The Politics of Purim

Law, Sovereignty and Hospitality in the Aesthetic Afterlives of Esther

Jo Carruthers

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780567702319
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567693327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book approaches the holiday of Purim as profane, freed to human use and ends, in order to consider the political legacy of the biblical story of Esther in festival and art works. Jo Carruthers explores carnival and synagogue practices, the purimshpil (Purim's own dramatic genre), illuminated Esther scrolls, as well as artworks by Botticelli, Millais and Jan Steen. The complex and astute interrogation of political life in such festival and artworks is analysed through theories of sovereignty, law, precarity and hospitality by key political thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière.

Carruthers considers different motifs of boundary conservation and dissolution, as a means of contemplating the political implications of Purim and the Esther story for diaspora politics. How is sovereignty aspired to and attained by marginalized and threatened communities? How can one respond to the ethical call of hospitality to relax sovereign boundaries whilst protecting and celebrating that which is exceptional? The practice of giving gifts, mishloach manos, offers a model of hospitality that together with Purim's profane impulse is epitomized in the final chapter's discussion of a 2018 Brooklyn purimshpil, that offers a riotous ridiculing of white supremacist rhetoric, norms of domination, capitalist inequalities, modern slavery and ablest identities and assumptions.

1

CARNIVAL, LAWLESSNESS AND SOVEREIGNTY

Lawlessness is the most striking aspect of Purim festivities. Those who are normally law-abiding become riotous; men who adhere to Deuteronomy’s prohibition against cross-dressing nonetheless may be found in women’s clothing;¹ those known for their sobriety get drunk. The story of Esther is celebrated at Purim as one of reversals – mourning is turned to laughter and sorrow to joy. This turn in fortunes is given the Hebrew term, nahapok hu, meaning ‘the contrary occurred’, and the festival enacts this trope of reversal through various topsy-turvy activities.² Authorities are questioned, liturgy is parodied and normal laws are suspended so that gambling, cross-dressing and drunkenness are not only allowed, but insisted upon in rabbinical law. It is one of the great ironies of Purim that it is a mitzvah, an obligation, to neglect law on Purim.

Rules on Purim observance are outlined in early Jewish writings. The tractate Megillah of the Mishnah focuses on rules for the reading of the scroll, for fasting and the timing of the festival (its exact timing within and outside of cities, for example).³ The tractate outlines obligations of lawlessness in fine detail, so that even the act of drunkenness comes with specific instruction. You must get so drunk, explains the tractate, that you cannot differentiate between the phrases ‘blessed be Mordecai’ and ‘cursed be Haman’.⁴ Maimonides in his twelfth-century Mishneh Torah outlines the rules in even finer detail, explaining the way the scroll should be unrolled and folded to resemble a letter, that one should not work on Purim if possible, and elaborating on the exact rules for the giving of gifts, or portions of food, to one another and to the poor.⁵

The embracing of lawlessness in this, the most popular of Jewish festivals, means it is observed with enthusiasm by the most and the least orthodox. Shari Troy explains in her ethnological studies that the Bobover Hasidim of New York approach drunkenness with a devotional seriousness. In the purimshpil performed by the Bobover community, live frogs amplify the chaos.⁶ The practices of normally law-abiding ultra-orthodox communities are indicative of activities across other Jewish groups. In yeshivas, pupils take the place of their rabbis, enjoying a day of teasing and mimicking normally revered teachers. Although characterized by lawlessness, it is, then, a festival shaped by and under the rule of law. The focus on lawlessness at Purim seems to suggest that there is a place for lawlessness, an importance to lawlessness, even within the implicit endorsement and valuing of law itself. So, why might lawlessness be important for those participants or legislators of Purim practice who are otherwise committed to law?

