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297  fifty-eight Ad de’lo Yada: Until We Don’t Know the Difference The Book of Esther and Purim Gregg Drinkwater and Elliot Kukla All Prophetic Books and the Sacred Writings will cease to be recited in public during the messianic era except the Book of Esther. It will continue to exist just as the five books of the Torah . . . will never cease. —Rambam1 Why does the book of Esther—the source of the Purim story and the text read aloud on the holiday—warrant such special status that it figures in the rabbinic dream of a perfect Messianic future?2 After all, it is the most secular Biblical book, with no reference to prayer, Jewish rituals, the Temple, or even God’s name.3 And why will the significance of Esther, an uppity intermarried Jewish woman, last in an era when the writings of the mighty prophets—including Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah—will have faded away into irrelevance? These questions ask us to look beneath the surface of this deceptively simple text. In the world of the book of Esther, and in the carnivalesque traditions of the holiday of Purim, everything (including our preconceptions of Judaism) is turned upside down. The book of Esther—and indeed Purim itself—is about the holiness of transgression and the redemptive potential of masquerade. The story begins with Esther hiding her Jewish identity to become the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus. She disguises herself by performing (in a kind of Near Eastern drag) as a non-Jewish Persian woman, to win the king’s favor and ultimately to save her people from an edict of destruction orchestrated by the story’s villain, the scheming Haman. In this text, disguise and the transgression of social norms lie at the heart of redemption, teaching us that the hidden self can be the true hero of the story and that masquerade can save the entire people. This is why the vision that the book of Esther communicates is so compelling for the ancient Sages and for contemporary queer folk alike. The blurring both of personal identity and of social boundaries, as embodied by Esther, is the key to the significance of Purim and helps us understand why the book of Esther is connected to rabbinic dreams of Messianic redemption. As any student of Talmud or other classical Jewish texts soon learns, in the Jewish sacred imagination the realm of the possible is constantly expanding, and there is rarely a yes or no 298 Gregg Drinkwater and Elliot Kukla answer to any question. The book of Esther and so many of Judaism’s other sacred texts seem to be reminding us to expect the unexpected, to search for the hidden meaning, and do not be so quick to assume that what you see before you, the literal or peshat level of understanding, is ever the ultimate truth (or even that an “ultimate” truth exists). Traditions have developed to help us focus on this lesson every Purim in an experiential way. Our Sages teach that on Purim, we must drink “ad de’lo yada” (until we do not know)—until we are so drunk that we do not know the difference between the blessed Mordechai (who, along with Esther, is the story’s other hero) and the cursed Haman. The point of this exercise is not simply to release our inhibitions but to free our mind-set from its rigid socialization—to see for ourselves that there is no such thing as opposites but rather infinite diversity. As the Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross noted in a special Purim essay that launched the online Torah Queeries project in 2006 (www.jewishmosaic.org/torah), “Purim is dedicated to the courageous peeling away of labels, unmasking the safety of the familiar and entering the delicious territory of the unknown.” She goes on to encourage us “to piously observe the important laws of Purim—especially the ones that ask us to go beyond the law, peel the label, turn the table, and drink the night away. Yes. Drink, kinderlach, or whatever it takes to blur the differences until you don’t know the difference between . . . Mordechai or Haman, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, straight or gay, meshugena or mentsch. From this upside-down folly, taken seriously, much redemption is born to the soul!”4 We learn in the Talmud that Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the year, is the most spiritually alike to Purim, the silliest day of...

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