Purim is a holiday that is about women’s power, in its different forms.
Thinking about the roles of Queen Vashti and her successor Queen Esther in the Purim story highlights some of the dilemmas that women have faced throughout history. I therefore think it’s particularly apt that Ta’anit Esther is International Agunah Day, the day the marks the harrowing struggle of “chained women,” or women denied divorce.
Vashti and Esther were both married to a man, the same man, for whom women were objects to be adorned and used. This was arguably the prevailing culture at the time, but there are also gradations in the exploitation of women. (To wit, someone visiting the planet for the first time who puts on MTV would believe that our culture is no better today than it was then.) Moreover, King Ahasverus was particularly adamant in his use of women’s bodies to claim his own power. He summoned Vashti specifically “to show the peoples and the princes her beauty; for she was fair to look on,” he chose his next queen based on a beauty contest, and declared that peace in his entire kingdom was a function of women’s submission, that “all the wives will give to their husbands honor, both to great and small… that every man should bear rule in his own house, and speak according to the language of his people.”
Interestingly, Vashti and Esther dealt with the king differently. Vashti was defiant.
A funny thing happened in my house the other day. And by funny, I mean dismaying and somewhat depressing. My two-year-old daughter came home from preschool talking about a Bad Man. When we hear this Bad Man’s name, she told me with wide-eyed gusto, we make a lot of noise to scare him away.
As she excitedly recounted the Purim story, I realized I’d approached a rite of passage in modern Jewish parenthood that’s right up there with wincing at a bris and trying to make Hanukkah something more than a tsunami of presents. It was, of course, the dilemma of how to teach kids our often difficult and scary religious tales, of which Purim is probably the most difficult and scary.
And I’m not talking about the whole minefield of problems like the sexism in the Vashti scene, the valuation of female beauty in the Esther thread, and the bloody revenge levied against the Jews’ enemies — to say nothing of the super scary part about the genocide plot, which was thankfully left out of my daughter’s introduction to the holiday. No, at this point I just mean the simple idea of there being Bad Men, like Haman. Of course, there are bad people in the world. But is that something that toddlers who have never heard of them need to learn?
The Kittel Collection is a series of clothing pieces that explores the different ways clothing is used as a vehicle for meaning and identity within our tradition and literature. The kittel is a simple, white, garment used as a burial shroud, and customarily worn by men on various Jewish holy days. Each month, The Sisterhood showcases, and looks at the meaning behind, a kittel from my collection. View images of this month’s kittel, the Liar’s Kittel, after the jump.
A few years ago I co-hosted a Purim party that invited the guests to “Come as you’re not. Whatever you think you are, whoever that is, come as your opposite, come as your nemesis.” It was great theme. Shy retiring types came as drag queens and flamboyant Prince Charmings. Buttoned-up lawyers came as hippies. And there were many nuns and priests. It gave people existential angst — “…but who aren’t I…?” — in the run-up to Purim. The party theme tapped into our secret desires for how we want to see ourselves.
In Bereshit, some of the characters use clothing to manipulate and trick others. They change the roles they have been given, so that their realities can be altered: Jacob dresses up as Esau, fools his father into blessing him, and gains the inheritance he always wanted. Jacob’s sons use Joseph’s torn and bloody coat to spin the story that Joseph is dead in order to receive their father’s love and attention. Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and Judah sleeps with her, and she gets pregnant, all without him realizing her true identity. She transforms herself a childless widow into reclaiming a life for herself.
(slideshow below)
Yesterday was “boy-girl” day at my daughter’s school. What does that mean, exactly, you wonder, as I did when the news arrived home? Turns out, it is part of the Purim lead-up week, when every day the school has another dressing-up theme, like the less-charged “pajama day” or “face paint day.” The school this year instituted a day when boys dress up like girls and girls dress up like boys.
Now granted, the school may have found inspiration for this misguided idea from the many adult men who have dressed up as women over the years. When I was doing my research on partnership synagogues, one of my interviewees told me that I should write about how at his synagogue one year, no less than six men dressed up as women, and that in his opinion that says something about the men who are willing to pray in an egalitarian way. Presumably he was implying that a man dressing up like a woman is more in touch with his feminine side, whatever the heck that means. Or maybe that he just likes women. Or maybe he thinks that in the partnership synagogue, a place that pushes gender boundaries, it’s okay for a man to test his secret desire to go trans.
