Purim and The Zone Of Interest

 The festival of Purim is the Jewish Mardi gras. A time for carnival, fancy dress, masks, revelry. This is a strange, paradoxical turn of events: Jews recall an ancient story of survival in the face of persecution – the story is told in the Biblical Book of Esther, where Jews in Persia fall victim to the annihilatory antisemitic rage of the king’s minister, Haman – and retell the story each year by turning darkness into light-heartedness, and fear into frivolity. The celebration of Purim is an opportunity for fun, for the mocking of sacred cows, for the subversion of the pieties of Jewish life.

One could say this is about using humour as a psychological defence against pain – Jews do a lot of that – but I suspect that the way Purim is celebrated has a deeper purpose at its heart. Take the role of alcohol in promoting the mood of levity, of ‘taking the piss’, that accompanies the celebrations. As early as the 4^th century, rabbi Rava decreed that the mitzvah, the religious obligation, is to drink until you cannot distinguish between the phrases ‘Blessed is Mordechai’  [the hero] and ‘Cursed is Haman’ [the villain].  

Later rabbis weren’t happy with this invitation to drunkenness. They interpreted Rava’s injunction to mean: well, you should drink more than usual so that you fall asleep – because then you won’t/can’t know the difference between these opposite sentiments.  

But I wonder if there is some deeper rabbinic intuition in play in Rava’s thinking. Is not this blurring of the distinction between saviour/hero and destroyer/aggressor asking us to question the nature of good and evil?  On every other day of the year the rabbis were keen to keep these impulses very separate: the whole of Jewish ethical life depended on keeping them apart. We were to engage in acts of goodness - and keep far from evil and evil-doers, as the liturgy tells us. That’s the Jewish project every day of the year: finding ways for human goodness, our goodness, to outweigh the forces of destructiveness that lurk in the human heart.

Both the rabbis of old and the psychologists of today acknowledge that this is an ongoing human struggle – this work (inner and outer) of ensuring ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil’. And it is a struggle because the lived boundaries between the two are not as obvious as we might wish them to be. Once a year, on Purim, the simple splitting of life into absolute realms of good and evil seems to be called into question. On Purim you are encouraged to engage in an experiment – it is elevated to the realm of a mitzvah – the task is to find a way of blurring, slurring, subverting, the boundaries. And you find out how easy it is: a couple of drinks and good and bad are not so clear cut, nor so far apart.

We might wish this were the case but in the so-called real world – not in some religious fantasy picture of the real world – the dynamics around good and evil can be very disturbing. Evil can arise out of good intentions, as Einstein and Oppenheimer and others realised about splitting the atom. And sometimes good can arise from, or emerge from, evil: from the ashes of the Holocaust, the State of Israel was born - from the utter tragedy of victimhood to the miracle of continuity and self-determination. But, on the other side of the coin, because complexity is more true to life than the narratives we like to tell, when the Jewish state came into being, the Palestinian Nakba also came to pass. Life is much more complex, the boundaries between good and evil can often be more complex, than is comfortable.

We know it is always much more psychologically comforting for us to split the world into simple opposites – heaven and hell, right and wrong, goodies and baddies, the civilised (us) and the barbarians (them), heroes and villains, Mordecai and Haman. We feel we know where we are, how to orientate ourselves emotionally, if we can rely on these simple  dichotomies. And we do this both consciously and unconsciously.  But I think Purim – beneath the froth and the frivolity - opens us up to something quite disquieting.

Not only is it a story in which, notoriously, God does not appear (the only Biblical book in which this is so) but survival depends only on trickery and deceit. In the fable, Mordecai uses his niece’s sexuality (he weaponizes it, as the saying goes now) to manipulate the king; and Esther’ capacity to deceive – she hides her identity until the right moment – is seen as worthy of praise. The people are saved because of this subverting of simple boundaries between good and bad behaviour. Seduction and subterfuge not only make the story tick along quite nicely – they underpin the moral ambiguities of the tale.

And the moral ambiguities in the story are compounded by the way in which Jewish survival is accompanied by the death of those who wish to destroy them. The story tells it as an act of self-defence – 500 antagonists are killed in Shushan on the 13^th and 14^th of Adar, and another 75,000 in the rest of the Persian empire. You may hear uncomfortable echoes here in current events, which I won’t go into.

