Purim sameach!

Last Thursday night and Friday, all of Israel was celebrating Purim, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the events described in the Book of Esther.

Purim is a carnivalesque holiday with analogues in many other cultures: for instance, Halloween, Mardi Gras, masquerade balls, or the Brazilian Carnivale. Like all such holidays, it involves a playful and satirical inversion of the normal social order, a temporary turning of the social world upside down. This can take all kinds of forms, from cross-dressing (I saw a few men in drag on Ben-Yehuda Street) to donning the costumes of royalty such as Queen Esther (commoners imitating elites). I also saw secular Israeli Jews dressed up as ultra-Orthodox religious Jews -- a particularly interesting inversion in a country where secular and religious Jews often clash. These kinds of reversals and inversions are also part of the Book of Esther itself. For example, the villain Haman is hanged on the very same gallows that he had constructed to execute the good guy Mordecai. Sociologists and anthropologists have written a lot about the meaning of this kind of holiday. While some have seen it as a kind of safety valve that allows ordinary people to rebel in a ritualized, regulated, and non-threatening way, others have suggested that carnivalesque holidays always retain the potential to subvert the existing social order.

I attended an outdoor public reading of the megillah (the Book of Esther) on Rothschild Avenue on Thursday evening (and yes, I "heard the whole megillah," as the expression goes). But the real festivities took place on Friday. Here is Ben-Yehuda Street, right around the corner from my apartment, on Friday afternoon:

The Purim festivities included music:

And dancing:

Some people celebrated in a religious way. Here are people putting on tefilin (phylacteries) to pray below a picture of the late Rabbi Schneerson:

And if praying doesn't work, maybe zipping around the streets of Tel Aviv on rollerskates with a yellow banner that says Moshiach (messiah) will hasten his coming:

Other people celebrated in a more secular way:

But kids always know how to have the most fun:

Of course, no carnivalesque holiday would be complete without outlandish costumes:

Even the Christian Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) came to celebrate the Jewish holiday. (Perhaps he was in town for Easter, which fell on the Sunday after Purim.) This is doubly carnivalesque: women dressing as men, and Jews dressing up as a Christian icon.

Chag sameach (happy holiday), everyone!