Purim is in the air. At school, children have been comparing costume plans. Photos of the hamentashen friends are baking and memories of the hamentashen I baked in years past have started to fill my social media feed. We think of Purim as a fun holiday for kids, full of costumes, revelry, and treats. And yet, each year as I think about how to share the story of Purim with children of various ages, I am struck by the many elements of the story that are problematic. From the position of women and the ways that they have and lack power, to the genocidal enemy who so easily rises to power, to the apparent absence of God in the unfolding of the story, to the problematic ending which does not allow the Jews to be saved by simple decree, but turns the whole disaster on its head, with the Jews forced to fight to defend themselves, killing many people and instilling fear into others in the process, this is not a simple story to relate to our children. So we tend to leave some details out when they are young, adding a bit more complication as they grow ready to grapple with the serious issues raised by this farcical, yet holy, book.
This week, on Shabbat, we get a little preview of some of the elements of the megillah that challenge the worldview we might hope to engender in our children. This is Shabbat Zachor, the week when, in addition to the regular torah reading, we add a special maftir portion that starts with the word zachor, remember, reminding us of the attack of Amalek, the biblical foe from whom Haman is said to be descended. The nation of Amalek, like Haman, preyed on the vulnerable, attacking the Israelites soon after they left Egypt, picking off the stragglers, demonstrating an utter lack of reverence for God. This parsha instructs that we are to both remember, and to blot out the memory of Amalek, leaving the question of how that blotting out should be done hanging uncomfortably unanswered.
The juxtaposition of the Purim story against the main parsha for this week draws another interesting contrast. Just as we’re thinking of things that we associate with children that make us wonder about the wisdom of this association, we come to parshat vayikra, the beginning of the third book of the Torah. Vayikra, Leviticus, has traditionally been the first book of the Torah to be studied by school-children. This book, also known as Torat Kohanim, The Laws of the Priests, is concerned largely with the details of the sacrificial system and many people see it as the least engaging book of the Torah. Why then, did it become customary for children to start there? One of the earliest explanations states that both sacrifices and children are “pure”, so it is fitting for the pure to study the pure.
This reasoning may not resonate at first, but digging a little deeper, I think there is something to it. When I studied Vayikra in rabbinical school with Rabbi Nehemia Polen, he promised to show us how this was actually the most interesting book of the Torah. To boil down hours and hours of his insightful teaching into a sentence, Vayikra, is about relationship, in particular about building a relationship with God. This week, in addition to the details of how one brings a sacrifice, we start to see the situations in which a person would be inspired or compelled to bring a sacrifice, reasons like gratitude, peace-making, remedying guilt. We begin to see a system that builds, sustains and repairs a relationship. We could argue that pursuing, or even contemplating, a relationship with God is daunting for us as adults, it would be unrealistic to expect a child comprehend it. On the other hand, there is a compelling case to be made that children, in their readiness to learn and grow, are in fact, more capable of opening themselves to the spiritual. And the building blocks of the divine-human relationship of this book are the same social-emotional core principles that are coming to be understand as critical to children’s development.
Vayikra begins as a kind of cliff-hanger from the previous book, Shemot, where the mishkan, the tabernacle, was finally completed, and God’s presence filled it so entirely that Moses was not able to enter the tent. In the first verse of Vayikra, God calls to Moses, inviting him into the holy space, calling him into relationship. The mishka is understood to be a microcosm built by human hands, a reciprocal act of building a dwelling place for God, who first created the world for humans to live in. Here God’s invitation to Moses to enter the mishkan-microcosm becomes the next step in navigating the relationship between human and Divine partners.
As we see in our children, as we watch them learn to navigate their relationships with friends, and even with us, it is not a simple thing to create a space in which we can connect with someone who is both like and unlike ourselves. At the beginning of the Torah, God created humans in the divine image, but as humanity spread out to fulfil the divine command to fill the earth, it seems they took up so much space that they could not find God.. Distance emerged between people and God, and God had to reach out anew to a select few people to try again to build a relationship.
When the Israelites built the mishkan, they tried again, with God’s guidance, to create a meeting space into which they could invite God, but at the end of Shemot, God was taking up so much space in the mishkan that humanity had no place there. Now, as Vayikra begins, we begin to see the invitation become mutual. God calls Moses into the space into which the people have invited God, and begins to impart explicitly, in great detail, the social-emotional work that will go into maintaining a positive ongoing relationship.
The megilah, in contrast, takes place largely in a palace of a human king, a king who relies on human advisors and who values power and riches over relationship and kindness. The rule of the palace is that those who approach the king uninvited are put to death, and even his beloved queen is left uninvited for long spans of time. God is ostensibly not present in the palace of King Ahasuerus. In order to include the megilah in the canon of holy books, the Rabbis had to find God’s place in it. They argue that when Mordecai tells Esther that if she remains silent in the face of her people’s crisis, relief and salvation will come to the Jews from makom acher, another place, the word makom, place, is actually a hidden name of God, who is the place inside of which the entire world exist.
They teach us that we have a choice. We can read the megilah, and God will not be in it, unless we choose to invite God in, to open the door to the relationship, and to do the social-emotional work of learning to live with others, to value the divine image in each example of humanity. What more important stories could we have to share our children?
Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom and a Happy Purim!