After a year filled with earnestness, Jews receive the gift of Purim. We get to eat little triangular cookies, listen to the story of Queen Esther’s courage as she saved the Jews of Shushan, dress in costume, dance a little and drink a lot.
This Purim, before the rumpus begins, we have a couple members of the tribe who unwittingly provide fodder for Purim humor. Let’s pay homage.
Take Israel’s newest star, Arkady Gaydamak. (Some Israelis heartily embrace Henny Youngman’s sentiment, “Take Arkady Gaydamak, please.”) The Russian-born businessman moved to Israel in 1972 at age 20.
About six months later, he moved to France, where he lived for many years until December 2000, when he returned (ahem, fled) to Israel. I’m sure he was motivated by a deep and abiding attachment to the Zionist idea, not to mention the French arrest warrant concerning illegal arms trading with Angola, tax evasion and money laundering.
Now living in Israel, he owns three houses and two sports teams — HaPoel Jerusalem basketball team and the popular soccer team, Beitar Jerusalem. He doesn’t speak Hebrew, but who cares? He has gazillions of what some might consider the real language of the times — shekels, rubles, dollars, euros.
In Israel, he has been investigated for laundering some of that language, but has not been indicted and the case remains open. As recently as this week he was questioned on suspicion of bribing a government official.
During last summer’s war with Hezbollah, he became a national sweetheart when he opened a tent city/village on the beach in Nitzanim for thousands of residents of northern Israel. Dishing out about $15 million (about $500,000 a day), he provided shelter, food and entertainment. In November, he provided weeklong vacations for hundreds of Sderot residents who have been under rocket attacks for the past several years.
So, what’s next? Politics, of course. After decrying pretty much everything about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Gaydamak announced last week that he was starting a political party. And then he threw his support behind Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who would like to become a future prime minister.
What could be more perfect? Israeli President Moshe Katzav deemed himself “temporarily incapacitated” while prosecutors investigate charges of rape and other sexual offenses, reminiscent of former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai’s 2001 guilty verdict of sexual abuse. Katzav’s predecessor, Ezer Weizman, resigned from office after newspapers published allegations that he received large amounts of money from businessmen without reporting it to the government legal advisor, as required.
And then there’s current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is under investigation for corruption; former Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who was recently convicted of sexual assault; and Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Kadima who is accused of cronyism while in a previous Cabinet post.
With that circle of role models, how could Gaydamak resist?
But then, he could always drop politics and figure out how to be thin and fabulous from the newest cookbook/lifestyle author, Stacy Cohen.
Who needs satire when we have Cohen and her book, “The Kosher Billionaire’s Secret Recipe” (Beyond Words Publishing, 2007, $39.95)? Never mind that she uses “kosher” as an adjective to describe a person, as in “I am kosher”; it’s her book’s content that’s irresistible.
A glossy press packet about the book begins like this:
“Imagine: Dressed in a magnificent La Perla bathing suit and flowing raw red silk sarong, you and your high-tech entrepreneur husband board a private helicopter bound for an island paradise…. The president of this magnificent island country greets you, and together with his striking Tahitian wife, you are escorted on a tour of a veritable tropical wonderland so dazzling and stunning….”
My gag reflex is starting. But Cohen — who is described as “a world-renowned philanthropist, lavish entertainer and hostess, fashion expert, and an avid supporter of the arts” — continues:
“You watch as the president’s wife gently uses the white sand to exfoliate the president’s back, and unexpectedly, your magnificent lunch is capped off by the president and his beautiful Tahitian wife swimming in the sun-dappled crystalline waters.”
The book is complete with photos of Cohen lying lustily across a Rolls Royce; walking with her little, white fluffy dog on a leash and a security goon behind her, shlepping armloads of paper shopping bags; wistfully putting a ring over her black leather-gloved finger as another security guy stands guard, complete with a Secret Service-style earpiece. And then there’s the photo of her, surrounded by candles as she sits in a chair embracing what looks like a wooden plaque that says “Torah.”