Does this dark side of the Biblical tale – which we narrate in the midst of the accompanying jollity - give us pause?  How many deaths are acceptable? How many deaths are inevitable? How many are rationalised as - in that ugly phrase - ‘collateral damage’? How many deaths are necessary that we survive and those who abhor us don’t? Maybe God was wise to steer well clear of this story. He gets compromised enough by those on all sides who call on him to this day to vindicate their murderousness. Or use him to justify it.

Liberal Judaism 50 years ago also steered well clear of this part of the story – they cut the reading of the megillah [the Biblical story of Esther] so that congregants didn’t have to hear about all this blood shed by Jews. They have stopped this censorship in more recent years – maybe because it doesn’t really do anyone any favours, to collude with our wish to avoid the darkness in the human heart, to avoid attending to the moral complexities that attend our humanity.

Although many people want their religion to help them feel more comfortable in life, honest religion can – hopefully - also provoke us into feeling less comfortable in ourselves.

But I can understand why those who edited the Biblical text did it. Because who really wants to think about all this? Maybe drunkenness has its value, lest we feel the full horror, the shock, the confusion, the disgust, the triumphalism, that such battles for group survival seem to produce; blurring with drink the distinction between blessing our heroes and cursing our enemies means we don’t have to think for too long  about what people are capable of doing to each other. It means we don’t have to reflect too much on the truth of the poet W.H.Auden’s words that “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”.  

Drunkenness is one of the ways humanity has found whereby we don’t have to know what is really going on. (In the Bible it goes back to Noah, that survivor of the destructiveness and trauma of the Flood). But there are other ways too, not just alcohol, ways to ensure we don’t know – don’t have to feel, or think about – some of the horrors that go on around us.

Which takes me to The Zone Of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary double Oscar-winning film.

I hope to return to this film at a later date. This is just to commend it to you if you haven’t yet seen it. It is not untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’  - as you may know, it is set in the family home and garden of Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz. Höss was the commandant of the camp - and the wall of their back garden was the wall of the death camp. 

So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil. You never see into the camp, you only hear it – the soundtrack is remarkable, uncanny, unheimlich: the ominous dull grinding as of a huge industrial machine (which it was), that you hear throughout the film, off stage as it were - it is literally obscene, from the Greek, ob-skeen (‘offstage/out of sight’); you hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries, and on the horizon you see smoke arising from tall thin chimneys, but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. So this is of course a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts can also have evil grafted to their souls.

But it is, as the director has asserted, not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past, but a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’,  not only a now that contains the knowing and not wanting to know around the ongoing traumas of both Israelis and the people of Gaza. The film was conceived and made, long before October 7^th. In every age it would be a film that challenges one’s complacency, the ways in which we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and sometimes see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.

“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B.Yeats (Easter, 1916). 

I hope to return at some stage to The Zone of Interest. Because it is a piece of art, like  the Biblical stories of old, that is timeless, that raises profound moral questions, that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our compromises, our shadiness, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention – each scene asks questions, each scene demands a commentary: such a Jewish film!

Meanwhile Purim allows us to appreciate that gift for the paradoxical that Judaism relishes - in this case getting us to reflect on questions of survival in a world where God might seem out of the picture and we are left to our own all-too-human resources, where the Mordecai and the Haman within us battle it out for the upper hand. Who will bow down to whom? Will evil bow to good? Or good to evil?

Is life all in the end ‘Purim’ – a lottery? When Haman casts lots – purim in Hebrew - to find the date to kill the Jews, the story gestures to the elements of chance, randomness, the vagaries of fate. It is as if Haman is disavowing his own evil by pretending that what is to happen is guided by chance - that he is ‘just following orders’, as it were, just following how the lots fall. But we know that this isn’t the whole picture – that he is the active perpetrator undermined in the end by his own vanity as much as by Mordecai’s wiliness.

On this occasion, in the Purim story, Jewish saichel defeated goyische arrogance – and maybe that’s why the story made it into the sacred canon. And we can drink to that while knowing, as The Zone of Interest testifies, that life for Jews does not always turn out like that.  Saichel can only take you so far – but perhaps goodness can take you further. Let’s hope so.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 23^rd 2024]