Red vs. Blue and Corona Too
Hope you all had a wonderful Purim! This holiday always brings up interesting discussions about humor, pranks, and what one is allowed to joke about.
It’s a great time to crack jokes about ourselves, and Jews are great at cracking jokes. I don’t know if you’ve all seen all the Jewish one-liners (“Israel: Everyone should refrain from hugging and kissing. Ashkenazim, carry on as usual”) floating around about Coronavirus but us Jews are great at having a sense of humor.
Purim is a time when many people use their shtick or humorous side to do the mitzvah of the day. For instance, there was a meme floating around with a Mishloach Manot package of a Corona beer wrapped in a face mask and a fortune cookie. This sparked off a huge discussion on social media about whether such humor was off-limits and in poor taste.
One commenter even mentioned how Jews used dark humor to get through the Holocaust. So isn’t having a sense of humor about tragic and difficult things a good idea?
Another issue that came up is politics. I wanted to create red-and-blue cookies, mimicking the black-and-white cookies of my youth, with Bernie Sanders on one side and Donald Trump on the other side (I'm updating this to reflect that at this point Biden would probably be the more accurate choice). I would attach to it the Talmudic dictum that one is supposed to “forget the difference between ‘blessed is Mordechai’ and ‘cursed is Haman.’” Of course, recipients could determine for themselves which candidate matched which of the Purim characters. Other than myself, my entire family thought this was a terrible idea. They don’t like to rock the boat or create drama.
But I kind of feel like, isn’t that what Purim is for? It’s a time when we can touch subjects in humor that we can’t touch the rest of the year. It’s a time when we can laugh at our idiosyncratic triggers.
In the time-honored tradition of “Purim shpiels,” students in rabbinical schools often publicly imitated or even mocked their teachers, kind of like kosher SNL. Often, the rabbis and teachers encouraged and enjoyed these shows of satire, whereas the rest of the year, it would have been considered the height of disrespect and blasphemy.
I have long noted that the Jewish calendar is so psychologically brilliant with its appropriate days to show the whole spectrum of human emotion. We have Tisha B’av for our sadness. We have Yom Kippur for our regrets and feelings of guilt. We have Rosh Hashanah for a sense of freshness and rejuvenation. We have Chanukah to celebrate our Jewish nationalism. And yes, we have Purim to bring out our levity and humor.
So, in my opinion, almost nothing, then, would be off-limits on Purim.
Each community and family has its own boundaries about what is considered to be in poor taste, even for Purim. In many communities, kids will dress up as characters or personalities that are considered off-limits in their circles for the rest of the year. It is almost like an edgy, cathartic opportunity to be what you can’t be.
I think this is great. There’s a time and a place for literally everything under the sun.
So, red or blue, and Corona too? What say you?
Shabbat Shalom,
Ruchi