However, it is telling that you don’t find many women dressing up as men (except for specific-costume men, like Charlie Chaplain).
While Purim is still more than a month away, Israeli bakeries are already full of hamentashen and newspapers and magazines are full of advertising campaigns for children’s costumes.
In the charged atmosphere of Beit Shemesh, even Purim has now become a battleground in the escalating ‘exclusion of women’ in the ultra-Orthodox community.
But the moral of this particular story is that fighting the trend can be successful when fought quickly and effectively, and using the buying power of the non Haredi-extremist community as a key weapon in the battle.
It all began when Hadassah Margolese — mother of the now famous eight-year-old Naama — was appalled to find that the circulars in her mailbox running advertisements for Purim costumes with the faces of the little girls dressed as fairies and princesses were blurred into obscurity.
This Purim, for the first time in more than three decades, I wore my wedding dress. It was a strange experience.
The idea was born out of desperation. My husband and I only began thinking of costumes for the Megillah reading and Purim spiel we attend every year just hours before it was due to begin, and because it was Shabbat, we had no chance to purchase anything. My usual backup, a beautiful kimono he bought me on a business trip to Japan, seemed inappropriate this year. While I want to express solidarity with the grief-stricken country, this didn’t seem the way to do it.
My second backup, a long, embroidered Arab dress and white hijab from Jordan, also was problematic. An expression of solidarity with Middle East women protesting for freedom? A worthy feeling, but this year the outfit could also be interpreted as something far less sympathetic. So, that was out, too.
As a last resort, my husband went to the basement to retrieve my wedding gown, last worn nearly 31 years ago (our anniversary is in a couple of days).
The oil from the Hanukkah donut-fry had barely cooled before talk of our hamantaschen bake-fest began. Baking is my way of expressing devotion, particularly as single woman in her mid-40s for whom being an aunt is the closest I will come to Jewish motherhood. Before my sister gave birth to the first of her two daughters six years ago, enduring the stories of my friends’ “adorable” nieces was torture. While feigning interest and donning a wan smile I couldn’t understand why they cared so much about their sibling’s kid.
Now that I am an aunt I have become one of those people I used to mock, telling tales of my nieces’ own adorableness and showing photos constantly. The girls have infused my life with a depth of feeling I still don’t comprehend, and I am determined to plant the baker’s seed in them both. When I was a child my mother would snap, “Food is not love!” whenever I’d complain about whatever she’d served for dinner. I disagree.
Purim is just around the corner and, in my house, that means my children have been super-glued into their costumes for about three weeks. My 6-year-old son, a dinosaur fan, has been wearing his T-Rex hat and roaring at the baby non-stop. My 3-year-old daughter has been wearing her poofy, pink princess dress and tiara, alternately calling herself Cinderella or Queen Esther. My daughter in a princess dress is not all that unusual. She has a few “savta bought” (obviously) tutus she loves to twirl around in, but having just read Peggy Orenstein’s “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture,” both the Cinderella talk and the Queen Esther talk are giving me pause.
It occurs to me, as my son reenacts the Purim story (complete with a jump off the chair for Haman’s hanging), just how similar the two stories are. Two motherless girls, their true identity a secret, rising far above their circumstances by virtue of their great beauty to land the prince/king. I see its merit as a captivating story, but as providing an enduring Jewish role model?
I actually spent the past hour playing sheitel-macher — combing out a long, blond wig, much the way Tali Farkash described in the article that sparked this blog-debate. See my post here and Rabbi Broyde’s response here I was doing it for my 7-year old daughter because tomorrow is “wig day” in school. No, they are not training the girls to be good married women. It’s just Purim.
