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livI really wasn't feeling purim this year. I mean, hey, it was fine, I read the Megillah competently, I made sure all the kids had a good time and the adults were unselfconscious enough to enjoy the silliness. And we had a good turn out, and people dressed up and brought food and were generally good sports, and I think that's partly because I've been talking up the festival for a few weeks, and working behind the scenes to make sure people who don't usually bother with regular Friday nights were informed.
I think this may actually be part of the problem; purim isn't a chance for me to have fun these days, it's a big organizational effort to make sure other people have fun. And I can totally phone it in at this point; I've been organizing activities for miscellaneous groups of kids since I ran birthday parties for my younger siblings as a pre-teen myself. I left the Megillah prep a bit too much to the last minute, so I didn't do it as well as I'd like, but, y'know, I totally can read a familiar text from klaf (traditional handwritten document with no vowels or punctuation) even if I leave until the day before to quickly refresh my memory of the tricky bits. I can do a good old (melo)dramatic reading with silly voices and enough expression that people who don't have fluent Hebrew can more or less follow. I can produce silly bouncy enthusiasm on command, and deliver a patter that keeps people amused and entertained and throw some innuendo to the adults in the audience without making the kids feel embarrassed or excluded.
I'm burning the expletive out, though. The community are so supportive and lovely and so grateful when I provide them with what they want out of religion at the moment: straight down the line traditional rituals done with feeling and with samples from my box of "inclusion" tricks. Stuff that's familiar from people's childhoods, but updated just enough that it isn't some boring old man droning on in a language that nobody understands. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and I'm well placed to offer it.
But what I want out of religion is intellectual stimulation, either some discussion of ways to reinvent and reinterpret and challenge the traditions, or some proper text study I can get my teeth into. I'm not gonna get that here, and honestly purim is almost exactly the wrong time for it even in the sort of community that does that kind of thing. But I don't have enough free weekends to go and visit other communities where I can be a participant instead of an organizer; either I'm running things here, or else I'm visiting my friends which I place at a higher priority than shulgoing. I haven't made it to any of the Manchester synagogues in most of a year, nor to pop over tohadassah's placement communities which I've been promising to do for ages. I've occasionally managed to combine visiting my people in Cambridge with attending the very nice, highly intellectual Reform community there, but it's not quite sustaining me. And part of the problem is that work is stressful at the moment and I am, as mentioned, over-committed; even though at lot of my rushing around madly involves doing things I find really fun, I also need more actual relaxing breaks than I'm getting.
Partly, it's buying purim presents for a completely unknown in advance group of children. I never have any idea who's going to turn up, how many, what ages, or, and I wish I didn't have to care, what genders. I don't gender police the kids, far from it, but give me a dozen children I mostly don't know and you can guarantee that some of them will refuse to touch anything even vaguely gender-neutral, let alone if they suspect it's for the wrong gender, and if the kids themselves do express interest in a wrongly gendered toy their parents and grandparents frequently correct them. I try to get a range of stuff, not extending quite out to the extremes of ultra pink, frilly princessy stuff or intensely macho toy weapons and camo designs, and mostly I succeed by avoiding Disney and Disney knock-off branded stuff which I'd want to stay away from anyway, regardless of the gender issue. But then you get things like a two-year-old bypassing all the age-appropriate toys I offered and insisting on the thing he most easily recognized as being "for a boy": a china money-box in the shape of a football, which he promptly broke two minutes later (a china football is not for kicking). My most favourite child is even more my favourite now; I awarded him first prize in the costume contest not because he's my favourite but because he had clearly made an effort to make his own costume, a really excellent Willy Wonka outfit, whereas most of the other kids had bought costumes, and he preferred some glow-stick necklaces over everything officially marketed to nine-year-old boys <3
Then there's the Megillah (book of Esther) itself. Some feminists like it because they read it as portraying misogyny rather than promoting misogyny, but honestly? for a story we make a point of exposing kids to and building a strongly family-oriented celebration around, it contains rather a lot of rape jokes. And a bunch of LOL eunuchs stuff and humour about how effeminate Persian men supposedly are. I'm complaining about this partly because I'm in a bad mood about not having people in my community I can have this discussion with; nobody is surprised that if you read the Bible as a novel it doesn't live up to modern standards of right-on gender politics.
The other thing is drag. Drag is a big feature of purim, fancy dress in general, but particularly cross-dressing. Ages ago I had an argument with a trans friend who claimed that drag-based humour is transphobic, and I was really defensive and I said, no, it's funny when men wear dresses and make-up, that doesn't mean we're laughing at women dressing like conventionally gendered women! But this was very poor reasoning on my part, because in fact the very thing that makes trans women trans is that for at least some part of their lives people incorrectly think they are male. If they're unlucky, people continue thinking they're male even when they are living as their real gender. So now I have to admit my friend had a point and there is a continuum between laughing at trash drag and laughing at trans women. I also don't have a plan for how to make my community a welcoming place to gender non-conforming people while still celebrating purim in a way most people think of as traditional. On the other hand, I am aware of at least some men living in a social and religious context where genderqueer isn't a viable option, who take the prohibition against cross-dressing seriously, and find it really liberating to be able to wear a dress on purim, even if they have to pretend it's a joke.
