Lessons in leadership from the costumes of Purim and the Priests.
As we prepare for the beginning of Women’s History Month, it feels like perfect timing to be heading into the Purim holiday as well. The women of our Purim story are heroic: Vashti, in her defiance and her desire to be seen as more than her looks; Esther, in her courage, her commitment to her people, and her knowledge that she’s been placed in the role she’s in for a sacred purpose.
As I am getting ready for Purim this year with a one and a half year old, I’ve found myself scrolling through “toddler costumes” options on the internet. And what I’ve noticed is that there are just as many “villain” costumes (Darth Vader for kids, anyone?) as there are heroes (superheroes, first responders, royalty).
It turns out, kids will dress up as anything they want because it makes them happy, even when it means walking around as the bad guy from Star Wars. Sure, they like to dress up as superheroes, too, but they’re just as happy to be swashbuckling pirates or spiders or force-wielding dictators. The joy is in the costuming, the chance to wear another personality for a day, to make imagination manifest.
Everything Jewish tradition offers us this Shabbat is encouraging us to make that same attempt at play, at the childlike ability to try on different versions of ourselves, heroes and villains alike. Purim, which falls this Monday night, is, of course, a clear invitation to mask and unmask ourselves. But it is also inextricably linked to this week’s Torah portion of Tetzaveh, which focuses on the intricate details of priestly dress. Sacred costume. We learn that wearing the mantle of communal responsibility requires that such a responsibility be made corporeal. The priests are to wear special garb representative of their entire community. Their clothing is a physical marker meant to call them back to the import of their role, their identity, and their relationship with others. We learn that the priests’ costume is meant l’chavod ul’tifaret, for honor and for beauty—it elevates both its wearers and its viewers.
I can imagine how it must have felt for those priests to put on their clothes every day. I wonder if you can too. Like the medical professional who slips into their scrubs, the lawyer who wields a leather briefcase, the member of the military in their uniform, and so many more, when I put on a kippah or tallit, or magnetically clip my “Rabbi Langowitz” nametag to my lapel, I feel the edges of my identity sharpening around the role I play. None of us are walking around wearing a twelve stone golden breast-plate, but all of us, at one point or another, physically carry our identities, relationships, and roles in how we present ourselves. Sometimes this can be very empowering—I sense the sacredness of my own responsibility, and others do too. And sometimes, perhaps, we wish we could take off our costumes, at least for a little while: wipe off the customer service smile, or the call-that-person-in-an-emergency pager, or set down all our social costumes and customs and feel free to just be…us, whoever that looks like.
Sometimes, society might make us feel like that kavod and tiferet, that layer of honor and beauty, is too costly to wear, day in and day out. Our world asks us to be clean, and neat, and trendy, and perky, and made up, and status-oriented, and put together, and happy, and good, good, good, all the time. But for the sleepless parent of a newborn infant, or the friend struggling with infertility at a baby shower, such an outfit can feel debilitating. For the teenager pulled in five different directions, just trying to navigate their social world, for the person struggling with mental illness or addiction in silence, for the one going back to work on the day after shiva ends, for the person who is just wondering how to stop being for others and start being for themselves, the fact that society expects us to wear our own perfection is paralyzing, leads only to more weariness, more self-doubt.
Our tradition offers two antidotes, this week, to such a simplified view of how we clothe ourselves in beauty and honor. The first comes from our Purim narrative. Jewish tradition has long linked the villain of the Purim story, Haman, with Amalek, the enemy leader from the Torah who attacks the Israelites in the wilderness when they’re down, slaughtering women and children. It’s from Amalek this Shabbat receives its traditional name, Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of remembering. It can be confusing: we are simultaneously told to remember Amalek, and then told to wipe out his memory, to never mention his name. I think the answer for such a conundrum is inspired by the reality of those kids’ pirate and Darth Vader costumes. We allow ourselves to dress up as our villains—perhaps to give them a little less power, perhaps to give ourselves a little more. We remember them. And then we take the costume off, we wipe out that name. We recognize that we do not want that kind of evil in our world. And we also recognize, in wearing the villain’s costume, that it is far different from what we wear every day. We may be messy, distracted, unorganized, low, angry, exhausted…but that makes us human, it doesn’t make us evil.
And the second antidote is in the role of the priests themselves. We read of their elaborate garments, their kavod, their tiferet, and then, we read as they wear those signs of beauty and honor and spend their days sacrificing animals on behalf of their people. Now I know there was no such thing as a Tide To Go pen in Ancient Israelite culture, but I would bet you that the Priests would need a whole barrel of them to restore their clothes to their original glory at the end of a day covered in blood and guts. The beautiful clothes aren’t beautiful because they’re pristine. The garments that command respect are not holy because they go unused. You are not worthy of honor because what you wear is more expensive, or better laundered. You do not cloak yourself in beauty because you shop in a certain store or use a certain lotion. This portion comes to teach us, the Purim story comes to teach us, that our kavod, our tiferet, come to us in the same way as they do to the priests, as they do to Esther. They come when we recognize our obligations to others and those obligations inspire us to get messy. To get human. To reach out and bring others closer to us. To sacrifice, and not worry about how it makes us look. To broadcast our identity to the world because in the end it will be salvific—for us, and those like us.
So this, Shabbat, as we make our way toward Women’s History Month and our Purim festivities, I encourage you to think about what costumes you wear in your every day lives. Let the meaningful ones give you strength, and let the harmful ones fall away. Try on the villain’s outfit, every once in a while, so you can remind yourself that such evil is not what you truly wear, not who you truly are. And give yourself permission to get messy—in your clothes, your emotions, your ideas. Therein lies your humanity, your beauty, and your honor.