It’s quite funny, really. The wig is a fantastic tool for playing with identity, for stepping out of social norms and boundaries and stretching one’s reality and liberation. People use Purim to be who they are not “normally” allowed to be — v’nahafoch hu — and it is great fun. If society allowed us to play dress-up a little more, we might be a jollier people. But now that my daughter is finished giggling about her costume and gone to bed, I have returned here to this very serious debate about whether wigs somehow make women more religious. It’s so funny that it makes me want to cry.
Michael J. Broyde opens his piece with an assertion that I am “mistaken in [my] critique of the wigs that many married Orthodox women choose to wear” — not that he disagrees with me, mind you, rather that I am simply wrong. Rabbi Broyde then goes on to offer several assertions I believe do nothing to rebut my basic argument. In fact, he perfectly demonstrates what I was trying to say.
I couldn’t read all the Esther and Vashti talk around the Web, without chiming in myself. Like Elissa Strauss, I dressed up as one of the two queens every year at my Jewish day school’s Purim carnival — at least until 3rd or 4th grade when we started getting more creative with our costumes. Whether I was Esther or Vashti depended on the statement I wanted to make any given year. I remember feeling quite torn between being the perfect princess and being the bad-ass one (not that I knew what such a term meant, but I knew they were different).
The way I was told the story of Esther and Vashti makes me realize how early we’re indoctrinated with certain conceptions of gender — the good, obedient, selfless girl vs. the rebel. These two are our very own Jewish version of the Madonna-Eve, or Virgin-Whore dichotomy. Many feminists this week have talked about the way Esther and Vashti represent two ways of dealing with the patriarchy — either using beauty and patience to get your way, or standing up outright and facing the consequences. It’s the kind of debate we have in feminist circles all the time: Do we concede rhetoric to get change accomplished (the Esther way) or do we stand up for our principles at any cost (the Vashti way)?
When I was in kindergarten I played Queen Esther in our synagogue’s Purim spiel. I remember feeling pretty good about playing the lead, and energized that the role called for playing a heroine and putting on a frilly pink dress.
I thought about this Saturday during a discussion at my synagogue about gender and power in the book of Esther. We looked at the way Esther derives her power from her beauty — and questioned whether she really was powerful at all.
Purim is being increasingly interpreted as a feminist holiday, from the re-reading of the non-Jewish Queen Vashti as a defiant hero, to the all-female megillah readings growing in observant communities. Fellow Sisterhood contributor Elana Sztokman wrote about how Queen Esther is interpreted as an agunah, or a woman stuck in an unwanted marriage, in this recent post.
Come Saturday night and Sunday, Jewish homes, parties and synagogues will be full of sugared-up little Queen Esthers, superheroes and other assorted costumed children, clad in their Purim guises.
I’ve never been the kind of mom willing, or able, to sew artfully constructed costumes with complicated details. When I was in Boro Park once the Sunday before Purim, I was excited to go to one of the Purim stores that pop up before the holiday there, thinking we’d find all sorts of cool get-ups. But the store had only a range of bride-like Queen Esther costumes for the girls, a range so limited that it was perhaps as predictable as it was disappointing. Usually, when my kidlets start wondering aloud what they’ll be for Purim, they’re most likely to hear “go check what’s in the dress up box,” where they choose from clown, hippie, Rasta and Hasidic garb to put on.
You can learn an incredible amount about different people from language. There are, for example, 27 words for “moustache” in Albanian – including a word for what English-speakers would call “no moustache.” It seems that in Albania, moustaches are pretty important. Similarly, the Inuit are famous for having 30 words for snow – clearly they see things in the snow that most of us don’t.
Unique linguistic forms abound, and provide intriguing insights into cultures. According to this book,” Pascuense in Easter Island has a word for a slight inflammation of the throat caused by screaming too much (“ngaobera”) and and Brazilian Portuguese has a word for the practice of putting a live cricket into a box of newly faked documents until the insect’s excrement makes the paper look convincingly old (“grigalem”). So what’s Hebrew’s he claim to fame?
I would have liked to find a word, perhaps, for that hand gesture of squeezing thumb and middle finger in order to indicate to the viewer, “wait.” But no, we Jews are not quite that lucky. Instead, what distinguishes our culture is that ours is the only language in the world that has the word “agunah.”
Copyright © 2012, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
