Purim and Passion Plays

This week we celebrated Purim, but for Israel’s Haredi sector the death of Rabbi Haim Kanievksy on Friday and his burial on Sunday, virtually precluded any form of celebration

Although he held no official position, Kanievsky was considered a major luminary in the non-Hassidic ultra-Orthodox world.

Kanievsky's death was published on the front pages of nearly every newspaper in the country on Sunday, from the liberal Haaretz to ultra-Orthodox dailies.

Various estimates put the number of mourners at his funeral in Bnei Barak at 850,000.

The police took the precaution of cordoning off large swathes of the Dan Bloc area (Tel Aviv and adjacent towns) to prevent traffic congestion  

The Ramat Gan Stadium was turned into a helicopter landing pad for evacuations and the IDF's elite 669 rescue unit was put on alert.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post -    “ The funeral cost the Israeli economy approximately $ 466,000,000. The estimate is based on an analysis conducted by the business data company CoFace BDI.

Normally Purim is a joyous occasion. The general public either accepts the narrative as told in the Book of Esther “verbatim,”   or views it as a historical novel. Whatever the case, Purim is widely celebrated in the Jewish world.  

Purim and St. Patrick's Day land on the same day this year for the first time in almost 40 years. Despite the fact that they come from vastly different backgrounds, the one thing both holidays have in common is the tradition of revelry and booze.

Irish Jews prepared to celebrate a rare occasion that they call the “Double P”: when Purim and St. Patrick’s Day both fall on the same day.

Purim, with its focus on joy, fancy dress costumes  and more than a wee bit of alcohol consumption, meshes particularly well with some St. Patrick’s Day traditions, which have become a carnivalesque celebration of all things Irish. That is to say, Irish not only in Ireland but also in places   where there are large Irish immigrant communities.  

Many Jews in Ireland attend the annual city centre parade, often wearing something green. But the Jewish community of Ireland doesn’t mark the Double P in any specific way.

Most of the Jews of Ireland are newcomers to the country, and have only a superficial connection to St. Patrick’s Day — the traditional date of the death of Saint Patrick, a 5th-century Christian missionary who is considered the foremost patron saint of Ireland.

Only a few hundred of Ireland’s 3,000-odd Jews are locals, descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in Ireland from the 19th century onward. The others, many of them Israelis, live in Dublin as employees of Google, Facebook, Intel and other high-tech giants headquartered in the city, which is sometimes called Europe’s Silicon Valley.

The newcomers began coming to Dublin about 15 years ago, and their numbers are growing: The number of Jews in Ireland leapt by 29% from 2011 to 2016, reaching about 2,500 that year, according to a 2020 demographic survey of European Jewry by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Intel’s recent decision to invest a further $13.2 billion in Ireland could create new jobs that will almost certainly attract more Jews to the country.

The Jewish high-tech crowd tends to be secular but many are happy to participate in local Jewish school activities, and are a mainstay of community events.

In Israel, where hundreds of Irish Jews live, one group was determined to celebrate the Double P3.

The group booked Murphy’s Irish Pub in Netanya on March 20 for a Double P celebration.

Purim has a theatrical attribute that is more pronounced in Ashkenazi communities. The Purim spiel, alternatively Purimshpil, is a skit or play, a comical dramatization of the Book of Esther.

I’ve accounted for the drinking and merrymaking, so I’ll move on to the   Hamantaschen which I’m told is Yiddish for Haman's pockets. As you probably know they are three-cornered pastries filled with poppy seeds, fruit preserves, chocolate, or other ingredients. Other sources render Hamantaschen as Haman’s hat or ears. The latter aptly puts Putin in the Purim picture.

At this juncture I want to mention the Purimshpil again in order to raise a problematic topic, namely the Passion Play.

