When the curiosity and quirk of the lunar calendar presents us with a leap year, thus giving us two months of Adar, we are also given two Purim holidays.
The primary Purim holiday we celebrate is of course in the second Adar, when we hear the recitation of the Megillah, bring care packages of thoughtful goodies to others in our neighborhood or community, are generous with our charity to ensure everyone has the means to celebrate the holiday feast, and make merry, often in costume.
But this first Purim that falls in that first month of Adar, should it be celebrated? Following a discussion in Talmud, the conclusion is that the Purim of the first Adar gets skipped. Nonetheless, it has a title all its own.
It is “Purim Katan,” “Little Purim.” While the actual Purim festivities are deferred for a month, Purim Katan does not pass as a regular day on the calendar. After all, had it not been a leap year, it would have been Purim.
So on this day, no eulogies are recited. Fasting is definitely forbidden.
But even before Purim Katan was looming (Friday, February 23), Purim has been on my mind.
Israel, the nation that through the millennia has known insecurity, terror, threat and actual genocide, is now being accused of genocide for self-defense, after an actual genocidal entity attempted just that on Oct. 7, 2023.
It’s that dangerous and dark absurdity, that sense of unexpected reversal of fortune or truth, of confused narratives — that world of Purim nahafoch-hu, of Purim’s “turn it upside down” — that seemed to have taken over.
We get to read the Megillah and know the story has a happy ending, or at least an ending of relief, when Haman’s decree of genocide against the Jewish people is rescinded. We get to read how the “good guy” in the story prevails against and replaces the wicked one.
But the Jews of Persia must have lived the day in, day out, panic and dread as the date of Haman’s genocidal decree drew nearer and nearer. The knives were out. The swords unsheathed. The target on their collective back had been painted. The Persians were primed for the destruction of the Jewish people.
The Megillah begins and persists in sharing the harrowing predicament the Jewish people were contending with.
Yet, as we know, miraculously, in the end, not one Jew is wounded.
Even so, the Megillah does in fact conclude with a violent ending. In another one of the “nahafoch-hu” twists of the plot, the Persians who were poised to perpetrate genocide against the Jews were the ones who were killed, by the Jews, no less. Five hundred men in the city of Shushan; 75,000 in the provinces.
This, at the directive of Mordechai.
I used to struggle with this part of the Megillah, until I reframed it for myself in Holocaust terms, imagining that after years of abuse by the Nazis, once the immediate danger might have seemed to have subsided, the Jews attacked so as to prevent the Germans from ever rising against the the Jewish people.
I have been thinking about this idea of preventive violence, of killing in self-defense, so as to prevent a future genocide.
For a normal, merciful human being, as justified or sadly necessary as self-defense is, it is the hardest thing. It goes against our instinctive nature of mercy. Yet doing otherwise would be a misplaced mercy, would only invite further agony and violence.
Preventive violence runs counterintuitive to the idea that violence only begets more violence, which a part of me deeply believes or, perhaps more accurately, wishes were true.
Yet reality slaps in the face with the truth that, indeed, sometimes mercy can be misplaced.
A famous rabbinic dictum is: “Those who are compassionate toward the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the compassionate.”
These themes of compassion and cruelty, of misplaced mercy, of preventive violence, as paradoxical as that sounds, are also ideas that the conclusion of the Megillah reminds us of and stimulates us to consider.
This Purim Katan has caused me to think about these themes more deeply, already one month before the actual Purim that we will celebrate.
But the truth is, this year, these aspects of Purim Katan and the Purim story tragically came early and came to life. We have had to ponder these excruciating and wrenching realities in our time.
It’s been on my mind since Oct. 7.
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