As for me, well, I dressed up as a pirate. I decided I wanted to be a pirate rather than a pirate wench, partly because drag is in fact a purim tradition. But it turns out that a thigh-length coat, belted, over a rather fitted ruffled shirt (the most piratey thing I happened to have on hand) makes me look really really hourglassy. Which would be fine if I were going for the contrast between the somewhat masculine persona and my natural body shape, but I kind of wasn't, I was shooting for the kind of androgynous that post Johnny Depp pirates represent. I tried to wrap my braid to give a more masculine style that works with long hair, but I didn't get it right. And I know very well I am ridiculously over-thinking this, if dressing up as a pirate for purim gives me gender angst there's really no hope for me.
The other thing that happened is that when I came into the synagogue I was wearing my ordinary winter coat over the costume (it was freezing out), and people could only see that I had a red headscarf and gold hoopy clip-on earrings. So of course they guessed that I'd come as a "gypsy" and made jokes about crossing palms with silver and reading fortunes and stuff. Which made me think of all those American Tumblrs about how totally offensive it is to dress up as an ethnic stereotype for Halloween. I don't very much want to make a big fuss about people's choices of purim costumes, but I'm starting to think maybe I should be firmer about this kind of thing.
I think part of what's going on is that the Jewish community tends to have an image of ourselves as the eternal victims, and therefore any mockery that's going on is automatically mocking the powerful, which is generally felt to be acceptable. Laughing at those drunken, effeminate, incompetent Persians was at some point in history a defence mechanism because the Persian empire was in fact treating its Jewish minority pretty badly. And I'm sure everybody would say I'm being oversensitive for making any kind of connection between essentially fictional Persians and modern-day Iranians, or between drunken slapstick humour and actual real live alcoholics. But I am getting less and less comfortable with gender-based mockery, and there's a ton of that in purim.
Sometimes I've bragged to non-Jewish friends about how purim is the best festival ever, because it involves dressing up in silly costumes and getting drunk. And I do think there's some value in making the point that religion is not always against pleasure or anti-fun. But right now I think purim is the worst festival ever, and the alcohol isn't helping.
I think this may actually be part of the problem; purim isn't a chance for me to have fun these days, it's a big organizational effort to make sure other people have fun. And I can totally phone it in at this point; I've been organizing activities for miscellaneous groups of kids since I ran birthday parties for my younger siblings as a pre-teen myself. I left the Megillah prep a bit too much to the last minute, so I didn't do it as well as I'd like, but, y'know, I totally can read a familiar text from klaf (traditional handwritten document with no vowels or punctuation) even if I leave until the day before to quickly refresh my memory of the tricky bits. I can do a good old (melo)dramatic reading with silly voices and enough expression that people who don't have fluent Hebrew can more or less follow. I can produce silly bouncy enthusiasm on command, and deliver a patter that keeps people amused and entertained and throw some innuendo to the adults in the audience without making the kids feel embarrassed or excluded.
I'm burning the expletive out, though. The community are so supportive and lovely and so grateful when I provide them with what they want out of religion at the moment: straight down the line traditional rituals done with feeling and with samples from my box of "inclusion" tricks. Stuff that's familiar from people's childhoods, but updated just enough that it isn't some boring old man droning on in a language that nobody understands. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and I'm well placed to offer it.
