One of the most joyous holidays in the jewish tradition is Purim, but it also has a dark side.
Purim has a drinking problem.
Purim is a holiday that celebrates the survival of the Jewish people from the hateful Haman in ancient Persia under the king of Achashverosh. Esther, our hero, saves the day through her wit and cunning.
It is a holiday of tremendous joy, whimsy, and silliness. Think of it as a bit of April Fool’s Day meets Halloween meets a community potluck.
But there’s another side to this too. Purim, as a holiday that is primarily joyous, also has an undercurrent of indulgence and misuse that can subvert the goals and the deeper meaning of this holiday
And I think we need to talk about it.
Where does this come from?
In addition to the many mitzvot of this holiday, like giving gifts and charity and listening to the book of Esther being read, a rabbinic ruling has become increasingly central to Purim celebrations.
It comes from the Talmud (Megillah 7b:7), and it reads as follows:
Rava said: A person is obligated to become intoxicated on Purim until they do not know [how to distinguish] between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordecai.
Which is to say, it appears, on its surface, that we are supposed to get so drunk that we don’t know the difference between the good guy and the bad guy.
This prompts us to ask three questions
- What does “intoxicated” mean exactly?
- What does it mean to “not know”? What does knowing mean here?
- What is the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai”?
If you’ve attended large Purim gatherings, some of them can get pretty raucous and crazy.
Even on YouTube, if you search “Purim celebration,” the first result is “Purim: The Drunkest Jewish Party on Earth.”
Regardless of that, many folks have experienced, across the religious spectrum, where alcohol was served during services or in excess during an after-party.
This idea that “we’re supposed to get drunk” is a thing or even the main thing that many people know about Purim.
Not a holiday of redemption, but of booze.
There is a reason for this: The two main Jewish legal codes from the last thousand years take the Talmud text as the core and then build on it.
The Mishneh Torah, from about a thousand years ago, says that we should get so drunk that we fall asleep. And the Shulkhan Arukh, still the halakhic authority from five hundred years ago, repeats the Talmud text but adds some information. We’ll get to that in a moment.
The point is, generally, when we talk about celebrating Purim, the text from the legal codes and the Talmud gets shared, and few, if any, of the comments around it get evaluated
Here’s the thing: I don’t think the rabbis ever meant for us to get hyper-focused on the alcohol part. As far back as the Talmud, 1800 years ago, the rabbis were pointing us in a different direction.
If we go back to our original source, the text doesn’t just stand alone, it is followed by a story. It goes like this:
Rabbah and Rabbi Zeira made a Purim feast with each other, and they became intoxicated. Rabbah arose and slaughtered Rabbi Zeira.
The next day, [when he sobered, he realized what happened. Rabbah] asked God for mercy, and [God] revived [Rabbi Zeira].
The next year, [Rabbah] said to [Rabbi Zeira]: Let the Master come and let us prepare the Purim feast with each other. [Rabbi Zeira] said to him: Miracles do not happen each and every hour.
A couple of important takeaways here:
First, how messed up is it that Rabbah gets so drunk he kills his friend? He doesn’t just kill his friend but slaughters him, using the word that we use for livestock.
Second, how crazy lucky are Rabbah and Rabbi Zeira both that this worked out without anyone staying dead? They really lucked out with a miracle here.
And just a brief detour here, the Talmud is definitely not telling a story of real revival here. This is just for effect. Maybe, he was drunk so deeply that he was “as if” he was dead, if we wanted to get historical.
Third and finally, we’re reminded by Rabbi Zeira that we’re not really supposed to rely on miracles, and more to the point: we’re not supposed to be in this mindset at all, probably ever.
It is the juxtaposition of these two things, the original instruction by Rava and this story, that are telling us that we’re not really supposed to be doing this thing at all. I mean, really? This is what we’re supposed to do!? No way.
How do we parse this?
Rabbi Moshe Isserless, the Ashkenazi gloss of the Shulchan Arukh, begins to help us understand this, and he’s not alone. He quotes the Kol Bo, to suggest that it isn’t that we should drink to excess, just more than we usually do. And, going back to our point, once we drink a bit more, we’ll fall asleep.
This should remind us of what we learned before, from the Mishneh Torah, about drinking until we fall asleep. But, we get a crucial bit of additional information here:
Falling asleep is relevant because “while a person sleeps, they do not know the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai”
This helps us understand one of our questions: what does it mean not to know the difference between these two things?
Rabbi Moshe goes on to say that there’s no difference between a person drinking more or less, as long as their intention is aligned with heaven, or for the purpose of the holiday, in this case.
Even with all of this: How are we supposed to be intentional and thoughtful if we’re drunk?
