What do we know?

We are marching onward toward Purim, let’s take a moment to contemplate this fascinating holiday.

Here is the basic background to the holiday of Purim. After the 1st Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed the Diaspora began and 70 years on there was a major Jewish community in Persia, particularly Shushan also known as Susa in present day Iran. The king Ahaseurus, commonly believed to be Xerxes I had a prime minister named Haman who had it in for the Jews and contrived to rid the entire kingdom of them by paying his king to offset the taxes he would receive from them. Ahaseurus, in a fit of misogynistic rage had his wife killed because she wouldn’t dance in front of him and his drunk friends. Of course, what is a king without a queen? So he had to find a new one and ended up marrying Esther who was a Jew, unbeknownst to him. When Mordechai, a community leader and Esther’s cousin, found out about the plot to kill the Jews he enlisted Esther’s help and they brought Haman down and saved the Jews. In commemoration of that event we party with dressing up in costumes, eating food, giving charity, and sharing gifts.

It is important to recognize that there are many layers to most things within Jewish religion and culture and Purim is no exception. There is the story level and then beyond that there are more mystical aspects that afford opportunity for growth and connection to the Divine. The Talmud (Megilla 7B) that says that a person is obligated to get so drunk on Purim that he doesn’t know the difference between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordechai.

I am not an apologist for getting drunk (or not) on Purim. Get drunk or don’t, this line in the Talmud is calling your name and offering you the secret to a meaningful Passover. Yes, I said Passover.

Laurence Gonzales quotes an interesting study in his epic book (epic as in ‘awesome’ not as in ‘long’), Deep Survival. A group of airline pilots were put through a unique simulator scenario to see how they would fare. The pilots are going through the process of preparing for landing, they receive landing clearance from the tower and they are on final approach. At some point when the plane is close to the runway the simulator operator puts another airplane on the runway. The result? Many pilots keep on landing and don’t see the other airplane.

The pilots don’t see the abnormal thing because they are focusing on the image they expect to see – an empty runway. Gonzales calls this a “memory of the future” and says that, in the mind, it’s as if the expected thing has already occurred. The plane has already landed safely. What they’re not doing is making space for what else might be there. 

One Purim evening as I was pacing up and down the block in front of my house, trying to metabolize the copious amounts of wine that I had drunk, I started singing a song that is based on the words of the Talmudic suggestion from above. I sang “ad d’lo yada” (until he doesn’t know) over and over. Suddenly the chanted words from a tape of Shlomo Carlebach I listened to as a child came to my mind. “What do we know? What do we know?” An oft stated expression from Shlomo that he would say in response to the depth and complexity of being a human being. I realized in a flash of drunken brilliance that the Talmud is telling us less about Mordechai and Haman and is telling us more about not knowing.

In allowing myself to not know I am intentionally creating space for more information to enter. An important difference between knowing and not knowing is that knowing is static – I know, so nothing needs to change; and not knowing is dynamic – I don’t know, so everything can change. In the static of knowing I don’t grow and I don’t change and I don’t see the airplane on the runway in front of me. In the dynamic of not knowing I am open to shifting, changing, and growing, and I can take in the new information of the airplane in front of me.

Purim is the apex in the cycle of holidays. It is the final moment before we transition to the next iteration of the spiral. Purim is therefore both a culmination of the process of a whole year and the introduction to the beginning of the next cycle. This Purim allow yourself to travel on the journey of a whimsical story where nothing is quite what it seems to a land where, even for a moment, you let go of your preconceived notions, say “I don’t know” and invite in whatever is there in the not knowing. And with this different perspective we might shift just a little bit and turn a repeated cycle of static slavery into a growing spiral of dynamic freedom as we continue on the circular calendar of growth. Happy Passover!