But what I want out of religion is intellectual stimulation, either some discussion of ways to reinvent and reinterpret and challenge the traditions, or some proper text study I can get my teeth into. I'm not gonna get that here, and honestly purim is almost exactly the wrong time for it even in the sort of community that does that kind of thing. But I don't have enough free weekends to go and visit other communities where I can be a participant instead of an organizer; either I'm running things here, or else I'm visiting my friends which I place at a higher priority than shulgoing. I haven't made it to any of the Manchester synagogues in most of a year, nor to pop over to
hadassah's placement communities which I've been promising to do for ages. I've occasionally managed to combine visiting my people in Cambridge with attending the very nice, highly intellectual Reform community there, but it's not quite sustaining me. And part of the problem is that work is stressful at the moment and I am, as mentioned, over-committed; even though at lot of my rushing around madly involves doing things I find really fun, I also need more actual relaxing breaks than I'm getting. Partly, it's buying purim presents for a completely unknown in advance group of children. I never have any idea who's going to turn up, how many, what ages, or, and I wish I didn't have to care, what genders. I don't gender police the kids, far from it, but give me a dozen children I mostly don't know and you can guarantee that some of them will refuse to touch anything even vaguely gender-neutral, let alone if they suspect it's for the wrong gender, and if the kids themselves do express interest in a wrongly gendered toy their parents and grandparents frequently correct them. I try to get a range of stuff, not extending quite out to the extremes of ultra pink, frilly princessy stuff or intensely macho toy weapons and camo designs, and mostly I succeed by avoiding Disney and Disney knock-off branded stuff which I'd want to stay away from anyway, regardless of the gender issue. But then you get things like a two-year-old bypassing all the age-appropriate toys I offered and insisting on the thing he most easily recognized as being "for a boy": a china money-box in the shape of a football, which he promptly broke two minutes later (a china football is not for kicking). My most favourite child is even more my favourite now; I awarded him first prize in the costume contest not because he's my favourite but because he had clearly made an effort to make his own costume, a really excellent Willy Wonka outfit, whereas most of the other kids had bought costumes, and he preferred some glow-stick necklaces over everything officially marketed to nine-year-old boys <3
Then there's the Megillah (book of Esther) itself. Some feminists like it because they read it as portraying misogyny rather than promoting misogyny, but honestly? for a story we make a point of exposing kids to and building a strongly family-oriented celebration around, it contains rather a lot of rape jokes. And a bunch of LOL eunuchs stuff and humour about how effeminate Persian men supposedly are. I'm complaining about this partly because I'm in a bad mood about not having people in my community I can have this discussion with; nobody is surprised that if you read the Bible as a novel it doesn't live up to modern standards of right-on gender politics.
The other thing is drag. Drag is a big feature of purim, fancy dress in general, but particularly cross-dressing. Ages ago I had an argument with a trans friend who claimed that drag-based humour is transphobic, and I was really defensive and I said, no, it's funny when men wear dresses and make-up, that doesn't mean we're laughing at women dressing like conventionally gendered women! But this was very poor reasoning on my part, because in fact the very thing that makes trans women trans is that for at least some part of their lives people incorrectly think they are male. If they're unlucky, people continue thinking they're male even when they are living as their real gender. So now I have to admit my friend had a point and there is a continuum between laughing at trash drag and laughing at trans women. I also don't have a plan for how to make my community a welcoming place to gender non-conforming people while still celebrating purim in a way most people think of as traditional. On the other hand, I am aware of at least some men living in a social and religious context where genderqueer isn't a viable option, who take the prohibition against cross-dressing seriously, and find it really liberating to be able to wear a dress on purim, even if they have to pretend it's a joke.
As for me, well, I dressed up as a pirate. I decided I wanted to be a pirate rather than a pirate wench, partly because drag is in fact a purim tradition. But it turns out that a thigh-length coat, belted, over a rather fitted ruffled shirt (the most piratey thing I happened to have on hand) makes me look really really hourglassy. Which would be fine if I were going for the contrast between the somewhat masculine persona and my natural body shape, but I kind of wasn't, I was shooting for the kind of androgynous that post Johnny Depp pirates represent. I tried to wrap my braid to give a more masculine style that works with long hair, but I didn't get it right. And I know very well I am ridiculously over-thinking this, if dressing up as a pirate for purim gives me gender angst there's really no hope for me.
The other thing that happened is that when I came into the synagogue I was wearing my ordinary winter coat over the costume (it was freezing out), and people could only see that I had a red headscarf and gold hoopy clip-on earrings. So of course they guessed that I'd come as a "gypsy" and made jokes about crossing palms with silver and reading fortunes and stuff. Which made me think of all those American Tumblrs about how totally offensive it is to dress up as an ethnic stereotype for Halloween. I don't very much want to make a big fuss about people's choices of purim costumes, but I'm starting to think maybe I should be firmer about this kind of thing.
I think part of what's going on is that the Jewish community tends to have an image of ourselves as the eternal victims, and therefore any mockery that's going on is automatically mocking the powerful, which is generally felt to be acceptable. Laughing at those drunken, effeminate, incompetent Persians was at some point in history a defence mechanism because the Persian empire was in fact treating its Jewish minority pretty badly. And I'm sure everybody would say I'm being oversensitive for making any kind of connection between essentially fictional Persians and modern-day Iranians, or between drunken slapstick humour and actual real live alcoholics. But I am getting less and less comfortable with gender-based mockery, and there's a ton of that in purim.
Sometimes I've bragged to non-Jewish friends about how purim is the best festival ever, because it involves dressing up in silly costumes and getting drunk. And I do think there's some value in making the point that religion is not always against pleasure or anti-fun. But right now I think purim is the worst festival ever, and the alcohol isn't helping.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 11:33 pm (UTC)Also, the Purim tradition of mocking the powerful is making me think of a very early version of 'Allo 'Allo.
[Edit: and the thing I originally thought of, but then forgot before posting, was the long tradition of men wearing womens' clothing as a disguise when in rebellion, like the Merched Beca in my part of Wales.]
One possible thought on potentially making the event more fun as well as organizy: would it be possible for you to plan & introduce new aspects?