L ifestyle /C ulture
Hand Warmers and Hamentaschen at Chabad
P URIM
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
I WAS AMONG a group of
about 30 people who gathered
for a Megillah reading on Feb.

25 at Chabad Young Philly at
Broad and Catharine streets.

Billed as “COVID-friendly
(unfriendly to the virus!),”
the evening did indeed bear
the indelible marks of the
pandemic: masks, hand
sanitizers, individually
wrapped food and spaced
seating. We were outside on
a breezy night under a nearly
full moon. Hot cider and hand
warmers abounded, which
created jugglers of us all, as
the desire to warm oneself
conflicted with the duty to
follow along as the Megillah
was read and to grogger away
when appropriate. Soft yellow
lights lined the backyard fence.

Aside from the story of
Chanukah, the Book of Esther
might be the Jewish story with
the greatest distance between the
text and its commentaries and
the version taught to children.

Ahasuerus, in my Jewish day
school education, was nothing
more than a bumbler who
loved two Jews, and then his
Jewish subjects; Vashti’s head
was simply separated from her
crown, rather than from her
entire body; and I can’t say I
recall too much discussion of
the Jews doing a preemptive
strike on the goyim in each of
the 127 provinces.

As I watched costumed
children preparing to make
all the sanctioned noise they
could, I wondered if the last
year had registered for them in
the way that approaching the
text of Esther as an adult did
for me. Were stories about the
competence and goodwill of
the adults in charge revealed to
be for children?
The Megillah reading was
done with great speed, and
the groggering was equally
competent; rare was the
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM premature grog. We heard
about Haman, the wicked son
of Hammedatha the Agagite
himself, and we heard about
the brave and beautiful Esther.

We joined voices to read a few
verses aloud together, and sang
together when the reading
was completed. We filed out
of the backyard slowly at the
conclusion, dropping off our
Esther texts for sanitation and
pocketing hamentaschen for
the road. We were even sent on
our way with mishloach manot,
each in a bright purple box.

The whole affair was less
than 40 minutes; there was
some cleaning to be done,
and two more shifts would be
coming to hear the Megillah
read that evening.

It feels good to write “we”
when “we” refers to a group
of people who were gathered
together in person. It’s not
The Megillah is read at Chabad Young Philly on Feb. 25.
something I’ve often had the
privilege to do in the last year. It’s
a “we” with depth because it is a
“we” with roots in the real world.

For an evening, “we” could think
of ourselves as a group of people
brought together by intention,
rather than as a herd to be
immunized, a voting bloc to be
courted, camps to be unified or
a data point in a spiking graph.

The writer Gabriel Winant
posed some scary questions in
an essay last December: Has the
last year of savagely rendered
isolation and violence revealed
that we do not, as Margaret
Thatcher once said, live in a
society? Has the pandemic
hastened the decline of our
mutual sense of responsibility?
Impossible to answer. But
at Chabad that night, I saw a
group of people who answered
Photo by Jesse Bernstein
in the negative, who seemed to
say, in one voice, that “society”
might not be something one
can opt in or out of. It might
just be an ecstatic state, one that
requires lots of people to do
small things together every day,
until the feeling is as real as the
hamentaschen in your hand. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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