Fittingly, at least to the obligation to drink, many commentators explain the meaning of Purim lawlessness as an expression of merry making, so that the joyfulness over reprieve from danger leads logically into licentiousness. In the celebration of the aversion of disaster, seriousness and strict legality are merely disregarded. So, the cross-dressing that became associated with Purim in contravention of the law in Deut. 22.5, forbidding the wearing of the other sex’s clothes, is sanctioned to ‘enhance the joyousness of the festival’.⁷ This is not lawlessness per se, not a disregard of law completely, the argument goes, but a softening of law in the name of frivolity. Parodic rewritings of liturgy emerged in the twelfth century, which, Philip Goodman reminds us was the ‘golden age’ of Jewish literature. The oldest example of a literary parody takes the form of Hymn for the First Night of Passover by Meier ben Isaac who turns the normally pious hymn form into a drinking song. Menahem ben Aaron’s Hymn for the Night of Purim epitomizes Purim licentiousness: ‘This night [of Purim] is a night for drunkards, a night for wine drinking and intoxication… The day of Purim is a day of feasting and drinking and merrymaking.’⁸ It becomes normal, on Purim, to turn even the most serious of religious forms into a joke.

Ultra-orthodox writings on Purim draw on mystical teaching to defend that most obvious of transgressions, drunkenness. It is viewed as a refusal of rationality to invoke instead an alternative messianic world of divine order. Whereas Jews may be experiencing oppression on earth, in this alternative divine world order they are the chosen people. Purim is a time during which the gates to heaven are opened to reveal a divine space that is beyond and above human laws. Purim lawlessness is therefore a signal to a transcendent order, recalling that there are other, divine laws at work in the universe that will one day prevail over repressive human authorities and thinking. Lack of order testifies to the superiority of divine ways. Lawlessness becomes a formal testament to a transcendent order beyond human understanding and in which exist no such easy oppositions as good and tragedy. Here lawlessness points to a messianic truth of a future, restored state in which God’s order prevails; or, as Meir Belsky expresses it: ‘[Purim] miracles are rooted at the end of time alone and express another, incomprehensible world’.⁹ Pinchas Stolper expresses the same sentiment that drinking is ‘part of a process of acknowledging our inability to know or fathom the presence of the hidden hand of G-d in our lives and in world events’. He goes on: ‘The underlying theme of Purim is “ad de-lo yada”, the sublimation of our ability to comprehend events’.¹⁰

The most common interpretive frame within contemporary scholarly writing on Purim is that of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. André LaCoque’s book, Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading, of 2008 applies carnivalesque theory to Purim and Esther, following Kenneth Craig’s 1995 book Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnival­esque.¹¹ Bakhtin’s carnivalesque has remained the dominant frame for Purim for decades, despite some compelling arguments against it, which I will turn to in a moment. Perhaps so many critics find the carnivalesque appealing because it offers an explanation for Purim’s stranger elements in that it is both seemingly harmless – a mere matter of fun and playfulness – and expresses a serious rejection of the status quo. After all, Bakhtin’s careful delineation of carnival’s upheaval fits with the kind of oppressive diaspora experience invoked at Purim: a rejection of law and order to express a desired freedom from repressive government. Such lawlessness fits very well with the rejection of authoritarian hierarchy and oppression.

Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival law reads lawlessness as a style, a formal expression and embodiment of freedom, an ‘aesthetic for democracy’ as Ken Hirschkkop has called it.¹² Bakthin writes:

During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of freedom. It has a universal spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part.¹³

As a folk style, carnival represents a ‘second life outside of officialdom’, the more anarchic ‘culture of the marketplace’.¹⁴ For Bakthin, the marketplace is a representative folk space where regulation does not reach and other, freer, kinds of life can be lived. Sellers and buyers jostle and bargain, gossip is shared and high and low are less distinguishable than in other more regulated areas of life. Repressive regimes are annulled by the very style of carnivalesque revelry as it offers an aesthetic in which restrictions and boundaries are dissolved and Bakthin paints a world of near-vertiginous movement in its: ‘peculiar logic of the inside out, of the “turnabout”, of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, cosmic crownings and uncrownings’.¹⁵ As a literary and festival style, the carnivalesque is easily applicable to the tropes of reversal, parody, profanation and dethroning that are so typical of Purim and the story of Esther itself. The carnivalesque also fits well with the older formulations of lawlessness in Jewish traditional writings. It testifies to a transcendent or ‘natural law’ that undermines the efficacy of human authority. It invokes a messianic future in which this transcendent law is finally recognized and effective.