I swear; I’m not making this up. For all the times I told my children, “You know, it’s not all about you,” I bow my head and acknowledge that apparently, it’s all about Stacy Cohen.
Except when it’s about Arkady Gaydamak, of course.
Purim’s revelry conceals message
about absurdity of Jews’ salvation
By Rabbi Michael Bernstein
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited Holocaust deniers from around the world to “re-envision history” by shedding darkness on our people’s darkest hours, white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke spoke on behalf of “the oppressed people of the world” and was given an opportunity on CNN to call Wolf Blitzer a tool of the Zionist conspiracy.
A fervently Orthodox rabbi who attended last month’s conference hugged his Iranian host and decried the “Zionists’ manipulation of Jewish suffering.”
These images seem absurd. But Ahmadinejad was only making real an incredible midrash, a rabbinic story, that envisions wicked Haman convincing King Achashverosh to endorse his plot against the Jews by retelling the Exodus as a story of Israelite terrorists who mercilessly slew their Egyptian hosts and ran roughshod through the desert behind their bloodthirsty chieftain, Moses.
In this midrash, Haman’s ancestors, the Amalekites, are not the cruel murderers who fall upon the Israelites when they are weak from their travel, but a peaceful people forced to take pre-emptive action against the dreaded followers of Moses. But what can we expect from the villain of the Purim story?
Lottery of chance
Purim is known universally as a time for absurdity. Masks cover the faces around us, groggers drown out the names of the wicked and tradition enjoins us to take temporary leave of our sobriety to the extent that we will even confuse the blessedness of the hero Mordechai with the cursedness of the evil Haman.
On Purim, we revel our way through both a looming genocide and the bloodshed that results from thwarting the designs of the wicked.
How can we be so unserious about these matters, knowing the truth about the history we have lived and the very real dangers that still lurk? When the leader of modern Persia convenes a conference of Holocaust deniers, publicly contemplates a world without Israel and openly seeks nuclear weapons, should we be putting on Purim shpiels?
The Megillah leaves no ambiguity about the massacre that would have been perpetrated by Haman and his followers. Only the vigilance of Mordechai and the courage of Esther stood in the way of his plan.
Yet the Purim holiday also highlights the absurdity of this salvation. The name Purim denotes the lottery of chance that not only was used to choose the day on which Haman’s pogrom would take place, but also stands for the stroke of luck by which the Jews happened to be in the right place at the right time to stop him.
The Book of Esther, whose name means “hidden one,” does not contain a single overt reference to the Divine or mention any supernatural events. What turned out to be a miracle was just as close to being a devastating massacre.
Against this backdrop emerged the traditional observance of Purim with its escapist masks, shpiels and abundant l’chaims.
Our topsy-turvy retelling of the Purim story points the way out of the trap between moral relativism and uncritical absolutism. Here is the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai”: The identification of a great evil does not mean that every action we take to oppose it is good.
It does not take a lot of drinking to lose sight of this fragile distinction. This insight became even harder to hold onto in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when even al-Qaida has been upstaged by the fear unleashed by Ahmadinejad and his implacable antipathy toward Israel.
Purim’s message for us today runs deeper than either the straightforward malevolence exhibited in the Book of Esther or the wild free-for-all that marks the holiday’s observance.
At the heart of the Purim tradition lies a paradox: Evil is real and must be confronted, but we ourselves are capable of losing our own moral compass when faced with terror. Will we be able to stay alert to real danger and at the same time retain the clarity necessary to make just, informed choices?
What holds these aspects of Purim together is Haman’s relationship to Amalek. On the Shabbat before Purim, Shabbat Zachor, we read the Torah’s commandment to remember that the Amalekites attacked without mercy when they chanced upon the Israelites coming out of Egypt. Amalek “happened” upon us, just like we “happened” to be in the right place to stop Haman.
We must remember baseless hatred is both absurd and very real. At the same time, when we celebrate Purim, we embrace the topsy-turvy uncertainty that makes us human.
Rabbi Michael Bernstein is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley, Pa.
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