From the Rabbi's Desk

What are our secret identities? How are we hidden? What are the parts of our personas we don’t let others see? Since the dawn of modernity, Jews have been confronted with a debate over who they are since they had the ability to “pass” and be part of the majority culture around them. This wouldn’t actually end up working out (the Dreyfus Affair in France, Leo Frank’s lynching in America and of course Germany from 1933 – 1945) but it was, and remains, an attractive option for all Jews. For many Jews, we just want to be like everyone else. We want to be seen as having all the value and worth our non-Jewish neighbors have. This has led to an alarming rate and level of assimilation that risks us losing who we are as a people.

הדסה/Hadassah was a Jewish girl living in the land of Shushan. Her parents were both dead so her older cousin, almost like an uncle, became responsible to care for her and raised her as his own daughter. When the king was looking to get married again, Hadassah went to the palace to compete for his heart and become the next queen. In אסתר ב:ז/Esther 2:7 we find that הדסה was actually known as אסתר/Esther and this is explained in the תלמוד/Talmud (מגילה י''ג.א). We learn her real name was הדסה but she concealed who she really was and thus went by the name אסתר. The reason for this explanation is that the name אסתר is from the word in Hebrew: סתר which means to keep secret. אסתר was concealing who she really was because she needed to. When she went to the place מרדכי/Mordecai told her not to tell people who she really was and she never told anyone who her people really were.

On פורים/Purim each year we celebrate by concealing who we are through the wearing of costumes. We hide our identities each year in celebration of what אסתר did to save our people. But there’s a problem to this methodology and outlook. We cannot allow ourselves to hide from our identities. We cannot allow ourselves to be obscured from being who we really are. There’s a sense of struggle in what’s being said here: on פורים we celebrate her “hiding” and yet “hiding” is not good. We celebrate the act on פורים because it was a means to an end, the end being that we were saved from certain destruction. Today hiding is doing the complete opposite.

Countless numbers of our ancestors were forced to convert to Christianity under the Catholic Church and they did so externally but remained Jews internally to the best of their abilities. These “crypto-Jews” did all they could to remain loyal to their people and God and over the generations this must have been harder and harder to maintain. They hid then because they had to and today many of the descendants are reclaiming their rightful place amongst their Jewish family. They hid out of necessity and now they live out loud.

The issue today is we cannot continue to hide. In a society that accepts us, we must not reject ourselves. We must do exactly the opposite. Today is not a time to assimilate or to shed our unique heritage. Today is a time to live our Judaism out loud. Today is a time to reject being hidden and instead force the world to see us as we are and as we want to be. פורים is a time to celebrate our overcoming another attempt at our destruction that happened by means of our hiding our true identities, and we can and must celebrate that event. We then need to take off our פורים costumes and, at the same time, remove our secular costumes as well. While antisemitism continues to afflict our people and the world, the answer is no longer to hide who we are but to be clear and aware of our heritage and our people. This פורים let us each commit ourselves to being our best Jewish selves. Let’s see that unlike אסתר, we won’t hide who we are because the Jewish world today doesn’t need us to hide, but needs us to be out and clear about who we are and what we bring to the world.