Purim’s Vengeance
Quentin Tarantino’s masterful film Inglourious Basterds is a World War II revenge fantasy. A ragtag group of American-Jewish soldiers hunts and kills Nazis. Along the way they are assisted by a beautiful Jewish princess, Shosanna, who wants to avenge the earlier murders of her family. They succeed in killing Nazi leaders, including the evil Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels y”s, when they gather to watch a propaganda film in Shosanna’s theatre. As the theatre burns, Shosanna is heard saying, “This is the face of Jewish vengeance.”
The Purim story tells a similar tale. Esther is likewise a princess who hides her Jewish identity. She thwarts Haman’s evil genocidal designs through beauty and cunning.
We focus on the holiday’s frivolity. We emphasize costumes and hamentashen, laughter and drinking. The story, however, concludes with a violent ending. The megillah states, “So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” (Esther 9) Do our celebrations and carnivals suggest an embarrassment about the story’s violence or even a worry about its implications? Do our costumes mask the Bible’s words, “They disposed of their enemies killing seventy thousand of their foes.”
It is told that the Israeli Orthodox intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz was so disturbed by Purim’s violence and distressed that his fellow Jews might be seduced by its violent demands, that he avoided observing the holiday. He did so with the assistance of a quirk in Jewish law. In Jerusalem Purim is not celebrated on the fourteenth of Adar but the fifteenth because Mordecai’s battles against Haman’s supporters lasted an additional day in Shushan. The rabbis decreed that Purim should be observed on the fifteenth in similarly walled cities. And so, Leibowitz remained in Jerusalem on the fourteenth of Adar while his fellow Israeli Jews observed Purim in all other cities. He then traveled to Tel Aviv on the fifteenth where the Purim celebrations were already concluded. He therefore managed to banish the megillah’s violence from his orbit.
In a post October 7th world I am thinking about Leibowitz’s idiosyncratic approach to Purim and wondering if the Book of Esther is not a fantasy but instead a warning. I still choose Zionism and Jewish sovereignty in this violent world that too often wishes us harm. But this year I am heeding Purim’s reminder that power often comes with violence done with our own hands and in our own name.
At the conclusion of Inglourious Basterds Brad Pitt’s character Lieutenant Aldo Raine etches a swastika on the Jew hunter Hans Landa’s forehead and then declares, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.” And that is how the fantasy ends.
Power is a bitter masterpiece carved with a knife’s edge. While it may protect us it also causes harm to others and begins to cut at our souls.
The Purim story concludes without ever mentioning God. Its final verses offer a note about raw, unchecked power.
Amidst the celebration and revelry, the megillah conjures a warning that power and violence go hand in hand. Absent the holy power can sometimes lead to the defamation of those who wield it.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz warns, “The uniqueness of the Jewish people is not a fact; it is an endeavor. The holiness of Israel is not a reality; it is a task.”
On this year’s Purim we must ask, are we up to the task? Do we heed the holiday’s warning?