PORTUGUÊS: O texto em português segue abaixo do texto em inglês.
For two years, I taught rabbinical students at the Ibero-American Institute for Reform Rabbinical Training — Chumash (the Five Books of Torah) one year, Nevi'im (the Books of the Prophets) the next, with largely the same cohort of students across both. When the Nevi'im course came around, I asked them to write a drashah on any haftarah from the liturgical cycle. One student thought he had found a clever shortcut. He opened his paper by noting, correctly, that a parashah and its haftarah typically share a name or a theme — and from that observation he pivoted entirely to the Torah portion, never once returning to the Prophets, which was the subject of the class. It was smart. It was creative. It was completely off topic. I failed him.
I tell you this as a confession. Pay close attention as I speak, and you may notice the precise moment I pull the same trick. You have been warned.
This week's parashah is Tetzaveh — “to command,” "to give an order." The opening verse reads:
וְאַתָּה תְּצַוֶּה אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל
V'atah tetzaveh et bnay-Yisrael
“You shall further command the Israelites.”[1]
The word tetzaveh shares its root with a word you all probably know: mitzvah. In its most technical sense, a mitzvah is a “commandment” — an “obligation”, an “order.” In Aramaic, however, the everyday language of the Talmud, the word carries a different resonance: “connection,” “attachment,” “link.”[2] And in the English of a contemporary Jewish household, when a parent says to their child, “that was a real mitzvah, standing up for that classmate who was being bullied,” the word has shifted again — now meaning something closer to “a good deed” than to a legal obligation. Three languages, three meanings: commandment, connection, kindness.
Hold that range of meanings in mind, because something happened this week that genuinely irritated me.
An Instagram post on Purim, published by an organisation connected to the international Progressive Jewish movement, listed what it called the mitzvot of the holiday. There was a technical error. Purim has four mitzvot: hearing the Megillah, sharing a festive meal, sending portions of food to friends — mishloach manot — and giving gifts to those in need — matanot la'evyonim. The post listed all four, but muddled the distinction between the last two in a way that missed the point of both.
That inaccuracy is not really what bothered me.
Progressive Judaism has staked its identity on the conviction that meaning-making matters more than mechanical compliance with laws that may no longer speak to the lives of contemporary Jews. That emphasis is not a compromise — it is a principled position, and it is ours.
Two brief examples. The central mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah is to hear the shofar. In years when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, the shofar is not blown until after Shabbat ends, at the very close of the services. Imagine someone who spent weeks doing genuine t'shuvah: honest self-examination, sincere apologies, real repair. They came to shul, prayed with full attention, weeping from a recognition of their own failures. Then, for whatever reason, they had to leave before the shofar was blown. Would you truly say that person had failed their religious obligation?
Second example. Rabbinic Judaism constructed an elaborate architecture of Shabbat law — thirty-nine categories of forbidden work, the melachot, with commentary branching endlessly from each one. The Mishnah itself concedes the fragility of this structure: “the laws of Shabbat are like mountains suspended by a hair, for they have little basis in Scripture and yet the laws derived from them are numerous.”[3] One rule is clearly grounded in Torah, though: the prohibition against lighting fire.[4] And yet every person who drove a petrol-powered car to shul this evening technically violated that law. Does anyone here believe that coming to shul on Shabbat goes against the spirit of Shabbat?
These examples illustrate a genuine fault line. Orthodoxy places its emphasis on faithful transmission and performance of the law. Progressive Judaism places its emphasis on the meaning behind the law and its relevance to living human beings. Neither approach is without complications — but they are genuinely different, and we should not pretend otherwise. So when a Progressive organisation frames Purim primarily through the language of “the four mitzvot,” something has gone wrong. It feels, to borrow a word from the season, like wearing someone else's costume.
Which brings me to Purim — and to why this holiday matters so much, right now, in this city, in this country.
Purim is a Diaspora story. It unfolds in a Jewish community living as a minority under foreign rule, subject to the goodwill — or the malice — of those in authority. It is a story about antisemitism, about the compromises Jews make in pursuit of proximity to power, and about what happens when Jews who were once powerless find themselves holding power.
