Cancel – or at least postpone – Purim

I’m not sure we need Purim this year. I felt the same about the high holidays back in 2020, when we were much younger, thinner, and fitter. Back then, I argued that we had had months of contemplation, introspection, and focus on who would live and who would die. In spite of my sensible suggestion to cancel it, they went ahead pretty much as they always did.

Only with a greater focus on those who would die by plague.

I will try my luck once again, but this time, I will motivate for the cancellation or at least postponement of the festival of Purim, which is due to take place next Friday. My reasons aren’t because I have abandoned my faith and no longer walk on the path of the righteous – assuming that I ever did. It’s not because I no longer see the hidden miracles and had of G-d all around us.

Rather it’s because I do.

I would argue that to celebrate the festival of Purim next Friday, when each of the last 363 days of lockdown felt exactly like Purim, seems a little pointless. Because the month of Adar and the festival of Purim is about an “upside-down world”, and the past year has been the most topsy turvy of all.

But that speaks to the general. It’s in the specifics that it becomes even more interesting.

Especially the drinking part. At a time when we can access alcohol.

And the part about not being able to tell the difference between Mordechai and Haman. Mordechai and Haman? Let’s be real. Most of us find it hard to tell if it’s Tuesday or Wednesday on any given Monday. Those two characters will be a cinch when it comes to muddling them up. I hardly even need alcohol to aid the confusion.

Further, because hypothetically, one’s 16-year-old daughter who has little access to her friends, except by way of technology is now at home most the time, it, hypothetically, becomes important to learn the names of the main characters in her megillah.

At 52 years old, I have trouble remembering which one of the Purim characters Esther was, let alone trying to distinguish modern-day Mia from Olivia from Amelia or Isabella. Haman and Mordechai are practically the “Maths Lit” of the mix-up challenge.

I don’t even need to mention masks, because that’s too obvious. Or money for the poor.

In 2020, in both the United States and in Israel, Purim was the start of the first wave. Our timing is good in that we have ended the second one. Whereas I don’t really want to cancel one of my favourite festivals, it’s not a time to abandon caution and revel in the day. Perhaps, rather, we can continue to look for the hand of G-d in all the places that we least expect to find Him.