How can we laugh? How can we not? (Purim)

Between Texas freezing over (like hell it is!) and---well, just everything else, I wondered how we can laugh on Purim. 

But then I read the Purim story in detail again and I realized, how can we even laugh about Purim at all, let alone when people are freezing to death in Texas and---well, just everything else. 

Yesterday I was walking in the cold and the snow in Central Park and from afar I could hear some very loud dance music blasting from the ice skating rink. Disturbing the peace of the North Woods (I grumbled) were some 50 people dancing in unison to bachata (Dominican dance music), legs lifting, arms pushing out, to the left, then the right (I do hope they were masked). They were having so much fun, I almost wished I could join them. 

It’s the season of fun. Or it’s supposed to be. Mardi Gras, Purim.

But if you read the Book of Esther you find the humiliation of women (girls?) paraded in front of a king in a beauty contest for his choosing, our hero Esther who saves the Jewish people through her bravery, and the revenge of a joyfully saved people attacking and killing thousands of their enemies. 

For this, we distribute “mishloach manot,” a little care package to our friends and neighbors and the poor, in celebration, and we dress up and get drunk.

Maybe the custom started in difficult times for the Jews; things suck, so find a reason to have fun! 

But I ask, how can we laugh? 

And yet. 

How can we not? 

I heard an interview with Rabbi Ariel Burger, student of Elie Wiesel (who would say, “and yet,” instead of “yes, and”), and author of Witness, Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom. 

Burger tells of a moment with a group that meets regularly in a “cafe” for discussion and suddenly found they didn’t agree when it came to January 6th and the attack on the Capitol. There was a heated discussion, the hour was almost up, and they turned to their leader looking for a solution. 

Knowing that there would be none, he led the group in niggun (wordless melody) for the last minutes of their time together, they sang, and the tension dissipated immediately. 

A chapter in Burger’s book is called, “How can you sing? How can you not?”

Burger quotes Rebbe Nachman as saying, “When two people talk at the same time, it’s dissonant, it’s cacophony, but when two people sing together, it can be harmony.” 

There’s a mystical teaching in Judaism about the white space around the letters of the Torah; it’s also the white empty space we sometimes look for during meditation. 

Burger asks us to consider, what do we want to create in that space? 

The white space allows us to expand our repertoire: what got us into our present mess is not what’s going to get us out of it. The white space takes us beyond the limitations of words. 

Burger continues: We can’t absorb everyone else’s suffering, or we will be driven to depression, as many great spiritual leaders have done, yet we need to sensitize ourselves enough so we feel implicated enough to have that feeling of responsibility--but without allowing despair to creep in. 

...The more hope we have and the more capacity to choose hope, the more we can take responsibility for the world around us...this is why hope is the first moral choice; it allows us to stay in the game, which is a lifetime’s work, or even more than one lifetime…

...If we give up, it’s over. We’re just choosing to allow people to be humiliated (like the girls in the king’s harem) over and over again in our presence.

Since talking and arguing isn’t solving our problems, what creativity can we find flowing through the white spaces beyond the limitations of words? What harmonies?

While we might ask, how can we sing when so many are suffering?

Well, how can we not? 

How can we laugh?

And yet, how can we not?