Elegy for the Thirteenth of Adar

[rhu]

Fifteen years ago, introverte and I spent two weeks visiting Israel. Purim is my favorite holiday, and it had long been my dream to be able to pull the "double Purim" trick of spending Purim proper in Tel Aviv, home of one of the largest Purim street festivals, and then heading back to Jerusalem in the afternoon and spending Shushan Purim in the Old City.

We had been planning to head to the Diezengoff Centre the afternoon before Purim to do some last-minute shopping, but instead decided to hang out at the hotel and rest. And it was while we were on the beach with friends that we heard the bomb. Instead of going to megillah reading, we huddled in our hotel room, terrified, crying, and reading megillah from a tanach instead of a klaf.

At the time, I wrote a poem, Elegy for the Thirteenth of Adar, and later set it to music. It's not a particularly good poem -- in fact, it's pretty bad and I'm embarrassed to read it now -- but it captured how we felt at the time, and in the traditional form of Jewish elegies, it finds echoes of the murder of our generation in the texts that have come before; in this case, in the megillah itself:

For the enemy had set out to destroy, murder, and annihilate the Jews, from young to old, children and women, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar.... And we went out into the midst of the city, and cried loud and bitterly.... For how can I bear to witness the catastrophe that befalls my people? How can I bear to witness the destruction of my people?....

This past week, no sooner had we ended the Shabbat with the quote from the megillah, For the Jews there was light and gladness and happiness and rejoicing.... So may it be for us! than we heard the horrifying news from Itamar. Terrorists had killed an entire family while they slept, including slitting the throats of young children and stabbing a four-month-old baby in the heart. And perhaps even worse than the murders themselves was the response: Palestinian policemen handing out candies in celebration, and the insinuation in the world press that somehow the Jews "had it coming" for living in a settlement.

This evening, on the heels of the Fast of Esther, I read this analysis that someone passed along from a columnist in Haaretz:

What was the meaning of this funeral, and of the monstrous crime of slaughtering a lovely young family in its sleep? For the religious right, it seemed to be saying: This is what you can expect, now and forever, over and again, until the Messiah comes to put an end to this unbearable, unextinguished anguish.

For the rest of us, it seemed to be saying, if possible, something even worse:

This is exactly what you can expect. This is your future. An endless procession of killings and escalation and enmity and settlement and condemnation and heartbreak and no negotiations and a broken Jewish people and no compromise and more settlement and a shattered Judaism, until the day that a vote is taken and the Palestinians are more numerous than we, and the flag which is based on the prayer shawl and the Shield of David is pulled down for the last time.

So here we are. Can we be joyful on this Purim? We must; it is commanded. But how? Only by having faith that we are only up to chapter five. In the megillah, God is never mentioned; the rabbis make a pun on the name of Esther and translate it as "I will hide Myself". The message is that God helps us "behind the scenes," as when the king has insomnia.

If we believe the narrative of Purim, then in our own day perhaps we have yet to make the transition from the first half of the megillah -- For the enemy had set out to destroy, murder, and annihilate the Jews -- to the second half -- For the Jews there was light and gladness and happiness and rejoicing.

Perhaps soon will come the time when the world's sleep will be disturbed, and the Aggagites will overreach, and the annals will be brought, and read, and the right of the Jews to live (and to defend ourselves) will no longer be questioned.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

[cellio]

Beautiful.