Beyond the reflective possibilities that Purim offers, traditions of the festival that extend far beyond the “four mitsvot” have much to teach us. For example, the tradition of wearing costumes on Purim (which is not a mitsvah in that narrow sense of the term) contains powerful possibilities. When I lived in the United States, I met some female Jewish students at the University of Illinois who chose to wear a hijab during Muslim awareness week — not as a casual gesture, not as costume or cultural appropriation, but as a deliberate act of solidarity, a way of experiencing firsthand the hostility that Muslim women faced simply by being visibly themselves. When we dress as someone else — with imagination and some humility — we open ourselves to the question of what it feels like to live inside a different skin, even if only for a few hours during a Purim celebration.
For years, I considered mishloach manot a silly tradition. Every Purim, people fill baskets with the most ultra-processed food they can find: sweets, biscuits, things wrapped in plastic that no one particularly needs. I did the same. And then one year, following the example of a dear teacher and friend, Rabbi Ebn Leader, I decided to do something different. I spent time in the kitchen and cooked fifty individual meals — fish, roasted vegetables, couscous, a dessert — and gave them away as mishloach manot. What I had not anticipated was the impact. Not on the recipients alone, but on me. Seeing the way people responded to receiving something made with genuine care, a real token of appreciation, changed the way I understood the tradition entirely. Mishloach manot is not about the basket. It is about the act of saying: I thought about you. I made something for you. You matter to me. The mitzvah — in the fullest, Aramaic sense of the word — is the connection itself.
And yet the violence at the end of the Book of Esther is not something we can dress up or celebrate our way past. The Orthodox Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz reportedly refused to leave Israel permanently for one reason above all others: it was the only country in the world where he could guarantee he would never have to celebrate Purim[5]. His method was precise. On Purim itself, he would remain in Jerusalem, which as a walled city observes the holiday a day later, on Shushan Purim. Then, the following day, he would travel to Tel Aviv, where Purim had already been celebrated. He thus arranged never to hear the Megillah, never to drink in celebration of what he saw, at its core, as a mass killing — the slaughter of Haman, his ten sons, and, according to the text of Esther chapter 9, over 75,000 enemies of the Jewish people throughout the ancient Persian empire. Leibowitz, as was his way, was simply being direct: he saw Purim, at its foundation, as a celebration of violence.
I am proud to belong to a religious movement in which I do not need to replicate that itinerary and leave the place I live in order to avoid the challenges I find in our own tradition. I can face Purim directly: celebrate the thwarting of an antisemitic massacre, and at the same time grieve, with full moral seriousness, that the very Jews who were once powerless chose, the moment power was within their reach, to answer the threat of violence with violence on a devastating scale. That grief does not cancel the celebration. The celebration does not cancel the grief. Holding both without resolving the tension too quickly is, I would argue, what Progressive Jewish maturity looks like.
Most contemporary scholars understand the Book of Esther as a literary work — a diaspora novella rather than a historical chronicle[6]. Its function in the Jewish canon, and Purim's role in the Jewish calendar, must therefore be to allow us to have these deeply important and often difficult conversations — conversations that are avoided, intentionally or unintentionally, when we restrict our focus to “the four mitzvot.”
I did not expect fifty meals to teach me something I did not already know; perhaps in the same way that my students did not expect to learn so much by walking across a university campus dressed in the clothing of another community. But that is usually how it works — the tradition you dismissed turns out to be the one that was waiting for you. Purim is full of those surprises. A holiday that looks, from the outside, like costumes and noise and too much sugar turns out to be one of the most morally serious days in the Jewish calendar: a story about power and powerlessness, about survival and its costs, about the difference between a gift and a transaction. This year, I hope you find at least one moment in the celebration when the costume slips and something true shows through. That, in the end, is what the tradition has always been asking of us.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.
[1] Exodus 27:20.
[2] Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson and Rabbi Patricia Fenton (eds). Walking with Mitzvot.
[3] Mishnah Chagigah 1:8.
[4] Exodus 35:3
[5] Shaul Maggid, “The Dark Side of Purim,” The Forward, 10 March 2014: https://forward.com/opinion/194161/the-dark-side-of-purim
[6] See, for example, Adele Berlin, “The Book of Esther and Ancient Storytelling,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 1 (2001): 3-14
