The Choosing: A Rabbi's Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days

7. Purim

7 Purim Surprise Endings For the miracles and for the redemption, for the strong acts and victories, and for the battles which you fought for our ancestors in those days and in our times: In the days of Mordechai and Esther in Shushan the capital, the evil Haman stood against them. He wanted to destroy, kill, and wipe out all the Jews, from children to elderly, babies and women, on one day: the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar, and to plunder them. But You in Your great mercy undermined his plans and confounded his plots, and turned his deeds on his own head, so that he and his sons were hanged on the gallows. For all this may Your name, our Ruler, be blessed and exalted forever and ever. —Al HaNissim Purim prayer Vashti: The Persian King Achashverosh’s First Wife. The Marriage Ended Violently When She Refused to Do What He Asked. The fifth grade assignment seemed simple enough: write a play, make it legible, and be prepared to read it out loud. After a few regrettable efforts, I realized that there were only so many stories a girl could write about angst-ridden unrequited love and the perfunctory flying unicorn. Having just seen the movie A Streetcar Named Desire at the tender age of nine, I was inspired to write an epic drama. I just needed my Stanley and Stella. My parents simply would not do. My father was a quiet man, and my mother 94 Surprise Endings 95 would have beaten him to death with a chair if he ever dared to lay a hand on her. My answer came, literally, from above. My grandfather’s room was directly above my own, and my grandparents had loud disagreements at least twice a week. These altercations lasted about half an hour, and they always ended the same way. Yelling would be followed by the crash of a dish against the wall, and then the television would be turned up: end of argument. Fortunately, my grandmother had many dishes. The casting call was closed. The only catch was that I had no idea what to write. The limited subject matter of my heavily censored imagination could not do justice to the genre. I craved inspiration and decided to go right to the source. My brother had been given a tape recorder for his birthday, and it was obvious that the creative potential of this gift was wasted on him. I waited a few weeks for him to lose interest, then liberated it for the sake of art. History, I was sure, would judge me kindly. I planted the machine upstairs, deep under cover, in my grandparents ’ pantry. There, it recorded the unedited contents of their dinner conversation. A few hours later, I went upstairs with my little book bag and recovered it. I took it into my bedroom, closed the door, put on headphones, and listened to what, to me, was completely A-level material: I knew I had hit the mother lode. I transcribed five handwritten, double-sided pages that included many of the Sicilian swear words that peppered my grandfather’s vocabulary. A week later, my principal called home about the play I had shared with my class. It had been red-flagged for its strong language, violence, and adult themes. On my way to the principal’s office for censure, I heard yelling from the teacher’s lounge. As I approached the door, I recognized the familiar lines: “Son of a bitch, if you don’t get me a beer, Sally, I will break your neck”; “Get it yourself, lazy bastard”; “Damn it”—this from my burly gym teacher—“I will choke 96 Purim you ’til you’re dead and stick you where no one will ever find you, butana.” Apparently, the play was a big hit with the faculty . But, where others might have been flattered or embarrassed , I was indignant. I wanted to run into the smoke-filled lounge screaming, “Danny isn’t angry, he’s a maniac—that’s just how he talks. Sally never yells back, she speaks quietly just to piss him off. Get it right, you hacks.” Instead, I turned around and continued walking down the long hallway , toward inevitable punishment. There would be no Tony award for me. There was only a concerned lecture from my parents about family privacy, three...