This week, we celebrate Purim. The holiday is a remembrance of a dark tale, filled with trickery, deception, and plots of murder and revenge.
The themes of the story are heavy and important. But the celebration of Purim is surrounded by a gauzy cloud of frivolity and laughter. We want our children to participate in parades and dress in costumes, so we hide these darker themes. We water down the plot so as not to tarnish our beautiful children with thoughts of hatred, killing and evil.
And yet, perhaps it is not wise to be so overprotective of our children. Perhaps the authors of the Purim story and the innovators of our Purim traditions knew that even children need to be aware of the darkness that exists in this world so they can begin to learn to fight it.
Purim always reminds me of a children’s book my father sent us when our own children were very young. The book, written by playwright Tony Kushner and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, is called “Brundibar.” It is the story of two young children who try to save their sick mother by singing on the street to raise money to buy her groceries.
Brundibar, an organ-grinder and giant bully, says the street belongs to him. He chases the children from the square, and not one adult lifts a finger to help them.That evening, huddled together in an alley to keep warm, the children are encouraged by stray animals who round up others to help. At daylight, 300 children show up in solidarity and, together with the siblings, sing a beautiful lullaby about lost children, lost mothers and lost time.
Inspired, the townspeople shower them with money. Brundibar, angrier than ever, tries to steal the children’s hard-won cash, but the adults and children chase him from the square.
The book is based on a children’s opera written more than 85 years ago in Prague, shortly before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. The opera was composed by a Jewish man named Hans Krasa who, after the Nazis took over, was imprisoned at Terezin before being killed at Auschwitz.
Terezin had a particularly large contingent of artists and intellectuals and, for a time, the Nazis allowed a busy schedule of concerts and lectures to take place there. They did this in part to delude outsiders, such as the International Red Cross, into thinking the Jews were being well treated in concentration camps, and in part to entertain Nazi officials and supporters.
One of the most popular performances the children of Terezín gave to outsiders was the opera “Brundibar.” It was performed 55 times by the children in the camp, rarely by the same cast, because the children were regularly deported east to Auschwitz to be gassed. The opera ends with the children singing a victory song with these words:
“The wicked never win,
We will have our victory yet!
Tyrants come along,
but you just wait and see!
They topple 1 – 2 – 3!
Our friends make us strong!
And thus we end our song.”
It is a triumphant ending, especially when you imagine a cast of weak, starving children singing those words in front of a Nazi brigade. However, it is not the ending in Kushner and in Sendak’s book.
In their book, after you read the lines of this victory song and think that you have come to the happily ever after end of the tale, you turn the page to find a postcard with a foreboding message from Brundibar. And this is what he says:
“They believe they’ve won the fight,
They believe I’m gone — not quite!
Nothing ever works out neatly —
Bullies don’t give up completely.
One departs, the next appears,
And we shall meet again, my dears!
Though I go, I won’t go far —
I’ll be back. Love, Brundibar.”
When asked why he and Kushner decided to add these last lines to the story, Sendak explained that children need to know about the possibility of evil in this world. They need to be surrounded by people who will love and protect them, but they cannot be sheltered from this truth. They need to know what hatred looks like and how they can respond to it. They need to know what oppression looks like so that when they meet it — on the playground, in the locker room, in the boardroom or in the halls of government — they will be prepared to stand up against it.
They need to be reminded that the fight against this kind of cruelty is an eternal one in which they can and must play a role.
Purim is actually the final holiday we celebrate in the cycle of the Jewish year. Although our spiritual new year begins in the fall with the High Holy Days, the Jewish calendar begins in the spring with the month of Nisan, the month in which we find Passover. Passover is our first holiday of the lunar year and Purim is our last.
Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes: “[There is] an important reason why Purim closes the festival cycle. The cycle began with Pesach, when God alone … redeemed us from the depths of Egypt. The cycle ends [with Purim] with a salvation during which God has retreated behind the curtain and the human actors have come center stage. With Purim we have learned how to bring about our own redemption. If Pesach is to show us by example that redemption is possible, then Purim demonstrates that we have learned the lesson.”
Strassfeld’s explanation reminds us that God does not play any sort of overt role in the story of Purim. God is behind the scenes, so to speak, providing courage and strength, but there are no direct sea splitting, plague inducing miracles this time around.
This time, people must face the challenge of standing up to their oppressors on their own. This time, people make their own miracles. When we read the story of Purim each year, as adults or as children, we are supposed to remember that we also have this power and responsibility.
When we see the strong trying to overpower the weak, when we see perversions of justice, when we hear of a people oppressed and waiting to be redeemed, we are the ones to stand and fight. We are the ones who must work now to bring about redemption, justice, and truth for the future.
We are never too young to learn this lesson, and never too old to be reminded of it.
Rabbi Andrea Goldstein serves Congregation Shaare Emeth and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