One of the things that is important to the Jewish tradition is the idea of kavanah, or that we are intentional with our choices. Not only should we do the right thing, but we should do it for the right reasons.
It is honestly outrageous to think that getting drunk would allow us to do that.
We already sense that we’re not supposed to drink a lot, maybe just a little more than usual, as we heard before. This shows up in other places too suggesting that the language of our original text isn’t clear, that it doesn’t mean super drunk, it means:
- Enough that you cannot do math in your head (calculating the two phrases’ gematria)
- Just enough to get a buzz or be tipsy
- Just that you say the wrong words, which is easy to do when you’ve drank a bit
Abudarham suggests that the context of Purim plays a role here. All the big events on the holiday are “wine feasts” or wine parties.
This is true!
- Vashti’s refusal to show up indecently happens from a drunk request
- Esther’s emergence as queen happens during a wine feast or banquet
- Finally, Esther’s ploy against Haman, leading him to his downfall, pardon the pun, also happens at a wine feast.
This is to say that it isn’t that we should get drunk, but that alcohol plays a big role in the story, and maybe it should for us too.
At the same time, objectively, while these moments move the story forward, they aren’t really good things. A demand to show up naked or the desperate attempt to save ourselves happening during a drinking party doesn’t really hold up to the standard: do we want these to be in our lives?
The very nature of these moments is that they are scary or perilous. They are good for a story, but not for our actual lives.
We live in a world that invites us to lose control, to drink to excess, to scroll endlessly.
Here too, that same whisper to let it all hang out shows up and encourages us to do that. But that isn’t healthy or right, especially when celebrating a holiday, even with joy.
We know from lots of folks who are sober, for personal reasons or they struggle with addiction, that alcohol isn’t the only way to have fun or joy. And that creating contexts that push us to make bad choices, like hurting our friends, teaches each other and our children the wrong message.
I don’t think it needs to be this way.
Let me say that I’m not telling you that you can’t celebrate your holiday the way you want, nor am I making a comment about personal use. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket here.
But there are choices we can make to lift up the spirit of the day without damaging ourselves or the people around us, the meaning of the day, or the sacredness of the space we cultivate.
One text that helped me dramatically shift this was Rabbi Akiva Weisinger’s retranslation and commentary on Rabbi Hutner’s exploration of Purim. You can find the whole thing here, but for our purposes, just Rabbi Weisinger’s comment at the end of his piece:
“Drinking blurs barriers, not only between “Baruch Moredchai” and “Arur Haman”, but between our cognition and our emotion, our intellectual and philosophical comprehension of God’s limits and our imaginative depictions of God’s actuality, all stemming from the blurring of lines between our in-progress imperfect world and the perfected world where good has triumphed over evil, a day that God winked at us through the veil of history and we caught a glimpse. A day in which we break free from the constraints of k’viyachol and apprehend God, for a brief moment, as physical reality.”
God doesn’t show up in the book of Esther, at least not explicitly, and is only hinted at by rabbinic imagination. And in that imagination, there’s really nothing better than connecting with the Divine and seeing beyond.
The idea is that drinking helps us bring down that barrier, to see what is beyond, to give us a bit of separation between that always churning brains of ours, and the soft emotional hearts that need to feel things.
But drinking isn’t the only way to do that. Let me explain what I mean by way of a story.
My encounter with God
When I was in rabbinical school, at the end of my first semester was Hanukkah. We spent the whole day studying the sections of Talmud around the holiday. When I got home, I set up my menorah and I lit the candles and I just sat and enjoyed the experience of the candles.
I have to tell you, I’ve never had an experience like this. I felt like God was peeking through the veil at me. I felt God’s radiant energy on me, peeling back layers of existence. I don’t totally know how to articulate that experience except, in part, for the way that Rabbi Weisinger described it here.
In my case, the day of study helped me blur those barriers, to see beyond what was there, and to deeply feel the holiday, in that case Hanukkah. It changed me in ways that I’m honestly still trying to understand.
In addition to the fact that there are other Mitzvot as part of this holiday that are worthy of our time, like giving gifts and supporting the needy, there is still a desire to gather as a community, and that is a good thing.
What might it look like if we emphasized those alternative strategies instead? Even if we wanted to focus on community gatherings, we can do it differently.
Music and group singing can create those spaces and for some it is chanting and meditation. For others, maybe it’s dancing or going into nature or walks.
There’s not going to be one answer for everyone. I don’t think that’s the point, but we should, collectively, emphasize and encourage a more expansive view.
One that doesn’t encourage a loss of agency and awareness, one that doesn’t encourage ingesting substances as the primary mode of spiritual engagement. But one that moves us forward in healthy and meaningful ways, that inspires us to go beyond without losing ourselves.
Have a joyous, meaningful, and intentional Purim.
Be safe out there.