One critic explained the phenomenon as follows: “To the mind of ancient and medieval Christian expositors, the ‘self-execration’ of the Jews as told in Matthew. 27:25 proved their collective complicity in the crucifixion. The everlasting guilt of the Jews was underlined by many authors throughout the centuries, and in medieval Passion plays it was often emphasised in the most drastic and inflammatory manner. While such renderings, however, did not openly contradict the gospels, the unvarnished pictorial representation of the Jews as the murderers of Jesus, and thus a blatant misrepresentation of the Passion narrative, constituted a veritable tradition in Christian art. The pictorial tradition that began with the highly stylised and symbolical representations of the crucifixion in the early Middle Ages continued in the calvaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It describes its development as well as its disappearance toward the end of the Middle Ages against the background of general tendencies in Christian art, and to assess its significance in regard to the relations between Christians and Jews.”

The Oberammergau Passion Play is without a doubt the best-known passion play. It has been performed every year from 1634 to 1680 and every 10 years since 1680 by the inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany.

The play is a staging of Jesus' passion, covering the short final period of his life from his visit to Jerusalem and leading to his execution by crucifixion. It is the earliest continuous survivor of the age of Christian religions vernacular drama. It has also frequently been criticised as antisemitic However, a multi-decade effort to reduce antisemitic content led by the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish and Christian allies, has, in recent decades, led to substantial revisions in the play.

A 2010 review in the Jewish newspaper The Forward stated: "It is undeniably true that the play was virulently antisemitic through most of its history, and that it gained an extra dose of notoriety after Hitler endorsed the 1934 production.  The review noted that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) states that the play "continues to transmit negative stereotypes of Jews" and that even the Catholic Church demanded changes to the play, to bring it more in line with church policies expressed by the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1965. ADL's national director Abe Foxman once said that if the play is "about a Crucifixion in which the Jews kill Christ, you can never clean it up enough" to avoid an antisemitic message.

In advance of the 2022 production of the play, the American Jewish Committee has convened an Academic Advisory Group including experts in the field of Christian-Jewish relations, New Testament studies, and German-Jewish relations. This group was created to recommend, through ongoing dialogue, pathways by which the play’s leadership can further advance a decades-long process to rid the play of any lingering anti-Jewish tropes. AJC has described the collaborative process with the Oberammergau community as productive: “The Oberammergau leadership desire for ongoing improvement is genuine,” even as “there remain concerns about points within the play that do not properly reflect" the range of first century Jewish opinion on Jesus’s leadership. This reflects both the historic progress in Christian-Jewish relations in the past decades and also lingering tensions over the anti-Jewish implications of certain traditional Christian interpretations of the Gospels.

The changes to the play since World War II have included the manner in which the play presents the charge of deicide, collective guilt and other content.

Knowing that the Oberammergau topic is depressing to say the least, I’ll move on to the World Happiness Report.

For the fifth year in a row, Finland is the world's happiest country, according to World Happiness Report rankings based largely on life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll.

The Nordic country and its neighbours Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland all score very well on the measures the report uses to explain its findings: healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support in times of trouble, low corruption and high social trust, generosity in a community where people look after each other and freedom to make key life decisions.

Denmark comes in at No. 2 in this year's rankings, followed by Iceland at No. 3. Sweden and Norway are seventh and eighth, respectively.

Switzerland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg take places 4 through 6, with Israel coming in at No. 9 and New Zealand rounding out the top 10.

Canada (No. 15), the United States (No. 16) and the United Kingdom (No. 17) all made it into the top 20 while Turkey has dropped back to 112th place.

Yet despite the famous social democracy of the Nordic Model guaranteeing high scores on metrics of trust in government and belief that others are there for you in times of need, there is a darker side to life up north.

“People get really depressed here a
nd it’s probably something to do with the long periods of darkness, and long periods of total daylight in the summertime can do harm to your mind as well,” said one Nordic commentator.

Israel is happy with its ninth-place ranking, managing well without the Aurora Polaris

and keeping some of not to so friendly neighbours at bay.

I planned to sign off at this point, but then a murderous terrorist attack in Beer Sheva changed my mood. The ongoing police investigation is still inconclusive, so I’ll leave the conclusion for next week.

 

Anyway, have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                                                               24^th of March, 2022.