaking, highly educated. Continue reading →
It’s a deeply spiritually meaningful Jewish holiday, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a holiday whose observance involves a lot of being silly. For example, we have Purim Torah, a sort of high level satirical joking. (Or sometimes not really so high level.) Then there are Purim costumes, which in some communities are very silly indeed. Purim plays (also called purimspielen) were some of the first Jewish theater, and to this day there are opportunities for members of Jewish communities to mock each other and the current political situation as they retell the story of the Book of Esther. There are Purim carnivals for children in costume. There are special Purim foods, like hamantashen, the jam-filled pastries that we North American Jews of Eastern European extraction make for this holiday, and, well, alcoholic beverages. (No, alcohol is not mandatory. I’ve been to more than one Purim party where people claim to be drinking when they are really holding cups of alcohol while telling jokes. You should never feel pressure to drink. Or to laugh.)
It’s the perfect holiday for this blog, because:
1. It’s a holiday about a Jewish woman who entered an interfaith marriage, preserved her identity and saved the Jewish people. Enough said.
2. On the internet, no one knows whether you’re wearing a Purim costume. (No, I’m not. For one thing, it’s not Purim yet. Also, I’m at work. In addition, I don’t even wear a costume at the megillah reading. Those are my real nose and glasses.)
As a bonus, there’s always the intersection between kitchen Judaism and math. Yes, math. Because you too can bake your way to the “
My five-year-old son is very subtle. The morning after our 