Yet, as defined by Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is not a true overturning of hierarchies but rather affords a dissolution only on a conceptual level. It is because of carnivalesque’s boundary-dissolving impulse that some Purim scholars have identified a problem with interpreting the festival’s lawlessness through Bakhtin’s theory. As an aesthetic of narrative or festival activities, the carnivalesque complicates and dissolves hierarchical structures and in this way does not map onto the boundary-marking activities of Purim.

Before I turn to critics who contest the use of the term ‘carnivalesque’ for Purim, I want first to explore the appeal of the carnivalesque as a theoretical frame. What is intriguing is the continued invocation of the carnivalesque despite Purim’s clear demarcation of boundaries, antithetical to Bakhtin’s assertion that in carnival ‘the individual feels that he is an indissoluble part of the collectivity, a member of the people’s mass body’.¹⁶ Perhaps it is Bakthin’s championing of a folk aesthetic that means his theory appeals so much to scholars of Purim. Invoking an ‘authentic’ national culture in the indigenous folk culture has been a common way in which to bolster an organic, marginal identity against officialdom and the status quo. Ahuva Belkin thoughtfully identifies the early purimshpiln as ‘Saturnalian carnivaleque’, drawing on Bakhtin’s identification of the Saturnalia as the source of carnival.¹⁷ The similarities are indeed striking as Belkin’s analysis reveals: ‘The popular customs manifested a spirit of anarchy and rebellion, a world of chaos and the breaking of taboos – a pattern of behavior totally out of tune with the puritanical nature of Judaism’.¹⁸ The carnivalesque gives ‘a certain relief from social tension’, Belkin argues, putting forward an interpretation of the carnivalesque that resembles Terry Eagleton’s formulation of it as a ‘safety valve’ in which normally repressed individuals can explosively express their frustrations before returning to a life of necessitated self-control. It is a ‘a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art’.¹⁹ Belkin points out that the purimshpil, her area of specialism, is the artistic expression of the carnivalesque character of Purim in which ‘the story of Esther was treated from very early on with a levity totally unthinkable on other occasions’.²⁰ She writes of the plays in which ‘the Purim players replaced the Biblical dignity and decorum with a wide range of slapstick and farce’. Aligning the purimshpil with Bakhtin’s celebration of the ‘folk’, she cites the language of the early plays, the Yiddish vernacular, as symbolizing the ‘everyday’ and which ‘therefore distanced the parody even further from the sacred source and helped create a Jewish language of carnival’.²¹ She ends her article with a thoroughly Bakhtinian frame: ‘The temporary overthrow of the social order sends out two messages: one is Utopian, allowing the individual to identify with the community, the other is subversive’.²² Belkin’s emphasis upon community draws on Bakhtin’s sense of the blurring of interpersonal boundaries as expressed in the grotesque realism of the leaky, opened body, a metaphor that signals the universal oneness that is produced at carnival. Belkin’s application of Bakhtin’s theories applies this sense of the blurred boundaries of self-identity but restricts it to a Jewish world.

Another ‘soft’ use of the carnivalesque is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Politics of Persecution
• Chapter 1 Carnival, Lawlessness and Sovereignty
• Chapter 2 The State of Exception, Amalek and Sovereign Hospitality
• Chapter 3 The Anti-Memorial of Remembering to Forget
• Chapter 4 The Art of Execution in The Illuminated Megillah
• Chapter 5 Bare Life and Sovereignty
• Chapter 6 Law’s Limitations
• Chapter 7 Creaturely Sovereignty
• Chapter 8 Esther the Good Host and the Good Sovereign
• Chapter 9 Mordecai’s Mourning
• Chapter 10 ‘Shalokh Mones Re-Mixed’: An Aftselakhis Purimsphil
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects