By Joel H. Cohen
NEW YORK — There may be more pressing reasons for concern out there, but right now we’re grappling with what to wear Purim night.
If you think of the Megillah-reading as the Academy Awards, then you can logically regard the stairs or the pathway leading to the shul as the Red Carpet. Then imagine that one or more TV correspondents are there with microphones, asking the eternal, grammatically incorrect, question of all entering: Not “What (designer)” but “Who are you wearing?”
To which you answer honestly — and maybe a bit shyly — “Mordecai” or “Haman,” maybe “Achashverus” or good old, reliable “Esther” or even “Vashti.” Whatever the answer, you can immediately tell from the interviewers’ expressions that you’ve disappointed them. They’re thinking, “Haman is so last year” or “Mordecai was out of style, a cliche, decades ago.”
But you soldier on, and enter the shul, where some of the patchwork of costumes have no Purim connection — such far cries from Shushan as sports team uniforms, Darth Vader, a flower child, Ghost-Buster, pirate, fireman, Tinker Bell. Batman and Superman are both there, and for a moment, you think you’ve mistakenly walked into a comic book convention –.”Toto, we’re not in Persia anymore.”
But then you know it’s surely Purim — as you sight a sea of giggly youngsters, each dressed as Queen Esther.
For the kids, there’s bound to be a costume contest. (I can quite proudly state that my wife, as a young teenager, won the Queen Esther contest at her shul against some formidable competition. As photos attest, she was quite cute and, I assure you, her election was not rigged, though a cynic might think that a factor in her victory was the participation of her large family, whose members took seriously the advice — not only legitimate, but encouraged, for that contest — to vote early and often. They did not — not– stuff the ballot box, or do anything illegal.)
In later years, we witnessed the best assortment of Purim costumes ever at a shul in New Orleans, where the adults wore their Mardi Gras costumes. One couple came dressed as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. When we mentioned their un-Purim-like and not-very-Jewish outfits to the (then) young rabbi of the shul, he said they’d called to ask if it would be okay to come dressed that way, and he’d told them it was good that they’d attend the service, no matter what the costume.
Rabbis at our Conservative shul over the years have sometimes worn outstanding Purim costumes. But that does’t help with our current dilemma. We still don’t know “who” to wear. Someone suggested I put on an orange wig, but it seems we should be “honoring” the tyrants of old, not of modern times. Another valid suggestion was sackcloth and ashes, and I’m even thinking of dressing like Hathatch, the good eunuch who looked after Esther….there’s not much the fashion police say about his costume.
We”ll know soon enough.
Happy Purim (no matter “who” you wear)
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Cohen is a humorist and freelance writer based in New York City.