1. Let's talk about costumes. Is a costume just a wrapping, or is it an outer expression of the spirit? The costume goes along with the holiday that once a year (just once!) values drunkenness: "A person is obligated to drink on Purim until he does not know the difference between 'cursed Haman' and 'blessed Mordechai.'" Drunkenness is also a costume, and like a costume it can take over one's personality. With the help of a costume or a mask, a person can become "not himself." When Odysseus hid in the Cyclops' cave and was asked his name by the terrible Polyphemus, he replied "no man" -- a reply that ended up being the key to his escape. Jacob entered his father Isaac's room disguised as his elder brother Esau and thus stole his birthright. He wasn't acting. Jacob came into the room not as himself, wrapped in different clothing, assuming a borrowed identity. And when he left, he was a different person. Anthropologists report that in many cultures, a costume or a mask is the same as an insect's pupal stage. One person puts it on, and a different person emerges. While in costume, he undergoes a process of death and rebirth, like the caterpillar that metamorphoses inside the cocoon before it is reborn as a butterfly. Drunkenness and costumes exemplify uncertainty. A dangerous place a person enters knowing he might not be able to leave. And what is Purim, if not the essence of that concept: existential uncertainty. "Therefore they called these days Purim, after the term 'pur' [lottery]" (Book of Esther 9:26). We live in meaningless chaos. We exist in a shifting reality that entertains us like a toy. The oh-so-typical Israeli question "What will be-" has to do with the desire to give reality meaning, to find the explanation between what looks like the pointless madness of "Must the sword devour forever-" (2 Shmuel 2:26). 2. A costume is a distraction from the regular point of view. Not only does the wearer look different, he also views what was his routine in a different light. The Zohar, the book of Jewish mysticism, interprets the story of Jacob's costume as an "accident" that led to "Jacob being blessed not by [Isaac], but by the Lord." Or, as we would put it, Isaac was used as a messenger at that moment, through whom Jacob was chosen -- not by his father, but by much greater historical forces. There is a deep message here that the monumental, decisive things actually happen without us knowing, while we are distracted. The Talmud tells of Rabbi Zira, who asked sages who studied the coming of the Messiah: "Please, don't delay it!" "Three things come when we aren't paying attention: the Messiah, a discovery, and a scorpion." A person doesn't intend to make a discovery any more than he intends to fall ill, heaven forbid. It happens at random, when we are distracted. The Messiah, too. Each person and his own personal Messiah, each people and its own salvation. I once heard from a wise man that the adage "the Messiah arrives when we're not paying attention" actually means that turning our thoughts away makes room for different thought, deeper and more original, that only a costume (or other distractions, like drunkenness) can awaken. Often we get stuck in old, outdated ideas and believe that they are the solution to our personal and national problems, until reality blows up in our faces. In dead-end situations like these, we need distractions. In his wonderful book "The Plague," Albert Camus wrote about residents of his city who were unprepared for the pestilence: "Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free." History has its own ways of teaching us humility. 3. As I write this column, I am picturing the case of Haaretz literary editor Benny Ziffer. I don't mean to defend his last column, in which he essentially advocated sexual abuse of minors for the sake of art. In my opinion, if he had left out a few infuriating, purely provocative sentences, it would have helped the case he was making for artists' freedom of expression and society's expectations of them. The public wrath that his article elicited did not erupt spontaneously, but had been building up over the past few years over the fact that Ziffer, seen as one of the high priests of the temple of leftist culture, betrayed the Left and became a defender of Israel. This is how he described to Channel 10 anchor Paz Schwartz the moment his views shifted: He was sitting next to the founders of Breaking the Silence at a dinner at the German Consulate, he said. "The entire conversation revolved around a kind of criticism of Israel that I would have agreed with if it had been said in the context of Israelis sitting in [someone's] living room. But not in front of Germans. Like, what, have we forgotten what the Germans
we need to ingratiate ourselves to the Germans? I felt I had fallen into a cesspool." He also said: "The Left in Israel is hopeless. There can be no hope from it. It's rotten to the core." All that would have been tolerable if Ziffer hadn't had the temerity to defend Sara Netanyahu. He described her humaneness and punched a hole in the demonic, evil image the Left has created for the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man the Left sees as the main threat to it and to the universe. "The provocation is a way of challenging these people whom I can't stand, people who, if you wake them in the middle of the night, would know what was proper to think at that moment," he said. A moment before he was tarred and feathered, Ziffer gave in and wrote a confession in the style of the public confessions of comrades who transgressed in Soviet Russia. He apologized and asked for forgiveness: "I got up one morning, and when I stood in front of the mirror I noticed that the mask with which I had covered my true face to entertain the readers of this column wouldn't come off." The media, for the most part, more or less understood that the change in his writing and the mental statues he had broken were just a mask that he would now discard and go back to being "himself." That is, what they were used to hearing within the confines of what was acceptable. I believe this impression is wrong. Ziffer took back only the part of his last column that created the outrage. It's a shame he went back into the closet. 4. The Left recognizes the power of thoughts and ideas, but isn't prepared to take the true risk of rebellious thought. As in ultra-conservative societies, the Left has become the guardian of the secular orthodoxy. And here we have the totalitarianism of thought that sees any change to the old order as a declaration of war and not a matter of historic justice in the division of public resources. In a society like this, costumes and masks are many times more important; with their aid, it is possible to shake up conventions without being suspected of heresy. In his book "Spinoza and Other Heretics," Yirmiyahu Yovel demonstrated how the Spanish Jews forced to convert to Christianity adopted a method of double writing that appeared to praise the Church, but between the lines contained harsh criticism of it. Left-wing society in Israel and the West is full of "forced social converts" in political masks. Behind these masks are people who hold a conservative-right worldview. Look around you. This week I was sitting with a well-known cultural figure in Tel Aviv, who was terrified to reveal his conservative opinions to his peers lest he be harmed. This reality has to change. Purim only comes once a year. The masquerade is over.
