Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Purim: The Other Halloween…or is it?
By Barbara Newman
As Purim approaches this year, for some reason, the old TV ad-campaign, “pork, the other white meat” comes to mind. Poor pork, apparently such an underdog to chicken that it needed its own ad-campaign. I know nothing about pork, and yet something about the ad resonates with my thoughts of Purim. In this day and age when so many Jews in America celebrate Halloween, Purim is relegated often to the “other Halloween,” but is that really fair? Should it even be compared to Halloween? Would more Jews celebrate Purim if they knew more about it, and opt out of Halloween entirely? I remember having to convince Jewish friends who loved dressing up for Halloween to come out to a Purim party. Why is Purim such an underdog?
On the surface, Purim and Halloween seem to have a number of similarities – costumes, parties, revelry — but cut deeper into them and you will find many differences.
Halloween (officially All Hallow’s Eve or All Saints’ Eve) is a secular holiday. Much of Halloween’s imagery is evil and scary, with ghosts, ghouls, witches and skulls, and these themes seem to be encouraged. Growing up, I remember hearing about tainted candy and people who would go out on the streets and throw eggs and spray shaving cream all over the neighborhood. Historically, Halloween was a time of year when many pogroms would occur, making it a genuinely scary time to be a Jew.
Purim, on the other hand, is a time to rejoice in the story of individuals overcoming evil. The word “Purim” means “lots” – a reference to Haman casting lots to determine the day he would destroy the Jews, ultimately settling on the 13th of Adar . It is an interesting echo of the Jews history with Halloween, but luckily for the Jews, Purim did not turn out so frightening. Through individual actions, good triumphed over evil, giving us more reasons to celebrate than to fear. Rather than trick-or-treat and take from others, the Purim tradition asks that we give to others, through Mishloach Manot (gifts of food) to our neighbors, and charity to the poor.
Although it is a Jewish holiday, on the surface, Purim can seem fairly secular. The heroism, triumphs and miracles of Purim came about through the actions of people. No reference to G-d is made throughout the Megillah reading and excessive drinking is encouraged (even in Synagogue). But all is not what it seems. Just as we dress up in costume and wonder who is beneath, there is hidden and significant meaning behind the seemingly secular nature of the holiday.
So is Purim really “the other” Halloween? Looking behind the mask of each holiday reveals just how different they truly are. Might Purim need a better marketing campaign so that more people will celebrate? Well that’s a different question.
Photo by Miala, licensed under Creative Commons.
Why I Eat the Other White Meat
by Emily Comisar
A brief summary of my religious history: I was born a Jew. My father has been Jewish all his life and my mother converted from Lutheranism in her mid-twenties (that I was not aware of this until my mid-teens is beside the fact).
Growing up, I always liked being Jewish because it made me different, especially living in certain school districts where members of the Tribe were few and far between. But when I went to private school in Dallas, I discovered that I was no longer any different than 30% of my eighth grade class. It became obvious to my thirteen-year-old brain that I either needed to find a more tangible link to Judaism or I would have to be Agnostic. This is why dissecting fetal pigs in biology class seemed as good an excuse as any to give up pork products and call myself “kosher-style.” College in Chicago, of course, offered me the opportunity to interact with a whole community of Jews my age in a much more significant way, and as I matured a little, my steadfast eating habits took on a different, more spiritual meaning.
This story, however, does not tie up so neatly. Moving to Florence, Italy in 2007 put me face to face with a cold, hard truth: virtually every Italian restaurant and market seems to specialize in some sort of pork product. They eat it crude and cooked, sliced and ground, rolled into sausages, on pizzas, and in pastas. It might as well be on the flag. Keeping my anti-pork regimen was not terribly difficult, as long as I was satisfied eating vegetarian, which for the most part I was. So to be clear, when I started re-thinking my gastrono mic choices that were already ten years in the making, it was not solely to do with the plethora of offerings on every street corner and in every supermarket.
I don’t believe in crises of faith. I figure that if you believe in something, you should believe in it enough that random acts of life don’t completely blow it all away. That being said, I do believe in spiritual evolution. The more time that I spent away from my Jewish safe haven in Chicago, the more I evolved – not necessarily for better or worse, but just in a different direction.
Eventually I realized that I didn’t really know why I refused to eat pork. The presence or absence of it in my life didn’t seem to have an effect on the rest of my religious beliefs and, given that I didn’t really keep kosher aside from this particular item, it just no longer made sense.
That’s how I decided to try the other white meat. It started with a little bit of pancetta in a spaghetti alla carbonara, a little bit of sausage in a calzone. I don’t know if, after ten years of abstention, I’ll ever bring myself to eat a sandwich sliced freshly off the roasted animal, but with small steps I tried new things and even got a little closer to my host culture. I’ve always thought that there was nothing more revealing about a people than their food.
Photo by Justin Belcher, licensed under Creative Commons.
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